Change is Something, Anyway

Taking another look at an anime weblog that makes regular updates to its sidebar of links to “Posts I Like,” I was surprised to be pointed to a piece by someone taking a less than nostalgic look back at working in a Target store in Canada. Every so often I do still reflect on having lived on the same city block as a small shopping mall that had housed a Target for the brief span of that chain’s operation up here. My impressions of that store weren’t as dire as the piece’s, but maybe I’m not confronting my neighbourhood and community the way the writer had to. The mall itself was torn down a few years later except for its grocery store (the last of the businesses in it moved across the parking lot into an old Sears furniture and appliance store redeveloped into several units, and some of the vacated space now houses a big two-story storage facility). The piece opening with a retrospective on Zellers, though, did leave me thinking of my own somewhat better memories of that previously vanished retailer (and the Coles bookstore and even a few other stores that had once been in the mall). A mention of Giant Tiger does remind me there’s one of those stores a little further away from me, although my own thoughts are that it’s not as big or as nice as even Zellers was.

As for the juxtaposition that had caught my eye in the first place, although I can think of a reason or two for the weblog’s owner to have happened on the piece I did have my thoughts turn back to the acquisition of the online anime store Right Stuf by Crunchyroll (and, by corporate extension, Sony). I can get the whole point of so many others reacting with “change is bad.” One part of me has pondered “competition in business” and whether “competition” in general means “someone wins in the end”; this may not be as celebrated here as in sports. I have in the past week, though, managed to confront the previous declaration of Right Stuf that they just couldn’t afford to offer free shipping up here any more by going through a company that offers to bring packages across the border; everything actually worked out there even if I might not be as clear as I could be on what Right Stuf itself would actually have charged for an order too small to qualify for free shipping. In the years since I started ordering from the store (a few years after I’d first heard about it) just to get the box for some “compilation movie” DVDs with all the criticisms attached to them, I’ve piled up anime faster than I can watch it on thin whims for the sake of skipping shipping charges. That’s a change that probably doesn’t outweigh all the worries churned up, but it is a change.