Friday, March 11, 2005

Target opens on Moreland, will this effect yard sales?

The word spread fast in the commercially retarded in-town neighborhoods around me, the Target store is open. People flocked to the old Atlanta Gas site in Edgewood as though heavenly visions were reported there. I wandered over there on Sunday to see this wonder first hand. Keeping in habit I bought nothing but observed the liberated local consumers who no longer had to drive to the edges of suburbia to buy cheap cotton clothing and anything that plugs in. These consumers wandered through the store with mouths gapping, looking like East Germans enjoying the new found bounty of western capitalism after the wall came down.
How will this affect my life and my endless pursuit of seeing what people are trying to divest themselves of? Well now they can have more things to divest themselves, since they will be acquiring more clutter close to home. A man might ask himself “should I sell that candle shaped like a cinnamon bun?” The answers will be a resounding yes since he can now buy one just down the street shaped like a cup cake to replace it. Not only that, but his friends will have greater access to buying useless gifts and trinkets to give him that he will a some point need to divest himself of. Will yard sales in the surrounding Edgewood area increase? I say yes again, for on the first day I went to Target here was already a Girl Scout cookie booth set up in the yard of a home near the Hardee St. entrance. It has been scientifically demonstrated that there is a direct correlation between Girl Scout Cookie stands and yard sales.
I bought nothing at Target and I had already purchased some Girl Scout cookies from my students.

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