This week's photo was taken at an undisclosed location in Chicago-- it's my most recent submission to Flickr's Guess Where Chicago group. This will likely be a tough one to guess, but I thought I'd let the group have a shot at it. Hint: this is a laundromat.
I see this scene as an apt representation of the U.S. economy in 2012. Sure, we've been kicked around a little. Maybe a couple of windows are broken. Maybe a car has even drove through our storefront! But we're still here. We're still open. C'mon in.
I took the following photos while visiting the Borders store in Evanston last weekend. At the time, it had four days left on its going out of business sale. Now it's closed.
The Evanston store is one of over 200 closing in the United States, and one of a dozen in the Chicago area alone. Every single store in Chicago itself is closing except for the flagship store downtown on State Street.
I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, you have a large retail chain (along with Barnes & Noble) that pushed independent stores out of business in the 90s. On the other hand, lots of people are losing their jobs, and not to mention that these are anchor stores in a lot of malls, and it's never good when those sit vacant. In this economy, you can't be picky and choosy. Pretty much any business going out of business is a negative.
One thing that doesn't worry me, which I know concerns a lot of people-- is what this means for the publishing industry. There's little doubt that the rise of e-readers helped to fuel Borders demise. So does this mean that the printed book is dead? Yes and no. Maybe? Honestly, I don't really care. So long as people are buying and consuming written media, authors and publishers are getting paid, it doesn't particularly matter to me if that's in the form of a dead tree, or a digital file on an e-book. The important thing is that people are reading.
Photo Details: all shot with a Nikon D7000 and 16-85mm lens. I also took a few photos of the store in Uptown and have included one of those in the set.
