Always

In my younger and more vapid years, I said some things that weren’t very nice. For example, I often referred to giant box department stores as alien mother ships. I would make this comment for a couple of reasons. For one, as mentioned, I used to be a terrible person. Secondly, I noticed that when you walked into one of these places, particularly at certain times of the day and if you squinted just right, they kind of look like an alien mother ship. You see things in these places that don’t seem to belong on earth: giants with shopping carts full of candy, cookies, and diet soda; angry young couples cussing at more children than would seem biologically plausible; babies without pants, adolescents buying marital aids, geriatrics in pajamas. It’s like an assortment of bad ideas got tossed into a paper bag, shook up, and then dumped into the middle of a Saturday afternoon.

With this in mind, I did my shopping with a perpetual smirk on my face, satisfied that soon I would escape the throng of visitors from another planet. I would return to my normal earthling life doing normal earthling things, like wearing shirts that covered my entire stomach. I shopped as a diplomat, in a sense. I would spend my money, and, more importantly, my time, often displaying my “otherness” by buying toothpaste.

But then a peculiar thing happened. I married a person with a much more sophisticated concept of money than me. I married a person who expected that we, as a couple, would begin to actually pay attention to where our money went. Insane, yes, but I was a newlywed, and so as a token of my undying affection, I began to keep track of our finances.

This was not a pleasant experience, particularly at first, because what I soon discovered was that I was giving an intense amount of money to aliens from another planet. I was boarding the mother ship repeatedly, throughout the week, and spending hundreds of dollars there each and every month. Because of bookkeeping, I was forced into accepting one of two possible realities: either I was slowly metamorphosing into an alien myself—becoming a key plot point in so many science fiction stories—or I had simply been wrong about these places being alien mother ships at all. Eventually a new stupid idea began to swish around in my mind, which is what happens as people age and they replace one rather ignorant schema for another. It became clear to me that box stores weren’t alien mother ships at all.

They are, in fact, the most sparkling jewel in the crown of Western civilization.

Think about it. Historians often consider the Romans as one of the most sophisticated civilizations to ever subjugate the earth. They make this assessment not because of the Roman’s nauseating concept of entertainment or their ruthless treatment of enemies. The Romans ruled their world because they were able to move their world. Their remarkable network of durable roads allowed their armies to move with relative blitzkrieg speed. They could defend borders that few of them would ever see. Their intricate system of aqueducts allowed them to move fresh water from throughout the empire and bring it right to their arch steps. They could flush their sewage and sustain an almost miraculous density of people.

And the Romans are just one example. The ancient Egyptians moved up and down the Nile. The Inca moved up and down the Andes. Byzantium flourished for centuries due to movement in and out and around its capital, and the sun never set on the British Empire because its naval capacity could offer them tea from India, gold from Africa, and timber from the Canadian east.

Civilizations flourish, exist or die based on how well they can answer this one question: how fast can you move resources? By that standard, the box store wins. The ultra-marts of the world win history, game over, reshuffle the deck. A thousand years from now historians will sit around and talk about how brilliant Americans created a plastic-intensive empire that covered the earth and could move products from the east coast of China to all parts of the world and back again. Within minutes you can fill your shopping cart with pineapples from Hawaii, limes from Mexico, coffee beans from Brazil and milk from northern Illinois. You can buy your child toys they don’t deserve from China, Japan, China, Taiwan and China. You can indirectly help finance corporations and governments you’ve never even heard of and probably can’t pronounce just because they've all been brought beneath one roof.

Granted, the box stores and their fast food ilk have almost single-handedly homogenized what was once a pretty diverse and rather interesting free-market culture, but who cares? Who’s going to complain about that when you can go into a hyper-mart in Illinois, Georgia or California and find the exact right flavor and size of beef jerky within minutes? That is what progress looks like, ladies and gentlemen: a half-pound bag of teriyaki-flavored beef jerky for $5.35 no matter what side of the Mississippi you’re on.

“Save Money, Live Better?” How about, “We Make Ancient Rome Look Like Clumsy Turtles?”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to drop by the mother ship. It looks like we’re almost out of bottled water.