Shop outside the box Salt Lake City!
“How low? How low? How low can your wages go?” was a chant heard at Saturday’s anti- Big Box parade in downtown Salt Lake City.
Many local business owners and patrons got together and had a FUN time for a cause. What a wonderfully creative way to send a message to the community and remind them to “shop local” and support locally owned and operated businesses. 400 South street in Salt Lake City was host to a “Shop Outside the Box” parade to protest the strain Big Box stores put on local businesses and the community. Big Box Collaborative a national organization dedicated to reforming big-box stores instigated the idea for anti-Big Box parades across the US celebrating International Day of Action Against Supermarkets and Big Box Stores.
We joined the the merriment and protesting with a joyful throng. My dad in the the fit-overs dressed as uncle Sam and I was dressed in red, white and blue to signify that a true patriot shops locally! Neil’s boxed head stated, “Think outside the box.” How I yearned for my days as captain of the flag team in High School so that I could whip up a flag routine to march along with!
The parade was a big hit with the local media and was covered in the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News as well as a Fox 13 News TV clip.
It was perfect sunny weather for the parade and there were practically more police officers than parade participants. There was a bicycle brigade and a motorcycle contingent. They operated like a well-oiled machine stopping traffic with a rolling barricade. Even though our numbers were dwarfed by the wide Utah streets, the police closed down traffic for our loonily-dressed band of paraders. It seemed they were trying to take everything very seriously and act professionally, but given the array of costumes it was nearly impossible for them not to crack a smile.
There were the four horses of the Shopocolypse: Greed, Wast, Gluttony and Vanity. They galloped with fervor. Another use of the fantastic term Shopocolypse is the upcoming movie, “What Would Jesus Buy.” This movie is a documentary by Morgan Spurlock (of Supersize Me fame) about the commercialization of Christmas. The parade was graced with the presence of a 6′6″ elf pushing a scrawny Santa in a shopping cart holding a sign that said, “Sins of the Shopocolypse.” There were also dozens of people in a “small box army” dressed in various sizes of cardboard boxes (recycled of course).
Part of the focus of the parade was to remind people to look to locally based vendors for Christmas gifts this season. Even for semi-posers like us who cannot seem to give up our Costco addiction, the parade was an imaginative, lively and fun way to help us reconnect with the local community. It made me think twice about local business and feel that our city’s economic fate is worth caring about. Local businesses who are owned by my neighbors and staffed by people who are treated well are definitely worth having a party about. It made me feel alive and that there is nothing better than dancing in the streets to defend variety and integrity and the American dream. Not the Made in China American dream but, the made right here in Salt Lake City American dream.
In the words of Hossen and the Bomb Diggatys who performed at the rally:
I don’t care if they bring in millions. MILLIONS of WHAT?!?
Big Box stores SUCK and drain the resources from our community.
[...] Shop outside the box Salt Lake City! [...]
I really urge people to read “The World is Flat.” It speaks well to some of these issues. We need to accept that the world is changing. It is likely that within the next ten to twenty years, commercial downtowns will have shrunk substantially as people will do all of their purchasing online or in box stores.
I for one do not see this as a sad thing. I simply see it as the way of the future. Progress always hurts someone. The TV put a lot of radio stations out of business. TiVo is changing the landscape of TV stations. The internet has destroyed or at least changed too many markets to list.
Trying to stop progress isn’t going to work. People have tried it before; they have failed. The problem with trying to stop progress is that it prevents us from preparing for it. Instead of fighting progress, let’s fight to prepare the people in our society for its inevitable arrival. Change is only painful to those who fail to adapt. And fighting against change prevents us from adapting.