What me live off corp?

{For those who never had access to Mad comics (which may be the whole of this island) the title to this blog will probably make no sense, and even for those who did it still may make little sense, but I won't worry with that now.}

I recently saw a good documentary on the BBC about a British guy and his girlfriend who attempted to drive the length and breath of America without using a single corporate owned business, only mom and pop type stores, and I think the implication was that it's really hard to be an American and not support large corporations at every turn. I wont try to argue with that, although I will add that it ain't any easier over here, and for me it's actually been phenomenally harder to live 'offcorp', so hard in fact that I really haven't been trying much over the past three years to live by mom and pops alone. I'm living offwheels (no car) so I'm limited to where I can walk, and so the hour long round trip walk to the local cooperative grocery store got old quick, and you could fit about twenty of Liverpool's only cooperative, the Windmill, into the Weaver Street Coop back in Carrboro, North Carolina where I easily lived a corporation free life, well, except for the one I worked for, Whole Foods, which ain't all that big as far as Corps go (probably smaller than Waitross), and the chief operating officer, John Mackey, is a tree-hugging libertarian vegan which for a CEO is about as boho as it gets, and so between it and Weaver Street (which had a beatific bakery and cafe inside) I never had to set foot in anywhere like Walmart or Tescos where I've been buying most of my groceries since it's about the only real grocery store within easy walking distance of where I live.

What I also miss having in walking distance is a nice locally grown coffee house. In Carrboro I not only had the cafe in Weaver Street but there were at least three other homegrown coffee houses that were within striking distance, and the total number of independent cafes in the greater Carrboro/Chapel-Hill area must've outnumbered the number of Starbucks by at least ten to one, whereas here in Liverpool there are three or four types of corporate coffee houses (the most prolific of which is Costa Coffee which I don't even think exists in America) that seem to control the movement of the majority of coffee in this city. They, as well as the momandpop cafes, also close by five, but that's another story.

Back where I used to live I didn't have to really put any effort or thought into not shopping at chain stores, there were just so many good alternatives, but here I find myself shopping at chains ninty percent of the time. And part of it has to do with the fact that I live in midurbia, a narrow strip of land that runs between the urban core of the city and the surrounding belt of proper suburbs which in England consist almost entirely of semi-detached three and four bedders. If I lived in the city center then I would have easy access to a lot more in the way of noncorporate businesses, but even in the heart of this city there are some things that I just can't seem to find. For instance, I was amazed when I moved here to find that Blockbuster Video still ran a virtual monopoly on video rentals and appeared to have no real competition, corporate or otherwise. In North Carolina in the late ninites a whole slew of new video rental joints opened up and there were always the momandpop ones, some better than others. In Carrboro the home grown video store, Visart, was probably the best one I've ever come across, and it contained just about every movie that you'd ever pay to see and even the ones that noone probably ever would, and just the Spanish film section of the store would have dwarfed the entire foreign section in most Blockbusters. I know this is the age of LoveFilms.com and payperview, and I know that if I really wanted to I could get all my movies for free through file sharing sites, but I miss my Visart even if most of its selection is in VHS.

I could probably go on and on about how easy I had it in the liberal bastion of Carrboro, but what the documentary and this blog have inspired me to do is to try to see how long I can go using only momandpop stores no matter where I am stationed, and so far I have to admit I haven't been able to stay away from Tesco and their value products for more than a few days at most. I guess I'll either just have to live with being a hypocrite for a while longer, or rationalize it by telling myself that even by shopping at Tescos I can still support local family farmers and organic agriculture and other small ethical or ecocentric companies that sale their products through retail giants and Co-ops alike .