The Wig-Wam Gets Whacked
What's Happening to Long Island?

By John Hartz
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January 1, 2000 | Page 1

In the nondescript Long Island suburb of Deer Park, where I live, things have been changing. I was struck by these changes when, a week ago, I was driving down the main street of town and saw that Wig-Wam was closing up shop. Even though I had never once set foot inside Wig-Wam, or even peeked through the windows, the forlorn "Going Out of Business" sign in front was reason for pause.

The late Wig-Wam was, appropriately, a wig store. The shop was nestled in a small strip mall, next to a bicycle shop and across the street from another, larger strip mall. For decades the Wig-Wam had occupied its storefront and carried out its business, though not quite enough of it in the end. The demise of Wig-Wam is something very small, and it might seem strange why I care at all. Maybe Propecia and Rogaine and that spray-on hair stuff advertised on television at 3am finally ate up enough of the market and pushed the bricks-and-mortar wig emporium unceremoniously out the door. Maybe local demographics changed drastically, with new, well-coifed age cohorts rapidly replacing the old. It isn't the why that matters, but the what, as in: What happens now?

Suburban towns, especially on Long Island, are stultifyingly homogeneous-a McDonalds, a few nearly identical homes on similar quarter-acres of lawn, a Burger King, and on and on. For miles east from the Queens border, this is basically all that can be seen. While suburbia reaches its most extreme manifestation on Long Island, the same blandness is true in varying degrees across the country. That's more than 3,000 miles of Office Depots and Jiffy Lubes. Therefore, when an unspectacular town loses a truly original establishment like Wig-Wam, its passing must be noted. I don't know what will appear in Wig-Wam's place. Right now, it could be almost anything, but I would give good odds on any number of fast-food restaurants. They'll probably be needed, because nearby Wig-Wam's old site a brand-new Home Depot has opened. On a recent visit to this Home Depot, I realized how very frightening a place it is. Built on an utterly inhuman scale, it hulks in one corner of a new shopping plaza, surrounded by vast expanses of asphalt. Its aisles are caverns. There are at least forty checkout counters. Lowly Wig-Wam could never be seen near a behemoth like this. In the new world of extreme shopping malls the concept of the strip mall, occupied by local stores, seems quaint. This Home Depot hangs out only with its brethren: a massive Staples superstore across the lot, and a Costco in another corner. Like genetically engineered farm animals raised on hormones and antibiotics, these stores explode production levels. With each bulk sale, the megalith becomes more entrenched, and communities increasingly approximate a more corporate, less individualized version of civilization.

The economic forces that are destroying smaller, local establishments in favor of massive, faceless giants are at work everywhere. Wig-Wam probably was not put out of business by Home Depot or Wal-Mart, but the local hardware store or general goods store almost certainly was. Corporate mergers abound: Daimler-Benz and Chrysler, Boeing and Lockheed, Sprint and MCI, and now Exxon and Mobil. In many European countries, especially France, a major backlash has built up against invasive and pervasive multinational companies, symbolized by McDonald's. New Starbucks franchises sprout up like weeds. As American towns and cities become more alike, the world does as well. What is lost is a richness and invigoration that comes from variation and difference, some of it subtle, some more substantial. The emptiness that remains is hard to identify, but it can be felt in the absence of small business owners who were active in their communities, or in the depressingly long walk from car to sliding-double doors and back, when it is easy to limit any human interaction to "Here's your change-have a nice day." It is an alienation that steadily chips away at communities and at civil society overall.

The essence of the problem is "bigness". A large economy of scale is useful for the bottom line, but does not always fit with the interests of the people. Sometimes, economic diversity is more important for communities, especially in terms of creating strong ones. Yet the trend toward ever-bigger corporations and businesses does not seem ready to abate just yet. Will it? If the reactions in Europe are any indication, at some point people in the United States will begin to realize where size, savings, and economic diversity matter in relation to one another. Perhaps there is some as-yet-unknown superstore critical mass. Until it is reached, we'll have to wear comfortable walking shoes on our shopping excursions, and buy our wigs on the Internet.

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Author Profile: John Hartz lives and writes in Long Island, New York. As a Watson fellow, he traveled the globe studying subway culture in 1998 and 1999.
E-Mail: john_hartz@hotmail.com.