Let Me Check Your Purchase Receipts.....

....how man from big box stores?

Big-box blight a symbol of failed culture March 31, 2009
Re: What should we make of empty big-box stores? March 29
The disposable architecture of big box stores is true to their contents: disposable employees selling disposable products made unsustainably on the backs of cheap foreign labour.
Their arrogant ugliness is a simple cipher of their social blight.
Just like the impossibly cheap junk they sell, their architecture adheres to the laws of extreme planned obsolescence and short-term gain, with the usual consequences of enormous social, political and environmental degradation.
Vast but not sublime, functional but inhuman, imposing but forgettable, there is no beauty in big boxes, not by any standards of Western aesthetics.
Whatever symbolic or artistic merits foolish theorists and artists might see in big boxes, their chief characteristic is the rejection of all culture and indeed of the whole Western tradition of artmaking as the slow, difficult, expensive crafting of symbols of beauty and excellence.
Real meaning takes time and is painfully wrested from drab reality. Historians will look back on big box stores as an expression of an utterly failed culture.
Raze them. Leave no traces.
Ryan Whyte, Toronto