My love is in league with the freeway
Its passion will ride, as the cities fly by
And the tail-lights dissolve, in the coming of night
And the questions in thousands take flight
– plant

Last weekend we took a little trip to Kentucky to visit Mammoth Cave National Park.  It’s about a 9 hour drive from our home here in Wisconsin.  Well, it may be if you don’t spend 2 hours stuck in Chicago traffic.  I love traveling and in America just hitting the open road is a desire somewhat hardwired into many of us I think.  It used to be that as you drove you were in constant anticipation of each bend in the road, each ridge you climbed and every stop for gas and food.  There was so much diversity. It was in fact, exploring.  Our parents have told us that things have changed since they took off down the highway in their 1950’s family cruisers and they have.  What has changed more than anything, is simply the lack of change.

Drive off the interstate highway into almost any city in America and prepare to be assaulted by ugly. Every exit brings your speeding craft back down to earth into a pit of quick marts, box stores, wires and billboards. Around every post and sickly bush are wrapped plastic bags and fast food containers. Pools of water are swirled with petroleum rainbows, and medians are filled with concrete pebbles strewn across brown dry dirt & spotty lifeless grass. Certainly things may get better once we get off the main corridor but if first impressions ruled, why would we?

My first sense was that we’ve become blind to it all. That we don’t really open our eyes until we enter a business or cross through some accepted boundary between the “nothing” and the something. It certainly seems that business and communities as a whole do believe this to some extent.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if that’s an illusion. Anyone who has traveled in their lives knows they take on a new sense of awareness and caution that comes from exploring an unknown environment. Often this translates as little more that a slightly more alert posture. Sometimes it means avoiding a stop now and again, or choosing one area over another. Certainly we become more aware of our surroundings. We seek the most primal messages in our atmosphere that assure us of safety or warn us of danger. We tend, based on experience and yes, sometimes prejudiced to avoid the run down, dirty or enclosed areas in favor of new, clean and wide spaces. How can we suddenly give those tendencies amiss when we pull off the highway to “fill ‘er up”?

Maybe somewhere within our subconscious we do get a bad impression. Maybe we are more effected than we know by atmosphere that surrounds these little islands of gas stations, box stores & fast food joints. Maybe that sense of mistrust we often feel, the one that makes us re-count our change, is not natural but created by the surroundings we’ve just entered. Surrounded by noise, billboards, broken concrete and dying plants we subtly become defensive. Then when walking into an envelope of air conditioning, inoffensive music and the sudden prefab plastic fern filled decor of a business, it somehow feels out of place. It feels like a trap. Unconsciously our defenses go up another notch, adrenaline flows, our senses sharpen and we greet every smile with subtle mistrust. We’re cordial. We’re polite. We’re simply, protective. We buy what we need, then get back on the road. A win for Kwicky Mart, a loss for the community.

Obviously the get in and get out factor must serve business. Especially those along the highway that deal in volume. There’s a certain hard honestly in the fact that they simply want to part you with your cash and don’t really care if you “like” their business. You’re traveling, you need gas.. Gotcha! You’re not going to avoid buying gas just because the bathrooms smell and the trash bins are pouring over with fast food wrappers and oil cans. Even where you’d have some choice though, many businesses don’t seem to feel the need to impress. In the constant race to part consumers with their ever shrinking income, business has focused not on increasing quality but on increasing the volume. More noise! More signage! Bigger billboards! Brighter lights!

Yet, throwing money into advertising while not bothering to sweep their parking lots or replace the bulbs in their half-lit signs seems totally mad. It seems akin to inviting your boss to your home for dinner to ask for a raise, and not bothering to wipe breakfast’s dried egg yolk off the table. (Personally we have fun pointing out all the bright red business signs with letters missing in their names. Sometimes from the highway it’s hard to tell the Adult Book Shops from the Hardware stores.)

I can’t help but wonder if that part of business that used to be about building community & trust is dead or at least on life support. Now in the world of national chains, box stores and consumer apathy business is sustained simply on name recognition and sales volume. Consumers don’t select a business because of quality or relationships but simply because they have limited time and limited options. Business needs no longer to care about presentation beyond the most superficial. Product quality is sacrificed for a price point and treated with a liberal return policy that often causes consumers more expense and grief. Not to mention gets them back into the store to shop some more. It’s all about numbers.

The number of people who would actually react to any of this is so small as to not even dent the margins… Business can simply respond that “Customers vote with their pocket book” after all. The problem these days is that there are so few choices and so much apathy that the vote is rigged. Collecting tourism dollars is often treated as little more than an annual shearing. One where the big players simply out yell the little ones. Where small business and community becomes lost in the “event”.

What bothers me personally is that our communities & small businesses suffer. Travelers get no sense of a town simply by rolling off the highway. Is your community  nice? What’s unique about your town? What first impression does yours give? From less than a mile off the interstate are visitors encouraged to explore (and spend money by the way..) or does it simply look like another trashy lay bye on the road to somewhere else?

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