Forgive me Father for I have sinned

Yesterday I wished that the Lowe’s Home improvement center I have been campaigning to keep out of town were in town.

As can be gleaned below, in the letters I sent to Councilwoman Thompson, I am asking the council of the City of Clemson to reconsider fudging the town’s zoning laws just to accommodate a Lowe’s shopping center in an area zoned for residential and small business development. In my letters, one of the arguments I used against the Lowe’s is that it’s existence will jeopardize the small local businesses such as nurseries and hardware stores that make this place human and humane. One such store is the ACE on route 123, two miles from the proposed site. However, after going there yesterday, I did wish for its demise.

I went to Ace to get a three-way light switch in “bone” (color) to complete a complicated wiring scheme a friend and I were trying to fix. After having a hard time finding the three-way switches, I asked an attendant where they were. He had about as much luck finding one as I did, but eventually picked up the last one, whose toggle was in “bisque" and not in "bone", the color I needed to match all the other 23 light switches in the room. As he handed it to me he said, “Some guy came in the other day and wiped me out of three-ways; I guess I should have ordered some more”. Duh. After dismantling a whole series of interconnected switches that turn one light on and off, and finding out that the reason they were not working properly was because of a broken 3-way in the set-up, I needed a new three-way switch to complete the circuit and put my family room back together; and I needed it then. I settled for the bisque colored switch after giving the the Ace man the evil eye and stating that I would return it when I got my bone colored one elsewhere. As I walked out, I wished for the Lowe’s; yes, on Isaqueena, in the center of a circle with a radius of 8 miles, on whose circumference sits 3 other Lowe’s super-stores. Fact is, that when I think of small businesses I miss, I do not think of franchises such as ACE, whose crappy little monopoly over this town is about to be dismantled; but I think of stores like Ole Norms, who certainly eventually closed because of the circle of Lowe’s and Home Depots around it; and whose land became more valuable as a site for a Food Lion.

Everything changes.