In defense of chain stores

SIX of us were dining at a fashionably dingy restaurant near Union Square in Manhattan, having just come from a reading of new fiction held at the massive Barnes & Noble that had just opened on the Square. The conversation came round to the bookstore itself, and someone said hesitantly, shyly, almost under his breath, "All things considered, Barnes & Noble isn't half bad." There was an embarrassed silence. Then someone else spoke up and admitted that she too rather liked the store. And before you knew it, all of us had begrudgingly admitted that we positively liked Barnes & Noble.

It was not that we did not know better, that we did not appreciate that nice people just didn't say such things: in certain circles, after all, this admission would have been a conversation stopper akin to, "You know, George Wallace really made a lot of sense . . ." We fully understood why we were supposed to hate Barnes & Noble: it's a corporate juggernaut driving out the smaller mom-and-pop bookstores; its interest in literature is middle-brow and thus suspect; it imposes Stalinist uniformity on the book world where previously there had been variety. And yet, having just visited the expansive and brightly lit structure on Union Square, we were compelled to admit that it had helped to transform what had been one of Manhattan's sleazier sections into a surprisingly glamorous area.

Furthermore, a moment's reflection was enough to see through the snobbery involved in not succumbing to the charms of Barnes & Noble. The pseudo-egalitarian claim that chain stores represent big business squeezing out the little guy is ill considered, not to say hypocritical on the part of tweedy types looking to defend their over-priced and understocked enclaves against the middle-brow hordes. Resembling an old-fashioned public library more than a bookstore, this newest Barnes & Noble, one of many outlets throughout the United States, is so customer-friendly as to provide desks and leather armchairs for all comers, with no pressure whatever to buy anything at all. Indeed, the reading we had just been to, one of many scheduled, featured three novelists whose books had not yet even been published. The store's much touted cafe is among the most congenial meeting places in the city, and the store's selection of books competes with and often surpasses those of the most highly regarded bookstores.

Perhaps most important of all, Barnes & Noble has done something almost unique in American culture. By adorning its walls and stairways, even its shopping bags and coffee mugs, with images of authors, from Shakespeare to Proust to Alice Walker, it succeeds in making writers heroes in a way that the French instinctively understand but Americans generally do not. It pays its customers the ultimate compliment of supposing them to be civilized people who take literature seriously.

What makes Barnes & Noble especially interesting as a cultural phenomenon is that it is part of a growing trend in marketing. Throughout the city and the country we are witnessing the emergence of medium-sized chain stores -- like Banana Republic, Nine West, the Body Shop, and Borders (another bookstore) -- which offer the middle class increasingly more quality for their money. This is nowhere more evident than in SoHo, a mile south of Union Square. Seemingly overnight, the place has been taken over by the likes of Pottery Barn, Williams Sonoma, Crabtree & Evelyn, and Eddie Bauer. You can find a Starbuck's or a Timothy's espresso bar on virtually every corner.

As a result, several cutting-edge galleries are getting out of SoHo. Some of them, like Mary Boone, are moving to posh 57th Street; others, to the new hot spot, Chelsea. This move is prompted by a certain allergic reaction to that most unglamorous of species, the middle class, known in the lingo of the art world as the bridge-and-tunnel crowd -- meaning the people who come from Long Island and New Jersey.

These people have just enough discretionary income to follow the fashions at a lag of some five years. Because they are neither the homeless, the demimonde, nor the fabulously wealthy, but just the middle class, they can never be assimilated into the art world's view of things. The dislike of these people and of the stores they patronize is usually couched in terms that are vaguely liberal --one laments the rampant gentrification that is taking place, with yuppies driving out the less affluent, etc. But in fact it is the recasting of a familiar snobbery, that revulsion which certain admirers of "advanced taste" experience when their pref is finally embraced by the common man.

Yet this shift in taste is a fascinating thing to watch. Chain stores like Barnes & Noble, with its Edwardian arm-chairs, and Williams Sonoma, with its twenty different kinds of balsamic vinegar, are at the forefront of a change in the quality of life that has been evolving for about a decade now. Before the Second World War there was a home-made, almost pre-industrial feel to the products one bought and the food one ate. But with the spread of industrialism after the Second World War, fresh and authentic commodities became a luxury few ever seemed to want.