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Decisions sometimes come hard. For instance, which is the greater symbol of our progress in the Centennial State:
A) Four miles of eastbound stop-and-go bumper-to-bumper Labor Day traffic cycling behind the Conifer stoplight on U.S. 285?
B) Fears that the convention center in Denver is too small to handle the throngs that might appear?
C) A bigger Wal-Mart starting construction on the outskirts of town?
The A) problem occurred because we had to transport our younger daughter to college in the big city, at the same time as about 100,000 other people were returning to civilization after a three-day weekend in the boondocks.
Upon our arrival in the Queen City of the Plains, we discovered that she had forgotten to bring clothes hangers.
I naively thought that, even on a holiday, it would be a simple matter to find a store that sold hangers in a major-league city like Denver.
Alas, an hour of nerve-wracking urban driving revealed that most of the open stores didn't even carry hangers, and those that normally did were sold out -- my guess is that many college students forgot to bring hangers, and the earlier arrivals had bought out the inventory.
This indicates that Denver should forget about the B) issue, a larger convention center, until some entrepreneur opens a 24-hour hanger store. If people must put up with the aggravations of metropolitan life, they should also enjoy the benefits, and I bet real cities like New York and Los Angeles have 24-hour hanger stores with adequate inventories.
What's some convention-goer to think if he can't buy a dozen hangers at three in the morning? That he's in some podunk jerkwater cowtown, of course, and if Denver can't solve this threat to its reputation first, it has no business building a bigger convention center.
Besides, the convention center is only six years old. Things must get obsolete fast in Denver. McNichols Arena is hardly a decrepit hulk, but the Nuggets/Avalanche ownership wants something new.
Mile High Stadium looks pretty solid when I drive by, but the Bronco management gives the impression that it's on the verge of collapse because it doesn't have enough luxury boxes. Coors Field just opened last year -- how long before the Rockies demand a new home?
Will DIA make it to the millennium before we start hearing that it's too small, obsolete for modern aircraft, and very expensive to maintain?
And still Denver is a city
where you can't find
clothes hangers on a Monday afternoon?
Salida, at least, is taking steps to solve that problem. You will soon be able to buy hangers here any time you feel like it.
The regular-sized 41,304-square-foot Wal-Mart here, which opened only 10 years ago, will be replaced next fall by a 109,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter, which will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
It will have 36 departments, ranging from electronics to fresh produce, so it should pretty well eliminate all other retailing from Salida, except perhaps for art galleries, hand-crafted knick-knack emporiums and souvenir stands. Durango is also getting pretty much the same deal from Wal-Mart.
But despite the size and variety announced for its new store, Wal-Mart seems to be missing one profitable opportunity.
Last summer, I was sitting in the car in the Wal-Mart parking lot as the sun set, waiting for various family members to emerge while I read some potboiler.
There were several huge motor homes in the lot. Their occupants began to level the rigs, aim satellite dishes, extend canopies, and otherwise set up camp.
Curious, I ambled over and asked one Missouri tourist why they'd drive all the way to the mountains of Colorado, and then camp in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
It was sure convenient for picking up supplies, he explained, and being close to town and all, it should be pretty safe from bears and the like, and he didn't have to drive that hard-to-handle rig up any awful back roads. They pretty much drove from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart on their vacations, and they knew other people who did the same.
Wal-Mart missing a sure-fire opportunity to put a few
more local merchants, like campground operators, out of
business. One corner of the parking lot should be set aside
for camping,
with restrooms, showers, laundry, video
arcade, playground, mountain-bike rental, etc.
Granted, it means the loss of many small enterprises that can't compete with the behemoth.
But look at the bright side -- the more of such people we can store in Wal-Mart parking lots, the better the woods are for the rest of us.
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