Off The Editor’s Desk – 3-18-2020
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We are vacationing in Arizona and as I write this column (last Friday) it is raining and has been raining off and on for the past couple of days and the dry run creeks are bank full.
Sedona is our home base there, and the community is tucked into the natural red rock cliffs located south of Flagstaff and is up about 3500 feet in the mountains. The temperature during our stay only got into the low fifties.
We motored more than the hundred miles to Phoenix on Monday so Paula could make her appointment at the Mayo Clinic there. We stayed with my sister Mary and her husband Dennis Erpenbach Monday night and attended a dinner theatre taking in the show “Golden Age of Rock and Roll.”
But what I wanted to discuss was the amount of traffic we experienced on our way to Arizona. We took Interstate 35 to Oklahoma City and then west on Interstate 40 to Flagstaff and into Sedona.
It seemed that truck traffic was twice the volume that we experienced three years ago when we were last in Arizona.
It seemed to me that there were more Amazon Prime trucks on this stretch of I-40 than any other company. I think that these trucks were carrying merchandise that was ordered over the internet.
I have written before about the dead and dying small town Main Street businesses. Fifty years ago our town was the hub of Mom and Pa businesses that furnished all the things that we needed to live. Now we must drive some distance to get those items. I blamed some of the loss of these firms in our community on the big box stores that were built on good farm land on the outside of downtown. But, are those big box stores now on the way out? As more and more people are using the internet to order the things that they went downtown to get, and in a couple of days the ordered items show up on your front porch, while you wonder if someone will steal it off the porch before you get home from work.
I will be lost if I have to order all my needs from the internet using a computer and my credit card, I will either end up in the nursing home or in a tent and growing food in my garden.
I sure miss all those small stores that once lined the Main Street of our small towns and I know how much I wish that they would return but I know they will not.
Thanks for reading! ~Carlton