Real estate consumerism, at any cost

I went home for Thanksgiving this year. My hometown is a mid-sized burb smack-dab in the middle of California, a little spot of bright red politics, traditional family values and industrialized farming bookended by the uber-liberal intellichic of the San Francisco Bay Area a few hours north, and the sleek, anything-goes polish of Hollywood a couple hours south.

What's cool in my hometown is Friday-night high school football, Sunday morning church services, and big box store shopping galore. I once heard that the city has the largest number of grocery stores per capita of any city in the country, and I believe it. They've got more Wal-Marts and Targets in town than any five Bay Area towns combined, and they've got grocery stores inside the Wal-Marts and Targets, too! You cannot drive past a corner or bat an eye without a Super-something staring you down.

Unfortunately, neither can you drive down a residential street without seeing several "For Sale" signs of bank-owned foreclosed homes. At various times in the last couple of years, my hometown has ranked at the very top of the state's and the nation's lists of cities with the highest foreclosure rates. If that grocery store stat stunned you, consider this: My hometown had the highest rates of West Nile virus anywhere in the country last year, because of all the foreclosed homes with abandoned swimming pools (read: mosquito breeding grounds) sitting stagnant.

Against this backdrop, my decision to visit Wal-Mart at 5 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving -- in light of my aversions to crowds, to shopping, in general, and to holiday shopping in specific -- was either borderline insane or borderline brilliant. (Minus the borderline on both ends of the spectrum.) On the one hand was the lure of $200 off laptops multiplied by the three laptops I needed to purchase for home and business this season, boosted by the thought that if the local economy was as bad as I'd been hearing, perhaps the crowds wouldn't be as severe as normal.

On the other hand? Reality. And reality was a store literally packed shoulder to shoulder with overheated people and overbreathed air. This store was so packed that I felt like a quarterback trying to find the hole in the defense in my effort to simply find a vacant square foot for my next footfall. And, of course, the computer section was in the corner of the store due kitty-corner to the entrance -- the furthest possible distance from the front door.

It was a 20-minute-long, arduous, but scenic route, and I mean scenic in the most tragic manner possible. Along the way, I saw private security guards forming a human chain around the shoppers picking up their iPods with the ticket they'd waited in line for hours to get. I virtually had to step around and over a woman who had literally passed out in Small Electronics -- and the crew of staffers hollering for medical help into their radios.

My husband, about 20 minutes behind me, met up with a disabled woman and her small child, looking for someone to avenge her against the shoppers who had plucked the toys she'd selected straight out of her hands. No joke.

Needless to say, my Dad and I got to the laptop line and learned that the tickets for the few sale items that were stocked had been handed out to shoppers who'd arrived two hours earlier, at 3 a.m. I considered picking up the other high-dollar/high-savings items on my list momentarily, then in one of those life moments where you realize with zero regret that you and your parent might be exactly the same, my eyes met my Dad's, and we made the unspoken pact to get out of that store as quickly as humanly possible. ...CONTINUED

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