Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Thought experiment for business people and developers

Picture this -

[hot parking lot]

It's summer.
It's around noon.
It's maybe a hundred degrees outside.

You're at home.
The house is cool.
But you need a few things from the world.

Are you going to get in your car and drive to the sea of blacktop (sporting mini-atolls of charming tiny trees and drought-tolerant shrubs, [parking lot atoll (taken in winter)]
while frying cars and customers sunny side up) to patronize the local bricks-and-mortar establishment?

Or will you just say to yourself "I can find it on the web, or else make do with what I've got"?

I know what I do.

If there was a shopping center with shade in this town, it'd be making money hand over fist.


[hot parking lot]
The Fowler center. Fry your fowl here (and at every other shopping center in Nevada County).

The shopping center is young, they're growing the shade as fast as they can right?

[tree is _shrinking_]
Wrong. Note the dieback; some trees are shrinking. (tip to landscapers: trees need water)

A solar grove solves the problem elsewhere, but up here the wildlife would be likely to log it.
at

4 comments:

  1. Sadie Lou8/06/2005 11:43 AM

    Why is it the shopping centers around here decide to put new parking lots in? It's gotta be 100 degrees out there already and then they put down a layer of thick, black tar? Raley's did it and Holiday Market in Penn Valley just did it!
    Where's the reasoning?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anna Haynes8/08/2005 11:12 PM

    It's really quite simple - we're bit partners in a bad summer movie, in which aliens are taking our jobs. The parking lot designers are from Venus ("mean temperature...867 degrees fahrenheit"), and the poor souls laying new asphalt are on a busman's holiday from Hell.

    It's not clear where the giant spiders came from.


    (alternative explanation - asphalt's easier to work with when it's hot?)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sadie Lou8/09/2005 3:04 PM

    *laughing*
    I like the first reason.

    Being 38 weeks pregnant--I just stay indoors most of the time and shop at Winco in Yuba City; that way I can buy two weeks worth of groceries for the price of one week at Raley's. *wink*

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anna Haynes1/24/2006 8:19 PM

    I should clarify, it's likely not the landscapers' fault. I talked to one last summer, who was pruning the already-miniature trees in one of the local lots, and he said "lots of shopping center owners don't want to pay for the water". Though that still doesn't explain why trees out of the signage "line of sight" tend to grow so much taller than those in front of the stores.

    ReplyDelete

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