Looking for Light
nan turpin photograph
Spring is the actual true season for beginnings, not our unconvincing New Years of contrived resolutions. In this season we have momentary clairvoyant vision of a different future produced by impending change, etc. etc. Looking for the light and all that. Agreed.
Primary Source will argue this morning that Springtime is the Historical season because it is the time we anticipate change, the future, with optimism and not dread. Right now we are all saying “But I love the Fall or Winter’s my favorite season” but you take my point: which is that in those precious times when change promises good things, we can admit the transitory nature of all and sundry and “historicize” the whole shebang.
Primary Source is just going to go ahead and say that while that’s not always a comfortable way to proceed, it’s probably useful.
And this brings us to this morning’s newspaper and the Chicago Tribune story on Nordstrom’s department store’s big freshening project. This Nordstrom’s is inside a shopping mall on North Michigan Avenue and, mall-style, is sealed off from daylight. That will change now and the day as well as the outside world will become part of the shopping experience. Store spokespeople call it an effort to remain “relevant” to what shoppers want. This is something that retail likes to do periodically.
Primary Source loves these relevance-adjustment moments, especially when they are made tangible like this one, part of daily life, part of shopping. This morning’s story talks about different departments in the store that will be re-designed, rebuilt for different, changing shopping practices. The customers are changing the way they do things because their world is changing, what they expect is changing.
Part of it is that the way they are stimulated, or as we used to say the way they get information, is changing, the way people perceive each other, interact with each other or don’t is changing, all of that. And all of that affects the way they spend their money or don’t. A tangible store, one that isn’t a hologram, like a store in a real shopping center, has to compete with on-line effervescence and that’s just one thing. So Nordstrom’s is making a really big window to the world (see 17th century).
That’s a very big change. It’s a “makeover” among all the many makeovers that we love to watch. It’s another before and after moment in our daily life, even if we don’t really shop, it is happening out there. And that’s a little bit what history is. Looking for lipstick a whole new way. Seriously.
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Bobby G. for the Business pages
Thanks to Joan and Brian for great big daffodils from Michigan
PRIMARY SOURCE 