“Progress”
I’m really, really bummed that Bob Slate is closing. It’s been around for 78 years and for quite a few of those I made it my stop for whatever I could find there. Nowhere else can you walk into a store and buy one sheet of resume paper. Need a coin roll? 2 ¢ each. Those dry transfer sheets that Field Notes just repopularized? They have around 10,000 individual sheets in 10 different font styles and point sizes, by the sheet. Want just one Speedball 2-C nib? $1.95.
It truly breaks my heart that Bob Slate is closing.
I felt the exact same grief when Service Point, a stationers that had been there in one form or another for almost a century, closed in August of last year. It was one of the few shops that I’ve truly loved in my life, and I’d known the staff since not long after I moved to Aberdeen. They weren’t friends, but they were people I knew, and saw frequently, and seeing their livelihood being closed underneath them was heartbreaking. Stupid as it sounds, I even felt guilty when I bought Lumographs and watercolours at 50% off — like I was just another one of the vultures who had swooped in to pick over its corpse during the closing-down sales.
Part of it was upset over the loss of convenience (where else can I get Decadry sheets, Swann Morton scalpel blades, and Alwych notebooks singly or by the dozen?), but, mainly, it was sadness over the loss of something old and good. It wasn’t fashionable, it didn’t have everything, but it had character, and stock going back years. Getting stationery from Paperchase just isn’t the same — they may sell Rhodia, but the place is impersonal, and the staff don’t seem invested in it.
The saddest part was seeing something that had survived so long, and been through so much, finally succumbing to “progress” — that nebulous, ill-defined forward motion that ignores worth and focusses instead on “going forward”, seemingly just for the sake of it. The closure of Service Point, and Bob Slate, and all these other little shops, is a loss that no new shopping mall or supermarket can ever really compensate for — each time one of them dies, a little part of what makes a town or city unique dies with it.
Notes
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I felt the exact same grief when Service Point, a stationers...there in one form or...
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