We need a term for what I’ve mentally been dubbing “corporate gentrification”, or the phenomena of the rapid death of small independent business combined with their replacement with sterile corporate “boxes”. You know these boxes. You’ve probably been inside one. They pop up all over town. Brick-shaped, devoid of character, sucking the souls out of communities. Brick-shaped chain restaurants, brick-shaped chain vape shops, brick-shaped chain yoga studios. ET. CETERA. They’re nightmarish, an abyssal, soulless box. A corporate corpse that communities are supposed to just accept, do business with, download their “apps”, and pretend that local businesses don’t matter. Suddenly, these box businesses are everywhere. They line our streets, invade our space, demolishing legacy structures to make way for their commercial rectangles, buildings that amount to social pollution, shapes and colors that negatively affect the psyches and spirits of those forced to look at them on a daily basis.
