Dollar This, Dollar That

I bicycle past the 65th Avenue and Highway 50 intersection a few times a week, usually around 4:00 PM alongside a crush of vehicles. For 1.4 miles I have no bike lane, the only section of my entire ride where I don't, and I face the wrath of irate motorists as I occupy a foot or two of their #2 lane. Some are particularly uncooperative; assholes who either give me no room, yell out obscenities, or block the bike lane ahead of me at the next stop to "show me." I simply go right down the middle of the road when they do that -- I don't ride on the sidewalk for the same reason they don't drive on it -- because it's illegal.

Within a few weeks will come the grand opening of a new Target store, adding a few hundred more vehicles per hour into the maw of that intersection. If I thought today's drivers were irate, wait until they get to sit through two more light cycles to get back home to Elk Grove. Truthfully, this is quite a dangerous thing, as some alpha-male jackoff in a Chevy Tahoe might, just might, take his impatient anger to the next level.

What's worse, though, is that discount stores like Target always attract the worst of Americana. I will now get to bicycle alongside many more obese, unkempt, pajama-clad, middle-aged, and rather unpleasant looking women shuttling themselves to Target from South Sacramento, often in barely-smogged jalopies, most of whom are bitter, grumpy, impatient!, and who will, under no circumstances, give a bicyclist any share of the road. I am always on the lookout for these drivers, as dangerous as those alpha-males.

This is what we're going to get more and more of, by the way, as discounting chains are the rising stars in our "new economy." Dollar General. Dollar Tree. Family Dollar. Dollar This. Dollar That. Fred's. WalMart. Target. TJMaxx. All selling low-quality Chinese/Bengali/Vietnamese/Sri Lankan shit -- but hey! the consumer is crushed, her debt is twelve and a half times her annual disposable income, so cheap imported processed food, cheap pillowcases, and cheap cigarettes are in store for the foreseeable future...and once we go there there's no coming back.

135,000 square feet of retail coming to a corner near me...and of course, some Sacramento high school marching band will be enlisted to lead the opening day parade, with free hot dogs, soda, and perhaps a giveaway cloth Target bag to more easily allow consumers to haul consumables out the door. Hmmm...I wonder why marching bands weren't employed during the shuttering of Kramer Carton and the loss of 60 manufacturing jobs, not a half mile from this intersection. I suppose it's because those former employees wanted their own cheap merchandise, too, unwilling to pay other Americans' higher wages to make the stuff they bought, so other Americans reciprocated, forcing [all] jobs to places where labor is cheaper...but I digress.

This Target (pronounced Tar-jaay) will only detract from my quality of life as I wrestle with increasingly infuriated motorists, but I will stop my narcissistic rant at this point, realizing how the quality of life for thousands of other Americans will only improve with this new commercial unit and hundreds perhaps thousands more just like it. Easier access to imported shit for many is much more important to our national livelihood than a single bicyclist's overblown irrational fear about a coupla cars. I now know that.