Darwin's Curse

Fittest For What?

Sam’s Department store in Brattleboro has been in business for 100 years. Almost every piece of clothing and pair of shoes I wear in Vermont came from there. It was started by Sam and Yetta Borofsky, immigrants.

Last week their grandson, Brad Borofsky, and present owner, announced the store is closing. He said the 30,000 square foot building that sells everything from sweaters to kayaks, to skis ,to shotguns, has been in steady financial decline the past few years. He ascribes much of that to the 7% sales tax, when across the river in New Hampshire where another Sam’s is, there is no sales tax. Massachusetts, where the third store is, doesn’t charge sales tax on clothing.

Former Vermont governor, Peter Shumlin said, “Losing Sam’s is like New York losing Macy’s.”

A moment like this can make one feel despair that predatory capitalism can’t resolve the inconvenient and emotionally jarring reality of having to chase evolving markets when a store like Sam’s not only provides everything a body could need, but feels like shopping among friends.

I have come to loathe comparing commerce to Darwin’s formula of survival of the fittest. Nature can be hard but we are subject to nature, not in charge. If we have agency in how we do commerce, what would it look like to work to make it conform to the needs and wants of people, and not merely to the so-called bottom line.

Who is to determine what is fittest for the way we live our common life?

I understand Brad Borofsky’s decision, and I believe his grief at having to make it is at least as deep as mine for losing a store that is as much a marker by which we took our bearings, as it is a store that made money.

When whatever dust our current lethal conflicts about how we want this country to run, settles, what will there be?

Will we finally succumb to the jungle metaphor to characterize our common life? Or might we see that we’re all in this together. That we can share in the abundance because there is enough for everyone if we lose our fear that your success leads to my failure.

Not to mention that our species, unless we grasp our interdependence with everything and everyone around us, can become the next vacant Sam’s.