Stop & Shop, Staples, and Home Depot are the only major retailers we have here in Greenfield. I am generally fine with that, as we try to do most of our shopping at small, locally owned businesses.
However, it means that we have to go down to Hadley any time we need to do clothes-shopping for the kids. And while we have a couple of pretty great little bookshops here in town, the B&N in Hadley is the closest I can get to the old Borders experience (which I still miss).
It’s not the end of the world to have to go, but it is a half-hour drive and once there, it’s a lot of traipsing back and forth in huge strip mall parking lots, wandering from one big-box store to the next. A single visit turns into an all-day affair, killing most of a Saturday or Sunday. We have friends that go down there all the time and I don’t know how they do it. I find it exhausting.
So I find the outbreak of unionization in Hadley these last few years to be rather heartening; it makes me feel a little better about shopping down there. It seems there is something of a domino effect, and I hope it continues.