Posted on Tuesday, January 31, 2006 - 2:33 pm:

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quote:

don't expect you to shed any tears because Aron's is gone.

Unless you grew up in L.A. as I did, you've probably never even heard of it. Aron's was this used record and CD store that I discovered 30 years ago. It was a quirky place, an audiophile heaven where there was never any telling what offbeat treasure you might find.

More to the point, it was "my" place, a store where I spent endless hours browsing for rarities and oddities you could never find elsewhere. To this day, no trip back to the city of L.A. is complete without an afternoon at Aron's. Or at least, that used to be the case. Recently, I read online in the L.A. Times that Aron's will soon be closing.

The paper played it as a sign of hard times in the music industry, noting that the number of independent music stores has dropped by half in the last 10 years. But for my money, the demise of Aron's is symptomatic of something larger: Mom and Pop are dying. Or at least, starting to smell funny.

You remember Mom and Pop, right? Mr. and Mrs. Small Business? Used to own that diner down the street, that coffee shop around the corner, that record store across town? Used to run that bookstore with the long aisles of dusty paperbacks where you could while away a rainy afternoon browsing to your heart's content. They gave the neighborhood personality. They gave it soul.

Then somebody bought them out, knocked down the building and put up a Wal-Mart. Or a Starbucks. Or a box store with low prices, huge selection, and all the soul of tuna fish on white bread. And one by one those storied places, yours and mine, winked out of existence.

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