You Can’t Get a Chrysler in Detroit

It seems ironic, I know, but the above header is correct; the last Chrysler dealership left in the City of Detroit was closed last week as one of the 789 locations eliminated by the company during the ongoing “restructuring.” The Wall Street Journal article goes on to note that the city also has no national bookstore chains, no national grocery chains, and only 4 Starbucks left in a city of 900,000 nominal residents. We’ve all been hearing about the consequences of the ongoing economic crisis in the United States, and the possible implications for all of us if something isn’t done about it, but I thought this story really explains the situation in familiar terms…

Consider for a moment if you woke up one day and all of the major businesses in your home town had closed. You can make shift picking up some of your needs from local merchants, and you probably will, but if you want an new Chrysler or Dodge, you’re going to have to get in your present car and drive for an hour or so; likewise, if you want to shop in anything more extensive than your corner market, or obtain any number of other needs, they’re all out in the suburbs. It’s almost like the scenario Neil Gaiman proposed in the “Sim City” game series; of getting up one morning and realizing that the city has quietly gotten up and moved away from you during the night…

I’m not going to shed a lot of tears for the Chrysler Company; like the other American automakers they appear to have dug their own pit and jumped into it without assistance. And I’m not going to suggest that somebody should have “done something” about all of the other companies that have managed to run their operations so firmly into the ground that they’ve been forced to pull out of America’s 11th largest city and leave all of that revenue behind for local firms to snap up. What I’m suggesting is that if we don’t at least try to learn from the experience the poor people in Detroit are having right now, it could be our turn next…

So before it becomes impossible to get lobster in Maine, or pizza in New York; before they stop packing beef in Omaha or making movies in Hollywood; before the aerospace industry leaves St. Louis and Seattle, and the financial services people bail out of whatever spider-hole they’ve fled to during the bailout crisis, I’m suggesting that we all stop pretending that we’re the most powerful industrial and service economy in the world, that we can do as we please and nothing can ever go wrong, and start acting like the end of the world is upon us and the barbarians are at the gate…

Because if you can’t get a single Chrysler product in the Motor City, I’ve got to suggest that this is, in fact, the case…