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A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

The house slide above Terwilliger

Hyper-local can be summed up easily as ‘all the news in your zip code.’ Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson captured it nicely too in a post titled The Vanishing Point Theory of News. The idea of hyper-local is further validated by the success of sites such as Yelp and Outside.in; they drill down to the zip code level to bring us all the news that’s fit to print, or not as the case may be.

I was hiking with my dog in my Hillsdale neighborhood yesterday and some thoughts percolated to top of mind – one being that hyper-local is an awesome idea yet that thought was immediately tempered by the next; hyper-localized information means having easy access to all the news in our communities, we are made aware, therefore we have to accept responsibility for what happens in our communities. There will be no excuses.

I could have stopped right there, it would have been a good Twitter-esque moment. But no. I have actually been paying attention to what goes on in my neighborhood and it’s not always pretty..

From tragedy and despair to new thinking.

No vehicles, a blessing

My regular hike leads from my home in the residential neighborhoods of Portland’s West Hills, down narrow musty lanes and streets to Terwilliger Boulevard [known to locals as the Terwilliger Highway - you may already sense where this is going...]. Where Terwilliger crosses the SW Capitol Highway the road is now closed to vehicles but not to hikers and bicyclists. A few weeks ago a house slid down the hillside that I can see ahead of me taking two others off their foundations as it cascaded toward Terwilliger. Road closed. Despair for the families involved but thankfully no injuries.

The house collapse has created a chain of events that can be seen as an opportunity.

First and foremost, as vehicles can no longer drive along the boulevard it is possible for hikers and bikers to enjoy the serenity of walking Terwilliger’s tree-lined curves without inhaling exhaust fumes or having to be constantly vigilant of motorists speeding to work. Remove the automobile from the equation and we are suddenly back on the path to nature. Of course the traffic has to go somewhere; the detour funnels it through Hillsdale along the increasingly congested Capitol Highway, up through the dangerous cross-section at Sunset Blvd and the Wilson High School entrance, and on back down to the severed umbilical that is Terwilliger where commuters, one to each car, can speed off toward OHSU.

Here’s the opportunity for Hillsdale as I see it: make things difficult for drivers.

Two fairly recent developments in Hillsdale [in the last 4 years] changed the character of the neighborhood – one positively, one negatively. The Hillsdale Library, completed in 2004, is both architecturally and holistically a perfect example of how Hillsdale should be developed. The Watershed building on the other hand is just the opposite. And yet the library, as good as it is, is not perfect.
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Riding the wave of consumer interest and awareness of healthy and organic foods Whole Foods, the up-market grocery chain, rapidly spread into middle and upper class neighborhoods around the country. Consumers with plenty of discretionary income to spend flocked to its stores and it soon earned itself the sobriquet Whole Paycheck, a phrase the companies executives would like to now remove from common parlance.

With the economy in the dumpster people are now reigning in on discretionary spending and to make matters worse for Whole Foods, consumer interest in organic food appears to be leveling off after several years of double-digit growth, according to the Hartman Group, a market research firm specializing in health and wellness. [Found on NYT]

With Whole Foods stock off 70% since 2006 is this a company that has stumbled like another former leader in the discretionary spending market, Starbucks? The cost of fuel and the high rise in food prices are definitely hurting the consumers pocketbook now they are turning their backs on high-priced grocery chains like Whole Foods.

This is not to say that consumers who are heavily committed to organic foods and are happy to pay a premium for them will stop buying organic. More likely it’s those customers who were attracted to the “idea” of organic, pulled in by savvy marketing from companies who never used the term organic to describe their produce, who will steer away from high-priced organic foods and go back to regular produce at cheaper grocery chains. As everyone jumped on the organic band wagon sales soared but now it is consumers economic woes that are dictating where their groceries monies will be spent. The trend appears to be that meat, produce and dairy that is organic continues to sell but products such as breakfast bars or cereals and other similar food categories labeled organic are now less important to shoppers.

Whole Foods problems do appear to mirror those of Starbucks‘ – they were both once Wall Street darlings whose stocks soared for years, but with aggressive strategies for expansion by building more stores rapidly both chains were unable to maintain their margins and Wall Street punished them. They also relied heavily on customers paying a premium for what they saw as a premium product and that only works in times of prosperity not in an economic downturn.

There is also the hyper-local aspect of consumer habits these days. Farmers Markets and even cooperative shares in small organic farms are becoming very popular these days. These markets and farms offer consumers access to locally grown organic produce at the right price and also the feelgood aspect of supporting their local communities. Think local, eat local may be a phrase that becomes popular but it won’t help a national chain like Whole Foods. Whole Paycheck may very well haunt them and their shareholders.

Related Post: Starbucks Fires Head of Entertainment Division