Lately I’ve been allowing myself to dream about life in a post-corporate world.

What would such a life be like?

I do remember, early in my own life, a time when most businesses were owned by local people, even the big ones. All the major retail shops like clothing stores, department stores, shoe stores, jewelry stores, and so forth were downtown, and everyone rode the bus to go downtown because there was no parking there except for very limited on-street metered parking.

Women dressed up to go shopping and men who worked downtown wore suits and still rode the bus. As late as the mid-1960s, there was no shame in riding the bus to town, and everyone dressed up to do it. I remember our local TV weatherman lived about six blocks from me and so, often, on my way to town to waste time window shopping and goofing off with my friends, he would be sitting on the same bus. Later the same day, I’d see him on TV on the local news, talking about the weather.

In those days, working in a department store was a real career, and the women and men who worked there were dressed up and deadly serious. Some department store clerks were so serious, they’d shoo adolescents like me and my best friend right out of the store. One department store, ‘The Frances Shop’, was frequented only by the most well off people in town. I never saw the inside of that department store, ever. I recall feeling both awe and shame when girls at my school showed up in Bobbie Brooks skirts and sweaters their mothers had purchased for them at back-to-school days at the Frances Shop.

Obviously, it wasn’t all good, those old days, but it was very different, and what strikes me today is how much more variety there was, even though stores were locally owned, smaller, and more class conscious. Today, anyone can go into Kohl’s or Penney’s or Macy’s and buy the same cheap crap available anywhere else in the country. Even big box stores like Meijer and Target and WalMart; same, same, same.

What we have today is the illusion of variety and the illusion of culture. We can go buy ourselves whatever persona we want up to what our wallets and credit cards will bear, but we will have to wait in line for our UPCs to be scanned by minimum wage employees whether we are buying Versace or Daisy Fuentes or mystery-wear from Taiwan, doesn’t matter, same, same, same. Ask a clerk a question (if you are able to make eye contact—no easy feat) and you will not get an answer. No one knows anything. Next week it will be all new crap, that is somehow nearly identical to the crap in the store right now.

The old way was painful and discriminatory. People knew and cared whose dad worked at a factory and whose dad worked in a suit, whose mom was in the PTA and whose mom belonged to a country club, who was black and who might as well be black by virtue of living too close to the projects or the wrong neighborhood. At the largest downtown department store in the northern city where I grew up, black women were not allowed to try on hats until well after Martin Luther King marched on Atlanta.

Now we can all get in our cars and drive to the mall and drop hundreds of dollars on clothes made by third world people paid pennies a day, and we can spend this money regardless of our race or our class, but how good does it make any of us feel? Not that good. And now, with the economy tanking, we don’t have the money for even this kind of empty, if equal, retail therapy.

So I’ve been letting myself imagine a post-corporate retail world populated by small shops run by blacks, and Latinos, and Mexicans, and aging hippies, and evangelical green living kids, and pagans, and Indians, and every kind of person who has a special skill, or a craft, or makes good cheese, or knows how to knit or sew. Shops run once more by real individual people, but without the societal division and hurt.

In some parts of the country, such retail communities are already forming and doing well. How wonderful would it be to know the man who made your shoes, or the woman who makes your tamales, and know them personally and say hi when you stop and buy? What if you could do what you do best and sell your goods or services to others and be fairly compensated and valued for your special talents and gifts?

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

It’s Summer Solstice today, the day when the sun pauses directly above us for the briefest moment, and the day is as long as it will ever be in the cycle of the year. Today is a very long day. And afterwards, after today, the days will grow shorter, the nights longer, it will get colder and colder by and by, until before we know what hit us winter is back and the only thing anyone is dreaming about is the sun. Where’d it go?

But today, Sunday June 22, Summer Solstice, I’m dreaming about nicer places to shop.

Once we get done falling apart completely, of course.