Hout of Time

I've just learned that O.W. Hout's, a State College, PA institution since, I think, 1920, will shut its doors on January 11. It seems they have simply run out of customers.

While somewhat unsurprising, this closure is deeply significant: it represents the final stroke in the transformation of the State College area into yet another friendlyville. No longer rural farmland, the counties surrounding Penn State University are now commercial subdevelopments. And, as in the case of most rural or ruralesque parts of the United States, other businesses have arrived in tandem with the contractors. These businesses are coeval with, and designed for, the kind of sub-suburb this part of the world has become.

Hout's never failed to frustrate me, but this wasn't for its outdatedness. Far from it. I'm an ardent supporter of the untimely and the slow, especially when it comes to food. The problem with Hout's is that it didn't fully grasp what the specifics of its appeal might have been. Or if it did, it simply didn't have the resources to act.

Hout's is a relic. A true country farm store, it sells everything from furniture, hardware, and lumber to garden supplies, kitchen equipment, and "gourmet" food. In recent years, the limitations of the form became sadly apparent: although the butcher was never anything other than excellent, the store's efforts to sell local produce fell flat. After all, whether local or not, vegetables just aren't appealing if they're left to rot on the shelves. Of course, other attempts at small-market produce retail tend similarly to struggle. Short of the low-overhead farmer's market, it's hard to compete with the food giants.

And who went to Hout's for its furniture? From visit to visit, the store seemed to become emptier, if ever so slightly, as it sold off old stock and didn't replace it.

A farm store can't be a farm store if there are no farms. It would be easy to feel nostalgic for the loss of a store that represents a once-prominent but now quaintly overshadowed form of rural capitalism. Imagine a door-to-door salesman hocking encyclopedias in the era of the internet. As the news stories will surely declare, Wal-Mart and Lowe's have crowded out the farm-store niche: they offer a scale (and thus a price) better suited to the hard-up "rural" folk who shop there. But don't get me started on Wal-Mart.

But is this really just the passing of a dinosaur—a casualty of the highway of Progress? There is something more at stake here; and nostalgia aside, there's no need to tell the same old story of mega-capitalism.

Hout's is a victim of another historical force, just as real, but more complicated than commercial Darwinism alone: not an inability to modernize, but an inability to de-modernize. A failure, that is, to recognize the particularity of what it does well. Butchery, lumber-cutting, housewares, hardware: these are all valuable, necessary, services. But they can't be jumbled together in the same haphazard way that renders scale the only way to compete: whenever bigger is better, the Wal-Marts will always the "advanced" form and Hout's will always be the "antique" form. These reliquary trades need a new logic.

If someone's going to be a door-to-door salesman today (and why not!), he can't just sell the same old encyclopedias. If someone wants to sell encyclopedias (and why not!), she can't just do it by going door-to-door. The appeals of traveling salespeople and encyclopedias is no longer obvious; it has to be invented rather than taken for granted.

Hout's, for one, needed to cut bait. They sat on their inventory-- useful when one is looking for, say, cedar siding to match the boards on a 1930s cottage. But awkward when it comes to an entire floor dedicated to (really!) showcasing furniture at once too expensive, and too out of date, to appeal to most everyone. And even more awkward when it comes to, say, apples or cucumbers.

If someone decides to take the business over and give it another run-- and I hope they will-- I hope the best elements of the farm store can be retained. Oddity, for certain, is a wonderfully nostalgic characteristic. But what the store really needs now— other than an infusion of cash— is an ideology, a raison d'être.

If only they could sell wine...