Things like this make me feel very out of touch. I went into Indigo the other day with my kids to use some gift cards from Christmas, with the idea of getting books to take on a short trip. We ended up in what felt like a bizarre home goods, toy store, book store, quasi-junk pile store. There was shit everywhere. My kids needed constant reminders to look for books, not junk.
Everything was plastic, cheap, very disposable, and very much intended for conspicuous consumption. Some part of me feels like we've fallen very far if literature, one of the pinnacles of human accomplishments, can only be sold if you can also buy the kind of garbage that's rapidly filling our oceans and landfills as well. There is a bizarre dichotomy between books - the things that can potentially last a lifetime and satisfy countless readers - and the impulsively purchased and remarkably unnecessary items which will be bought and lost or disposed of within a year.
I might be overly pessimistic about it. I want my kids to have more wholesome experiences when it comes to the type of media (especially books) they consume. I'll keep taking them to the library the majority of the time, and otherwise, go to local book shops which just sell books. If they still exist.
I feel a little bit like Abe Simpson. "I used to be with 'it', but then they changed what 'it' was.". Maybe Indigo is just fine.
You do seem a bit pessimistic and I'm not sure that your negativity is entirely warranted in the case of Indigo. The products they stock are certainly not high-end, but nor are they dollar store crap.
Most of the items are decent and some are quite nice. I've seen very nice blankets, good quality stationery and related items, board games, and the sort of mid-quality art/nerdy things that you tend to see in the gift shops of museums and art galleries.
None of it is stuff you "need" which may be causing your reaction, but if you were to buy it, you wouldn't throw (most of) it out a week later.
I don't head over there often, but I use a tea mug from that place every day in the office.
I used to like visiting those stores when they were "Chapters" whenever we'd visit the city (read extent-suburbs) as a kid. It was especially exciting when we didn't have internet or up-to-date computers and I'd get to browse the multitudes of computer and music magazines. Always left me jealous. I think that place had a bit better of a thing going—it was less frenetic.
That said, the buying power of Indigo makes it a worthwhile place to search for a book if you can't find it locally.
I feel exactly the same. In a particularly surreal moment a few months ago, I was in a newly-constructed Indigo store here in Kitchener, next door to a cinema multiplex, and there were so few books in the central gathering space of the store that they had a seating area set up in front of a giant flat wall that had a decal on it designed to look like bookshelves.
Where have we come to when even a bookstore uses a picture of books for decor in place of actual books?
I bought a Kindle earlier in the year and have read 11 books so far with it. This is a faster reading pace than I've had in at least a decade. I doubt I'll visit the new Indigo. Chapters on Weber had indeed slowly turned into a Pier 1 Imports avec books.
This has nothing to do with the health of literature. It's about brick and mortar stores being overextended in the 21st century when we've got all kinds of alternative ways to buy and consume merchandise including books.
I remember my childhood when there wasn't Indigo or Chapters big box stores in KW. There was a Coles inside Fairview and Conestoga malls taking up the space of a typical mall store. It's just the rise and fall of big box book stores.
Everything was plastic, cheap, very disposable, and very much intended for conspicuous consumption. Some part of me feels like we've fallen very far if literature, one of the pinnacles of human accomplishments, can only be sold if you can also buy the kind of garbage that's rapidly filling our oceans and landfills as well. There is a bizarre dichotomy between books - the things that can potentially last a lifetime and satisfy countless readers - and the impulsively purchased and remarkably unnecessary items which will be bought and lost or disposed of within a year.
I might be overly pessimistic about it. I want my kids to have more wholesome experiences when it comes to the type of media (especially books) they consume. I'll keep taking them to the library the majority of the time, and otherwise, go to local book shops which just sell books. If they still exist.
I feel a little bit like Abe Simpson. "I used to be with 'it', but then they changed what 'it' was.". Maybe Indigo is just fine.