Hey, let's hope

I just read an article called "Black Friday Die Die Die" by Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle and whom I admire very much.

Take a look at these two paragraphs:

Which reminds me of the nice discussion I had over Thanksgiving dinner about oil. My dinnermate’s belief was that, as oil prices creep up and gas prices inch toward four, five, 10 bucks a gallon in the U.S. over the next decade, one of the first things to suffer will be the megastores, the Wal-Marts and the Targets and their Black Friday-promoting ilk, and not merely because their transportation costs will skyrocket and it will be increasingly unfeasible for them to ship their sweatshop crap over from China and then truck it from the docks to the individual stores.

No, he suggested Wal-Mart and its rapacious brethren will begin to fade because people in the more rural parts of America will refuse to pay the 10 or 15 bucks in fuel costs for a round-trip drive to the nearest big box mega-outlet just to get some crackers and shampoo and some nails. Instead, they will return to shopping locally, in their own neighborhoods and downtowns, where the shops are smaller and the hardware store owner knows them personally. They might still haul ass to Wal-Mart once a month for a serious shopping excursion, but that won’t be enough for the big boxers to stay in business for long. And lo, the world will improve. A little.

Now, sadly, the author thinks that Wal-Mart is malevolent enough to find way around this. But, still. I'll grab any excuse to be a little optimistic!