Writing Samples

Searching for a solution
by Kevin Dowler

Spending hours upon hours blasting aliens, fighting ninja warriors and dodging enemy fire can put a glazed look into any avid video game player’s eyes.

But it is more than this glazed look that has downtown merchants worried about the video parlor patrons.

The merchants fear the video heads are scaring away their customers with their glazed stares.

At Wednesday night’s Grand Centre council meeting a petition requesting that arcades be thrown out of town was presented to council.

Almost every downtown business owner, except of course, the two arcade business owners, had signed the petition.

The downtown businesses didn’t actually request the businesses move out of town as much as out of the downtown.

When the downtown business owners’ representative was asked where arcades should be moved to, he suggested Fort Kent.

But Coun. Lynn Patterson was quick to note Fort Kent already had enough problems of its own.

The merchants general feeling is the kids were not coming downtown to use their stores and were only frequenting the game parlors.

What kind of reasoning is this?

If they aren’t coming to my party I don’t want them in my town?

These kids are the future consumers of Grand Centre and the merchants don’t want them.

I’m sure these kids would much rather shop in Edmonton than Grand Centre any day. The merchants, could easily get their wish since by shunning kids they also run the risk of shunning the kid’s parents.

Besides, the Edmonton game parlors are much better too.

What is really happening here is the Grand Centre merchants have found, a scapegoat for their problems with empty stores and a lack of business in their small downtown.

The busy game parlors and young toughs which keep the coin boxes full have suddenly become burdened as the ones responsible for causing all of the fear and loathing that keeps downtown business owners awake at night.

Part of being a teenager is threatening the stable folks and thank you very much Mr. and Mrs. Merchant, you have just given Grand Centre’s teens a gold star, while at the same time slapping the face of two fellow businessmen in calling their businesses dirty breeders of pestilence and filth.

Rather than bringing the downtown core together, the wide eyed merchants cringing behind their full tills would weaken the downtown core if their request was fulfilled by council.

But with the number of educators and managers on the Grand Centre council, who are used to dealing with the irrational fears of the insecure, they turned the situation around to bring the downtown together.

Both the arcade owners and the merchants want a stable downtown, so working together was too obvious for them to try without the help of an outsider, in this case, town council.

So both will be watching for video and pool hall patrons who are goofing off on the streets, who will then be reported to the arcade owners who will then ban their participation in the arcades for certain time periods.

When you look at the video heads and the till punchers there really isn’t much difference anyway.

The kids drop coins and hit buttons on machines that go ching and bing just the same as the till punchers, but which of the two have the stranger look in their eyes at the end of the day is hard to tell.

The more money a store owner gets in his till, the more apprehensive he becomes of a video head bursting into his store and demanding all his quarters, while the more money a video head puts in a machine the more apprehensive he becomes at being broke and thrown into 40 below weather during a snowstorm.

Both situations sound pretty scary to me.