I finally visited both Brooklyn Gimme! espresso bars this past weekend. They’re so close that it only took twelve minutes to walk from the Lorimer Street espresso bar to the one on Roebling Street. I liked the sign outside of the Roebling Street Gimme!, so I thought I’d share it.

This is the future home of yet another extraneous Wal-Mart Supercenter. The soon-to-be hypermarket will be just 700 meters southwest of an existing Wal-Mart, a Price Chopper, a K-Mart, a McDonald’s restaurant, and a multitude of other small stores. It also happens to be a fundamental drainage site for my hometown’s water supply, but that’s no concern to these folks. Recently, an environmental impact study of the area was completed, but can you hazard a guess as to who oversaw that project? Yep, Wal-Mart, Inc. itself! So it’s no surprise that that local organizations have challenged the assessment’s validity. Pretty soon this area will be forever entombed, underneath an asphalt parking lot and enduring irreparable environmental damage. Some local residents argue that a new Wal-Mart Supercenter will bring jobs into the city, but that might not be the case. Like most large corporations, one can speculate that Wal-Mart’s goal is to rid the city of what small business competition we have left, thus ruining quality jobs and the lives of small entrepreneurs. It has also been rumored that this Wal-Mart won’t be hiring full-time staff, so you know what that means? Absolutely no benefits for employees! What kind of person actually wants to become a Wal-Mart employee anyway?! That sounds like a dream job to me! Is this really what you want, Cortland?