Penn retail is off Target

Close your eyes. Now picture yourself bouncing down Walnut Street, circa 2014, in your sexy new sheepskin Ugg moon boots. On the right you've got your basics: CVS, cereal store, high priced clothing store, CVS, higher priced clothing store, CVS, highest priced clothing store also selling cereal, CVS. On the left, you have Annenberg's newly-built Center for World Domination, stretching for miles.

It's a good setup, no doubt, especially if you're like most Penn students and dream about public policy while sporting the latest Can-You-See-The-Outline-Of-My-Ass jeans. I, however, am not like most Penn students.

And all I wanted last semester, more so than a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, half-priced holiday candy or a Burberry umbrella, was to buy a pair of clean socks. Not novelty socks imprinted with the Stations of the Cross. Not socks diamond-encrusted with MJK for posterity. White, cotton, cheap-ass bagged socks.

It didn't take me long to figure out there were no socks on campus. I could not find socks in a box. I could not wear socks with a fox. There were no socks here or there. There were no socks anywhere. It socked.

I trudged to Center City in my tattered Hanes Her Ways, cursing my misfortune. On the way back to Penn, as the air tore at my ankles and nibbled at my knees, I realized that I was making frequent trips to The Gallery for items that I should be easily able to find on campus. And I know I'm not alone.

Fine Arts students have to travel to South Street to get basic charcoal and paper. Students wanting furniture trek to Ikea. If you want socks cheaper than your left kidney on the black market, it's off to Center City for you. Most of us aren't blessed with the ability to pay for Philadelphia car insurance. As a result, we're walking or SEPTAing pretty damn far to get our basic essentials without car trunks to carry our stuff home.

The current shopping and restaurant corridor at Penn caters to students with large disposable incomes and highly affluent fashion tastes. And surely, there are plenty of these students at Penn to keep Mr. Ugg's sheep naked and shivering for decades. But I'm going to guess that most of us aren't slathering our shivering feet in animal skins for warmth. Why should our little piggies go cold?

I don't think it's too much to ask for a store that sells reasonably priced socks on campus. Or school supplies. A notebook at the Penn Bookstore costs more than six times what a notebook costs at stores in Cherry Hill. School supplies and home essentials in the bookstore are marked up, and unless you want to travel to Center City and you have a way to carry your stuff back, Penn retailers are really socking you in the wallet.

Paper's paper. A sock's a sock. Scissors are scissors. And the solution to extravagant retail on campus is easier than Sock Paper Scissors. Two words: Moravian Court.

Penn is current investigating "if there's market enough" on campus for a CVS located in the space previously occupied by various restaurants, four blocks from the current CVS and blocks away from a Rite-Aid. If Penn's goal is to get a pharmacy, fine. It's admirable that they want the fine residents of Hill House to receive medical care.

But why not put in a store which can benefit many more facets of student life, including pharmaceutical needs? I suggest we replace Moravian Court with a compact Target. Since Target is currently in talks with Philadelphia to open their first store in Center City at 8th and Market, it seems reasonable for them to also consider locations a few blocks west.

I'm sure the Target people would love the students of Penn and Drexel and the community members of West Philadelphia. Target has a pharmacy. It has cheap school supplies. It even has socks, six to a bag.

A store like Target would be much more effective at Penn than another CVS. A department store would bring jobs into the community for students. It would give everyone options. The current Bookstore monopoly on office and home supplies gives few incentives to trim prices. No wonder we have to save for months to purchase everyday items. And a store like Target would bring shoppers from Center City into West Philadelphia, thereby increasing traffic at other retail locations on campus.

I picture anthropologists discovering these retail locations some point in the distant future, circa 2114. They will peer assiduously at the storefronts, trying to determine what the people were like who shopped in them long ago. One will turn to the other and babble, "By golly, Gloria! Look at all of the designer clothing and CVS's! We have found the richest city in all the land."

Gloria will turn and smile. "Marlene," she will murmur, "They're obviously Penn students. Put a sock in it, will you?"

Melody Joy Kramer is a junior English major from Cherry Hill, N.J. Perpendicular Harmony appears on Wednesdays.

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