You know the kind of store I’m talking about – the rundown shop in the decrepit plaza which last saw its glory days when Duran Duran was gracing the covers of teen magazines.

I usually avoid places like this, but I was hoping to find discontinued diaper doublers for my son. (For those unfamiliar with the product, it is an absorbent pad which you place in diapers at night to keep the diaper from soaking through – one of the best products ever, and it has been discontinued! No nearby stores have any similar product.)

So, I found myself forced to go to that store.

The shop has an air of despair which greets you at the door and presses on your shoulders during your entire visit. Bad music from an outdated sound system plays in the background, music which is both royalty and quality free. Music made by and for mindless drones.

The floor consists of dirty, stained, cracked and mismatched tiles. Merchandise is on the floor, but nobody seems to notice or care.

The shelves, of which there are too many, are chaotically crammed with as much junk as can possibly fit. Crap you can’t imagine ANYBODY buying.

Lining several shelves are toys which no child wants. Among those toys, robots that look like Transformers but have some other name and likely contain enough lead paint to kill you on contact. On other shelves, outdated food and all the plastic crap you can fit into a tiny shopping cart.

Sad, unhealthy-looking people shuffle their way through the narrow aisles, filling their carts with plastic and filling their empty lives with more crap. Or so it would seem to the casual, jaded observer.

How many NASCAR doodads can one person collect?

The only thing that can help a store like this, I thought, is a well placed wrecking ball.

And I wondered, what kind of person shops here?

The prices aren’t much cheaper than other places, yet the quality is vastly inferior. You’d have to really not care about yourself or what you’re buying to regularly shop in a place like this. It’s almost like… junk food.

And then in a moment of clarity, something clicked.

The way I see this place, and the people who frequent it, represents everything I loathe not only in society, but in myself. It’s the same way I’ve treated my body for years.

I don’t have the body of someone who has chosen quality over crap. I have been filling my gut with the food equivalent of plastic for years, no decades!

And while I might not look like it yet, it’s only a matter of time before I look just like this store – rundown and slovenly. Without any self respect.

Waiting for the wrecking ball.

Which is just the kick in the ass I needed to start 2009 off with a bang!

In that we sell ourselves every day, we have storefronts to keep up.

My storefront should be as fresh, beautiful, unique and orderly as the inner me is – or at least as the ideal inner me is.

So, what kind of storefront do you keep? Is it time to grab the wrecking ball and create the kind of store you can be proud of?

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