Talk:Fort Bragg

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Racine's

Put simply: Is it beneficial in any way to include a Buy listing for the local office supplies store on the Fort Bragg article page?

At heart I'm an inclusionist, so it's awkward for me to argue for the removal of information from a MediaWiki page of just about any sort. Compounding the matter is my relatively broad familiarity with the history of the area and the part that several members of the Racine family have had in it for over a century. Heck, Martha Racine (granddaughter of the store's founder) was one of my Mom's professors when she studied Accounting in the 80s at what was then College of the Redwoods, only to then be one of my professors in the 90s (this time for Spanish) on my path to an Associate's degree at the same campus. We've reminisced several times on her gift for keeping interest levels high even when slogging through the nadir of a syllabus.

All that having been said, even after 115 years of continuous operation, the Racine's of today is nothing more than an ordinary office/art supplies store of the sort able to be found in small towns everywhere. Its original incarnation as the town's first independent tobacco/mailing supplies store and distant newspaper stand in a remote area filled with manual laborers who were far from home would've made it essential to include on the Wikivoyage of its day, but not this one. With nothing distinguishing in their product line that's unique to the store or the area, I'm reluctantly advocating for its removal from the page and will proceed to do so sometime next month, barring objections that are posted here in the interim. RogueScholar (talk) 19:12, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Are art supplies stores very common and easy to find in Fort Bragg? In Manhattan, a good art supply store (emphasizing the word "good") can be notable and worth listing in a district guide. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:31, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

@Ikan Kekek:Truth be told, in a community of barely 7,000 souls with an economy that relies mostly on tourism, I can't think of any category of goods or service that is especially common, and yet they're all rather easy to find. There's essentially only one of anything here: one car rental location, one music store, one butcher shop, and yes, just the one art supplies store. I suppose that people who prioritize a folksy-sort of personal interaction might call a few of them good...but I certainly wouldn't.

I have lived in large cities though and I know what you're talking about; faced with a plethora of choices within driving distance the knowledge of which one is most likely to delight you with precisely the thing you didn't even know you needed is high-value information. Here, you're either stuck with the meager selection the local retailer can manage to keep stocked, or your fingers are taking you for a trip down the information superhighway. Hence I just don't see the utility of directing a visitor to an unremarkable store which is also the only place they could possibly end up at if they asked someone where to go for more watercolor supplies. RogueScholar (talk) 19:18, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Understood. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:19, 10 April 2019 (UTC)