All those new shopping temples springing up around the village and soaring rents really seem to be doing a number on small business. On one block alone, an indoor nursery and a picture framer have both gone tits-up. Neither were there very long.
Back in the day, ie the 1990s, this used to be the NAB. It has been empty some time now. Peasants can do their banking online.
Fuck even knows what this was. Maybe it was a shop selling dreams of being able to make a living keeping abreast of history to local historians.
If that’s the case it’s probably cursed and will never open again.
The old Thomas the Jewellers. No one has disposable income anymore, so much for the jewellery trade. Another one that used to be a mainstay and has turned into a big empty white elephant on the main street. The ‘For lease’ sign has been up so long its getting harder to read for all the graf tags.
Prime retail space no one can afford, available for rents the local economy can’t support. Carry on winning.
Anyone remember Rosenharts? Family cake makers? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Don’t worry consumers, there are franchise bakeries up the block. They probably have a better time with the rents with the overlords at head office taking care of mass advertising and such. It’s all about economies of scale and harvesting souls for growth, commies.
The Bridge Mall is looking a bit schmick of late hey! Well apart from, well, you know.
So much village in having a shiny new mall and empty shops because the economy can’t sustain the rent lol. It’s almost as as though the grifters running this fucked in the head society are fucked in the head themselves.
You know things are a bit proper fucked when even Betta Bargains can’t stay afloat. Maybe the Betta Bargains were all one way; the rule from further up the food chain was Betta Pay the Rent or Else Cunts.
So much for the taste of Africa. Middle-class laborites love DEI except for the part about including everyone in economic equality or diversifying ideas to include those other than selfish individualism. You can all still trade action for access but peasants.
Carry on rolling corporate class hierarchy turds in egalitarianism, inclusion and sustainability glitter Laborites I guess.
Pepperidge Farm used to get haircuts at Darrians when he was a pup. When he still had hair.
Reading books makes you gay anyway, everyone knows.
Couldn’t fill the tax coffers fast enough.
You can’t help people advertise if everything in the village is closing down as a precursor to Wall St finally shitting the bed as it inevitably must.
No signs of an accumulation crisis anywhere but LOL
When you can’t pay the rent being a Lydiard street legal/banking/real estate grifter you know things are a bit, you know, fucked.
Google Maps says this was a bakery. Sorry Emma. Rosenhart’s didn’t survive either and they were around for decades.
Also how’s the contrast between the Google Maps weather and the actual documented weather. It’s almost as though they photoshop the background like they’re real estate agents taking inside shots of houses for sale anywhere in Victoria.
Just up from Emma’s. Nothing good can happen in Ballarat, but the Geelong store is still open.
Another place that had been around for decades and now has the big blue sign out the front. The Battler is reminded of the bolt factory he worked in once, where a tool and die guy who had worked at the place for half a century was let go as soon as they needed to fire someone. They gave him a gold watch and he was like, I’d rather have my job.
Ballarat is like that. You can be around in this village forever, but as soon as you can’t pay the man, you’re expendable. Same as if you’re competent enough in your education job to express doubt in the judgement of senior management whose pedagogical qualifications are an MBA. Tell me something I don’t feel like hearing right now like I’m part of the problem, you’re dead meat, faggot. You’ll never work again.
Medicine seems to be a license to print money, but even medical offices opposite a village hospital can’t hack the pace. They have reduced the rent from two limbs and your first born to one and your second though. Let it never be said rentier capitalism breed sociopathy; what are you, some kind of communist?
Commies just like to bitch. Also did the corporate sock puppet misspell “jobs”? Capitalism is based on the jobs motive after all, or something. Props to the sock puppet for saying the quiet part out loud though.
Bridge St mall. An ANZ in the 1990s, Pepperidge Farm remembers. Another longtime empty. Banks don’t want to pay your rent and no one else can. The invisible hand strikes again.
The only sovereign in this village is rentier capitalism.
Wendouree. The owners of this place got rinsed along with their linen.
Avis is pulling up stumps. Nothing to see here peasants.
TFW when you go in for spices to a shop that was open yesterday
Not Inn of Kong you bastards. Fak
Lake Gardens, ex-psychiatric facilities now collecting dust. How about that deinstitutionalisation. The last cafe owners lasted about a year. You literally can’t operate a single cafe in Lake Gardens with no competition and survive. Ballarat winning once again.
At least we don’t have to worry about the nanny state I guess. Apart from the bureaucrats.
Shoot, the Pleasant St butchers aren’t even bothering with the sign. This is seriously nuts.
Trouble in paradise, campers. Mair St, just next to College. Oh, Pepperidge Farm says to say thanks for the major depression, attachment disorder and Complex PTSD. Dissociation holes that last most of your life are keen. Me and the Black Dog are blood brothers now. He says: ‘they only see the dog, not the size of the fight,’ and they only see the dog because they don’t want to see the size of the fight.’
‘Rabobank serves and supports Australia’s farmer community and agribusiness through a global network of farmers across 40 countries.’ How about that, 40 countries and Ballarat somehow lucked out lol.
Does that figure? I know many of us like to think we’re a little bit better than thou, a little bit more respectable, but are we legitimately a bit special?
This was the local Australian Education Union HQ. Like the canary in the coalmine.
Statement of the obvious: The coalmine education system is a corporate subsidiary where students are both product and consumer moving along a production line in a value-added human capital knowledge factory. A year or two ago there were 3000 empty teaching positions in NSW alone, which completely figures. The education system is like marxist microcults the way it chews through people and spits them out after totally using them up. Australian universities have been consistently falling in global rankings like we’re so geographically isolated the intellectual swamp never gets enough oxygen to steer clear of groupthink. Half of all adult Australians are too illiterate to read the label on a medicine bottle #clevercountry #winning. As Chomsky points out, mass education is a system of imposed ignorance anyway. The canary is dead, time to clear the hell out.
Maybe this is what happens when strikes are effectively outlawed and the ALP oversees a regime of ‘protected action’ as good as a protection racket if attempts to reconstruct the harms of autocratic overreach as beneficial to their victims count for anything. The system is run by woke economic fundamentalists and woke neoliberal theocrats, and it shows . . . arguably. The decline of organised labour and the destruction of the bonds of social solidarity at the hands of selfish individualism, inclusive of the system that is supposed to prepare us for adulthood and social and historical responsibility, but which mostly just indoctrinates us instead, is another symptom of the downward spiral isn’t it campers.
Back in the mall. Pepperidge Farm was thinking, man maybe I’m just focusing on the negative because I have to live in fucking Ballarat, and it’s actually really more about me, the conflicts that are so numerous they’re mostly what hold me together, and the unintentional art piece I call an internal monologue. I went for a walk and found 8 empties from a 1-2 minute stroll. Hating Ballarat doesn’t mean it’s not going down the gurgler. No more so than being paranoid means they’re not after you . . .
. . . which they very definitely are. This is what happens when you say too many bad things about bureaucrats.
Such a pretty new mall and such empty shops. Yeah it’s July. They’re not hanging in there are they.
This looks like another Geelong business that tried to work in Ballarat and went, ha yeah nah there’s a reason why we live in Geelong. It’s not the crappy beach either.
This place was an empathy coach for Laborites, they were systematically avoided like constituents with problems they don’t feel like having to know about right now. They didn’t clock enough hours to make the first month’s rent. Horrible tragedy.
I wouldn’t care so much about being brilliant so much as being able to meet expenses, make a living being no one else’s slave, and not get rinsed by the nanny state.
Baby it’s cold as shit outside if you don’t have money or mad power in this village. It’s Ballarat anyway, it’s cold as shit by definition. It’s as cold as the hearts of Ballarat queen bees.
Well not that cold but it’s fucking cold.
Landlords don’t get flowers because the only thing they love is money and they’re soulless monsters who would sell you out in an instant, their own grandmother in half a one. Therefore no one can have flowers.
That’s kind of like being around codependent, approval-thirsty social climbers who care more about being normal than being happy when you think about it.
How’s the rule of thirds here mofos. The Village of Ballarat needs to re-lease this space and turn it into a pretend shop where actors pretend to have money to buy stuff they pretend to need. Bandwagon effect, keep the mad dividend machine purring over.
Making dentures for cashed-up boomers would be a license to print money, except if boomers were hoarding all the wealth, housing and opportunity to the point that the economy was grinding to a halt. Not addicts but. What I would like to know is why there are so many people of my generation busting a gut to become exactly like them.
You’re getting there too shitbirds, just so you know.
Horsing supplies can’t hang in there, not even with tinfoil hat neckbeards gobbling up all the ivermectin.
Stop saying bad things about freedom commies
TBC