I can remember when the cities in this country were still very different

You're going to have to bear with me a little on this one. This is one of those "old guy writing about the good old days" pieces, so cut me a little slack.

The United States used to be a much bigger country, a more interesting country.

It used to be that when you went from one state to another, one city to another, places were actually different. Not anymore. Along about the mid 1980s, I started using a term that I had never seen anyone else use before -- "mallification," as in "the mallification of America." My premise was that if you were blindfolded and dropped into the middle of a shopping mall, and you couldn't ask anyone where you were or look for newspaper vendors, it might take you quite a while to realize if you were in Missoula, Mont., Indianapolis, Ind., or Baltimore, Md.

Most of the malls would have the same stores, from anchor stores like Macy's or Sears to restaurants like Hot Dog on a Stick or Ruby Tuesdays.

But things weren't always like that. When I was in elementary school in the late 1950s, we lived in the suburbs outside Dayton, Ohio. When we went to a department store downtown, it was a store that was unique to Dayton and it was wonderful..

Rike's at Second and Main in Dayton was one of the biggest stores I had ever seen, eight stories of shopping and 920,000 square feet of space. Click on the link to see the directory. There was almost nothing they didn't sell; it was a true department store, not a glorified clothing shop like so many stores are today.

As big and wonderful as Rike's was, it was tiny compared to the real king of Ohio department stores. Lazarus in Columbus was 1.3 million square feet. Rike's and Lazarus are both gone, now. Economies of scale make it almost impossible for single stores to compete with chains like Macy's. In fact, for its final years of business, Lazarus in Columbus was actually owned and run as a Macy's.

I actually remember Lazarus better. We seemed to shop in Columbus more often than we went to downtown Dayton, and what I remembered about Lazarus was how every Thanksgiving, the sixth floor toy department was expanded for Christmas shopping.

I do remember going downtown to see the window decorations at Rike's most Decembers. There was just something so much nicer about walking along the sidewalk and seeing different displays than there was later going to the mall.

I just finished reading Bill Bryson's wonderful memoir, "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid," about growing up in Des Moines, Iowa. Bryson was born in December 1951, almost exactly two years after I was born, so we had many of the same cultural reference points.

He made a lot of the same points I've made here about the uniqueness of his hometown. I think it's a shame that kids don't get that anymore. They don't go to a hamburger stand for a burger and fries; they go to an outlet of a national fast-food chain.

If I remember correctly, I was 11 when Dayton got its first McDonald's. It was fun at first, but I don't think it changed our country for the better.

When we moved to Virginia in 1963, there were unique things there -- Tops Drive-Ins, Three Chefs restaurants -- but they have all given way to uniformity over the last 50 years or so.

Everyplace is the same now.

I even saw a George Will column in 2007 or so that referred to the "mallification of America."

Progress is great, but if there's one thing we ought to have learned by now, just changing things doesn't necessarily mean we're making progress.