Merchants must be strangers?

Simmel illustrates that the stranger is the opposite of attachment and detached from space. A stranger is not seen as a landowner and only has general commonalities with someone because of both nearness and remoteness. Economically, he suggests that merchants or traders must be strangers. This may be a more historical approach to trading in that a stranger supplies a community with commodities itself cannot produce, thus a stranger must come in briefly to supply them with such a commodity. In a contemporary context, I struggle to see the merchant as a stranger. In popular culture and in many of our lives, we may have business people in which we frequent and consider them less of a stranger each time we see them. They have become part of someone's routine, so their status as a stranger diminishes.

Do you consider merchants in your lives to be strangers? Is there the possibility of mobility of a merchant from the status of a stranger to something else? Or is the merchant locked into the status of being a stranger in that they will always be remote from your more essential parts of life?

As much as I agree with you that contemporary society no longer requires outsiders to supply a community with foreign commodities, I do consider merchants to be strangers in my life. I think that contemporary society has turned merchants into even more unfamiliar beings disconnected and separate from us in many ways. Since most of us now purchase from or interact with bureaucracy and giant corporations rather than individual merchants, I don't even think that the term merchant truly applies to our present society. Considering that every trading relationship is eventually a non-personal exchange of goods and services for set prices, I think that merchants are forever locked into the status of a stranger.

I agree with what Chantelle said, the idea of merchants is a more historical concept before the age of the industrial revolution. Before the increase of factory production, each item was hand crafted most of the time and now we lose that individuality in the item. I believe that merchants will continue to be strangers as we still won't have that deep sated connection with them and there would still be that divide. The items or the material goods separate our connection from others.