The Whole Foods Market flagship at Sixth Street and Lamar Boulevard is the centrepiece of the Sixth + Lamar development, where Borders Books and Music once planned to open across the street from two of Austin's best known independent stores, BookPeople and Waterloo Records, which has since moved a few blocks north. The fight over that store, in 2002 and 2003, is what turned Keep Austin Weird from a bumper sticker into a civic slogan. BookPeople and Waterloo paired the phrase with a second one, Support Local Business. Their owners were Steve Bercu of BookPeople and John Kunz of Waterloo. The phrase itself came from Red Wassenich, a librarian who said it in 2000 while pledging money to The Lounge Show on KOOP Radio. He and his wife, Karen Pavelka, printed stickers and gave them to their dog groomer, who sold them for dog rescue. Wassenich never trademarked the line, and he objected when a local company did. He died on February 28, 2020.
The Borders store was part of Sixth + Lamar, a Schlosser Development project eligible for more than $2.1 million in city Smart Growth fee waivers and incentives. A study by Civic Economics for the group Liveable City estimated that Borders would take at least $11 million from BookPeople and Waterloo over five years, and that a dollar spent at the local stores produced three times the local economic activity of a dollar spent at the chain. Kunz said the fight was about the incentives, not the competition. Borders withdrew in April 2003, citing a slow economy, and the developer's revised plan for the block centered on a flagship store and headquarters for Austin-based Whole Foods Market.
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30.2706, -97.7533
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