[Vision2020] Shopping Center Plans Filed for Pullman-Moscow Highway Site

[Ron Force]

>From the "How the World Works" blog on Salon.com:
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2006/01/05/starke/print.html




----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----


Who is guilty of killing downtown?
Wal-Mart may well be the Grim Reaper, but aren't shoppers the ones swinging
the scythe?
Andrew Leonard

Jan. 05, 2006 | Driving down Highway 301 in northern Florida two weeks ago,
I saw something that hadn't been there the last time I passed that way -- a
brand, spanking new Wal-Mart Supercenter smack in the middle of the town of
Starke. It was hard to miss. Starke is looking pretty rundown these days,
with a fair number of shuttered storefronts lining the main drag through
town. But the Supercenter was all shiny and sparkly -- and extraordinarily
popular. I learned later from local press reports that since the store
opened up in late October, it has single-handedly transformed the traffic
patterns of the entire region.

It's not hard to understand why. Supercenters are a middling-size town's
downtown all by themselves. In Starke, the new 157,628-square-foot store
(three times as big as a 15-year-old store that it replaced) "now features a
full line of groceries as well as a bakery, a delicatessen, a frozen food
section and meat, dairy and fresh produce sections. The store has 36 general
merchandise departments including apparel and accessories, fine jewelry, a
lawn and garden center, health and beauty aids, and a full line of
electronics. It will be open to customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week
and will include 21 full-service and nine express check-out lanes."

Comparing it with the bedraggled appearance of the rest of the town, it was
natural to wonder if Wal-Mart is disemboweling the local economy, as so many
of its critics claim it is. I was reminded of this today when I perused a
new report on Wal-Mart released by a left-wing advocacy group called
Campaign for America's Future.

The report declares that "Wal-Mart sucked $20 billion out of local economies
this holiday season ... Crowds fighting to take advantage of the company’s
aggressive discounts gave the retail behemoth more than five times the sales
of its closest competitor" -- a total of some $66 billion in sales in
November and December.

"The new campaign slogan 'Wal-Mart: Killing Local Businesses One Main Street
at a Time' isn’t just rhetoric, it is reality. Across the country, from
Beaverton, Ore., to Batesburg-Leesville, S.C., and even New York City, the
announcement of a coming Wal-Mart sends shivers down the collective spine of
local business owners."

This may well be true. And I have no particular quibble with the
statistics -- they seem to jibe pretty closely with those presented in the
soon-to-be-published "The Wal-Mart Effect" by Fast Company editor Charles
Fishman. But judging by the long lines of cars looking for parking spaces at
the Starke Supercenter, the arrival of a Wal-Mart also sends thrills of joy
through local consumers. And there really needs to be better acknowledgment
of this by Wal-Mart critics, particularly from the progressive,
worker-friendly sorts who are behind the Campaign for America's Future.

Don't the throngs of North Florida residents flocking to Wal-Mart bear at
least as much responsibility for killing their downtowns as Wal-Mart does?
And shouldn't the cash that they are saving be part of the discussion as to
how much money is being "sucked" out of the local economy? If, as Fishman
points out, Wal-Mart's prices are 10 to 15 percent lower than those of other
stores, then consumers may well have saved as much as $7 billion or $8
billion in November and December by shopping there. That's a fair piece of
change.

The obvious question is, do the costs outweigh the benefits? And there are
plenty of good reasons to argue that they do; that the total cumulative
impact of Wal-Mart on the fabric of society is negative. But the unfortunate
reality is that few minds are going to be changed by one-sided reports that
do not even begin to acknowledge the very real reasons that people have for
shopping at Wal-Mart -- or the responsibility that those shoppers bear for
what kind of changes are wrought in their local communities.


-- Andrew Leonard



  Ron Force        Moscow ID USA
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20060109/7fa94010/attachment-0001.htm