Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Praised be the muckrakers!
Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" skewered the many costs of cheap food in franchise restaurants. Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickled and Dimed" exposed the horrors of trying to get by on low-paying jobs at the bottom rung of the economic ladder.
Now comes Stacy Mitchell with a searing indictment of the behemoth chain retailers (Wal-Mart, Costco, Best Buy, et al.) and what they are doing to this country.
Mitchell's "Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses" is a galvanizing eye-opener that deserves the widest possible audience. This is one of those urgent, revelatory volumes that could change how many readers conduct their daily lives, since it illuminates a stunning collection of business outrages, government favoritism, environmental damages, hidden economic and societal costs, debunked myths and a rising swell of consumer activism against big-box blight.
Mitchell, 33, is a researcher and activist based in Maine. She frequently speaks to small businesses and communities in need of her expertise. She also chairs the American Independent Business Alliance. Her strong contacts and research imbue "Big-Box Swindle" with dramatic examples across all areas of retailing and also a national scope that includes many trenchant cases from the Northwest, including Bellingham, Port Townsend, Walla Walla, Hood River, Ore., Bozeman, Mont., and Kamloops, B.C.
Page after page of "Big-Box Swindle" unleashes a shocker or sometimes several about the power, pervasiveness and relentlessness of mega-retailers.
Consider just these three:
Wal-Mart spent $18 billion in China in 2004, making it that country's fifth-largest trading partner, ahead of Great Britain and Germany.
A superstore is surrounded by 12 acres of parking, contributing vast amounts of poisonous runoff from vehicles, one of the most hazardous sources of water pollution today.
Thousands of vacant superstores (including more than 300 Wal-Marts) are littering the American landscape, as big-box retailers discard outlets in a decade or so and then move to newer and larger outlets often a few miles away in the same cities.
Mitchell does an excellent job of detailing the rise of mega-retailers aided by government concessions and handouts and how a steady succession of cities succumbed to the chains' assertions that national retailers coming to town represents "progress."
But she also documents how big-box retailers on the edge of town end up costing communities far more than they contribute -- sucking economic life and tax revenue from downtowns, killing off many small businesses more involved in local affairs, adding highway and public-safety costs, increasing mileage for private vehicle shopping trips, imbuing individual cities with a numbing sameness, enrolling many big-box employees in various public-assistance programs because they make so little in wages (except at Costco).
At least consumers are saving money at big-box retailers over smaller independents -- that has long been the ruling assumption in the marketplace. But Mitchell seriously undermines that assumption by citing several studies that have found that the price differential was often negligible, especially once mega-retailers backed off from initial loss-leader pricing after driving competitors out of business.
"Big-Box Swindle" could have been a downer to read, but Mitchell devotes the final quarter of her powerful book to growing citizen activism against mega-retailers. An increasing number of communities have been imposing square-footage caps on the size of retail establishments and requiring more thorough studies of the financial and environmental impacts of big-box stores.
At least 132 such projects were derailed by citizen opposition between 2000 and 2004, while activists have mounted strong campaigns to convince consumers to "buy local," with Bellingham a prime example of these burgeoning successes.
One of the most telling comments in Mitchell's book comes from an independent bookseller in Salt Lake City: "You cast a vote every time you spend a dollar. And every vote you cast helps shape your community."
"Big-Box Swindle" takes mega-retailers to task in convincing fashion. But Mitchell also provides inspiring lessons from places that are turning the tide.
Stacy Mitchell discusses "Big-Box Swindle" at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at The Elliott Bay Book Co.; 206-624-6600.
To see more of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for online features, or to subscribe, go to http://seattlep-I.com.
© 1998-2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All Rights Reserved.
