Review by Ed Quillen
Business – November 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Home Town Advantage – How to Defend your Main Street against Chain Stores, and Why It Matters
by Stacy Mitchell
Published in 2000 by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance
ISBN 0-917582-89-6
THE LAST TIME I checked, 25 cents of every retail dollar that was spent in Salida was spent at Wal-Mart. It shows when I compare the downtown I see now, with galleries and restaurants, to the downtown I encountered upon moving here in 1978.
Back then, there were three drugstores downtown; today there’s only one. There were two hardware stores, Cady and Patterson, and neither remains. There were two grocery stores, and now there’s only one. There were two office-supply stores, and now there’s only one. There was a department store, along with clothing stores for men and women. And I don’t know where I’d buy a pair of shoelaces downtown now.
But some of these faded away before 1986, when Wal-Mart opened. And with Gibson’s out on the highway then (current site of True-Value Hardware), a lot of the town’s commerce was moving out that way anyway. Further, some of the downtown stores were chains, like Woolworth’s and Safeway.
So it’s hard to blame everything on Wal-Mart, or the arrival of motel and fast-food franchises. Salida was laid out on a pedestrian scale in 1880, with the idea that people would walk to work and shop. Once people get into their cars, then parking becomes more important than proximity, and we use our cars.
The Home Town Advantage offers some detailed analysis of the economic effects of the big discounters like Wal-Mart, the category-killer big-boxes like Home Depot, and the standardized franchises like McDonald’s. They remove money, and decision-making, from the local community.
It also points out some little-observed collateral effects. For instance, if the Big National Store and the Little Local Store both buy from the same wholesale supplier of hardware or cosmetics, there’s a distribution infrastructure in place to serve Local Store. But if Big National creates its own distribution network based on direct orders from the factory, the wholesaler goes out of business, and keeping the shelves stocked gets to be a major challenge for Local Store.
However, this book focuses mostly on political or legal actions — better enforcement of federal anti-trust laws (fat chance), or stronger local zoning (which often fails to stand up in the inevitable court challenges).
It does have some good advice for local governments — quit subsidizing big corporations — but that appears to be quite difficult, given that even the big city of Denver is poised to provide $10 million of subsidy to Wal-Mart in a redevelopment that would push out dozens of small specialty shops.
While Home Town Advantage offers a lot of relevant research, it doesn’t offer much advice for the merchant who struggles to survive in this retail environment.
Many do by filling niches, by offering expertise, or by providing services like delivery and installation. That is, they’ve adapted, just as players are supposed to do in a market economy. And this element is totally missing from Home Town Advantage.
So this book is informative, but it doesn’t provide much in the way of advice for the individual merchant. Instead it focuses on political and legal maneuvers, ones that look less than promising in the current political and judicial climate. We can, after all, vote with our feet (walk downtown to shop) and our pocketbooks (spend our money with local shops).