(But for a discussion of globilization these stores rely on and the coming peak oil, see the interview with Matthew Simmons, the next to last question.)

The opposition to big-box stores really focuses on the treatment of workers, both foreign and domestic, and on this front, Akst pays no more than lip service.

Wow -- he dares to shake up the conventional wisdom (of the 2% of the American population that follows environmental issues)!

Wow -- a writer who affects a tone of populism and concern for the environment, but echoes all the arguments of WalMart public relations dept.  

I prefer the outright pirates of the business world who don't put a liberal gloss on their shenanigans.

Bart
Energy Bulletin

WalMart didn't get where it did by just finding sources of cheaper goods. It got to the dominant position by building large, poorly-insulated, over-lit, over-heated, shoddy boxes on cheap agricultural land. And then surrounds them with acres of Pollution Generating Impervious Surfaces (PGIS) also known as parking. The polluted run-off from this then runs into our stormwater/sewer systems.

It got there by employing illegal immigrants at below minimum wage to do the cleaning. By abusing child labor laws. By paying minimum wage and denying health care to many of its workers, and offloading much of that burden to state healthcare plans. By importing vast numbers of cheap goods made in countries with no labor laws, health laws, or environmental protections. Yes their workers are making money - usually pennies a day - but at what cost to their health and environment?

While you're one-stop shopping at WalMart - and others - you may save a modest amount of gas in not having to drive to other stores but consider where that store is - often built on agricultural land (prime land where I live) on the fringes of town, usually miles from public transport and sidewalks. How about if Home Depot actually implemented Low Impact Development guidelines on their car parks? Collected the rainwater from their roofs and used it to water their plants in their nurseries? Installed solar panels to offset some of their energy consumption? Built their structures on a human scale? Did some restorative landscaping? Cared about anything other than the next stockholders meeting? Yes in aggregate Home Depot sells the most FSC-certiified lumber but that's only because they have so many stores, most of which however do not stock FSC lumber on a regular basis. They're also selling it as a result of competition from local lumberyards (especially here in the Puget Sound area).

Dan boasts that WalMart has responded to public pressure by announcing recent environmental initiatives and offering health care. If the green plans do go ahead - and aren't just green washing - then it's a start. I'm more pessimistic about the health care - while the monthly cost is reasonable, the $1000 deductible is a major cost to someone earning just $16,000 per year. (Whereas Costco - against the wishes of financial advisors everywhere offers decent healthcare to all employees - and much better salaries too.)

Dan does make a valid point in that most shopping clubs do not offer grocery bags and cut down on packaging. This is good but let's not forget that this is to save them money, not the environment.

My biggest beef is with that oft repeated myth of economics - is that the cost savings we enjoy mean that we have more money to spend - and Dan suggests that we spend it on our favorite green cause. A recently released study has confirmed what many of us have feared - companies like WalMart not only drive down the salaries of their own serfs (aka associates) but local prevailing wages too. (Witness the Calif. grocery store strike.) Of course if you are in upper-middle to upper-class this may not affect you, but then you may not shop at WalMart anyway. But if we did shop there, and saved up the dollars that we save, could we offset the damage these stores cause? I really don't think so - best we might do is salvage a little bit of our conscience.

So I shall begin my critique with the one assertion I did agree with: "multi-outlet retailers simply aren't to blame for the car-oriented society in which we find ourselves."

While poor urban planning, greedy corporations, and insufficient government support is the main reason we have such a car-dependant society, major chain stores sure don't help solve that problem.

Now I shall continue with the points that I disagree with most.

"By offering only giant quantities, Sam's Club minimizes both shopping trips and packaging -- it doesn't even offer grocery bags."

It is not illogical to think that smaller businesses could do the same (some already do). When you buy produce directly from the source, from a farming co-operative for example, you avoid packaging and plastic bags, many deliver an assortment of vegetables to you in a box. Also, if you go to a market where produce is put in bags for you to take away, you can always bring your own, thus avoiding the unnecessary waste.

"Large chains are also easier to monitor -- and pressure...Criticism of Wal-Mart clearly has played a role in its much-ballyhooed recent initiatives to improve environmental performance and give more employees health insurance"

I would argue that this statement is misinformed. First of all, by putting so much control into the hands of one super store, you are actually facing a much more difficult entity to pressure than a mixture of smaller more independent businesses. You create a system with no checks and balances. For example, Wal-Mart wants to become the number one supplier of organic food. What does this mean for the organic industry? We have recently lost the battle to maintain the integrity of the organic standard, and that was a hard enough fight with the smaller of the "big boxes" against us, but when a super power like Wal-Mart controls the industry they set the standards. If Wal-Mart does not want strict organic standards, then there will be none. And that is just how the cookie crumbles in monopoly markets.

Now you might say, "but Wal-Mart would love to support tighter organic standards. They really are trying to green themselves! And they want to help their workers too!" If you believe this, then you are falling into the very trap that Wal-Mart's PR department has set. While Lee Scott was busy waxing philosophical about the federal minimum wage, a memo from the board was leaked that was brainstorming tactics to cut costs which included such things as hiring less full time staff and more part-time staff. As you may or may not know, this would allow them to get away with providing fewer benefits due to their employees' part-time status. Their constant contradictions between what they say and what they actually do leads me to believe that their stance is far from genuine.  

"And having money is what enables us to afford a cleaner, healthier environment."

We would not need money to clean up our environment if we did not destroy it in the first place.  

"We may not envy workers in developing countries who take factory jobs, but apparently they vastly prefer these to the rural life they are leaving behind in droves."

People flee from rural life because modern development has left them no choice. Their means of livelihood are taken away. And when you have little to no formal education, which many people who live in rural communities do not, this leaves little choice but to take the only jobs that will hire unskilled labor. (I say "formal" education as to not imply that the people who work in factories are uneducated, but simply to express that some may not posses the degree or background required to get better jobs). Perhaps you should take a trip to our very own border with Mexico and ask some of the people who work in the Maquiladores just how good they feel about their current situation.

"Economists have shown again and again that environmental conditions worsen as a country develops, only to improve again as it grows affluent enough to demand and afford cleaner water and air."

This is because our current model of development is completely flawed. You are totally leaving out the option for sustainable development as opposed to corporate backed unsustainable development that degrades the environment and society.

Unfortunately your idealistic view of how capitalism pulls the impoverished from the bondage of destitution is a bit misinformed. The reason we are able to get our $10 pair of jeans from Wal-Mart, or Target, etc, is because it costs them so little to produce. The fastest and most efficient way to reduce production costs is to do so at the expense of the workers and the environment. The reason that fair trade products cost so much, is less because it is a niche market (although that does play some part), and more because they are charging more money to support a higher standard of production.

I think the major flaw with your thought process is that you have accepted the current norm as the only realistic possibility, and not examined how that norm is a complete contradiction to a healthy and sustainable environment and population. It is not enough for big box businesses to adopt more environmentally friendly standards, what we really need to do is change the entire system as well as our outlook. The goals of a major money hungry corporation will never mesh with the real goals of the environmental and social justice movement. We need to consume less, not just change our production patterns, we need to push truly sustainable development practices, and yes, we need to support local business. Then, and only then, will we find a world that we can truly sustain for generations to come.


Leah Rinaldi

Am I alone here, or is this news to anyone else?

It's just that I'm so disappointed with my fellow journalists and writers when they engage in sophistry as Akst does, "making the worse side appear the better."  

It's not just that I disagree with Akst, it's his lack of seriousness, lack of analysis.  Has he thought deeply about this issue, or is he just glibly stringing together arguments he's heard?

Especially when a writer appears to be talented as Akst is, it is sad when he betrays his gift.

Bart
Energy Bulletin

Big Box retail is a global market model that only exists by displacing its transportation costs onto the car-dependent consumer and strengthens the automobile's monopoly on urban/suburban travel. The automobile presents a severe impediment to walking, bicyling and mass transit - a "Constitutional Inequity". The weak link in the 'transportation chain' of the global economy is the automobile.

An unrestrained global economy undermines the viability of all the smaller, more human scales of economy, local, regional, state and national economies. The global economy has become a juggernaut.

Yes, chains have been around for a century.  But they have grown dramatically in the last 15 years, amassing an unprecedented level of market power.  Take Lowe's and Home Depot for instance.  These were big chains in 1990 when they had a combined total of 450 stores.  Today, the two have 3,000 stores and capture more than 50 percent of all hardware and building supply sales nationally.  

Over that same period, the environmental impact of shopping has also increased dramatically.  And it is no coincidence.  

Suggesting that being able to get everything under one roof has reduced shopping trips completely ignores the actual data that the federal government has compiled on travel behavior.  We take the same number of shopping trips today as we did in 1990.  But the average length of trip has grown by about two miles.  Altogether, Americans are driving 95 billion miles more each year just for shopping.  

Yes, this is part of the larger problem of suburban sprawl.  But building larger boxes that entail more driving is also a core part of big-box retailers' growth strategy. They are not passive actors in this problem.  They purposefully build more and bigger stores than local market areas need:  they flood an area with excess capacity, which makes it easier to capsize smaller competitors.  The larger the store, the larger its market radius.  So, as the boxes get bigger and smaller retailers embedded in neighborhoods and town centers close, trip lengths increase.  

All of this excess building explains why the amount of retail store space per capita in the U.S. has doubled since 1990 (and it's not like we were "under retailed" then).  There's no sign of an end to the land binge either:  Wal-Mart plans to develop an additional 50,000 acres over the next decade.  

Do we need all of this additional retail space?  Hardly.  A staggering amount of it now sits vacant (as much as one billion square feet by some estimates).  But even idle, all of this pavement continues to send polluted runoff into our lakes and streams.  

Akst fails to note that global shipping is expanding much faster than the world's economic output, and shipping is now one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gases.

Poverty is indeed bad for the environment.  But it doesn't follow that wealth creation via any path is good for the environment.  Just look at us, leading the world on carbon emissions.

Lastly, regarding the bit about pressuring companies to do good: Since when, in a democracy, is it our roll as citizens to plead and cajole companies to do right by us?  We should be enacting better laws, which would be much easier if our political process had not be hijacked by huge global corporations.  


Stacy Mitchell is a senior researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Her book on big-box retail will be published by Beacon Press next year.

I hope the editors of Grist take notice that every comment on this ridiculous article was negative.  We don't want to read this anti-environmental crap here, we can't get away from it in our daily lives!

Jeff Hoffman

But to posit that chains might actually be good for the environment is to sink so low into the depths of denial that it's hard to know where to begin a serious rebuttal. If this was the April 1 issue I'd just ignore Daniel Akst's "The Wrong
Target" article.

Chains are indeed a logical outgrowth of the industrial mindset of efficiency over quality and mass production to increase profit as applied to retailing. However, since it is the mindset of the Industrial Growth Society that is destroying the planet and deadening the spirit, how can the Walmartization of the economy have anything good said about it?

Yes, it's true that chains can't be blamed for suburbia. But that hardly qualifies them for sainthood. Chains, almost by definition, kill innovation and personal creativity. The ability to buy everything under one roof (that's probably covering up what used to be a productive family farm) can hardly be claimed as a unique environmental benefit. Malls also provide one-stop shopping experiences, but so does a well-designed and vibrant downtown area. The one-stop shopping offered by Wal-Mart in particular is a toxic, plastic experience that embodies global environmental injustice at its worst.

Trying to put the onus on the retailers instead of the producers is also an ingenious way to shift blame. Yes, it is easier to picket Home Depot than a dozen local hardware stores and lumber yards. But this points to one of the things wrong with the environmental movement today: putting band-aids on symptoms and ignoring the cause. The lumber producers and importers are the ones who need to be targeted, so the local mom and pop shop isn't stuck in the hot seat in the first place as they try to provide what consumers want.

I don't have the time at the moment to dismantle Akst's fawning endorsement of a global free-market economy (others have already written books on the subject) so I'll only point out that if his premise of wealth sharing had a shred of truth to it, the American middle class wouldn't be disappearing, purchasing power wouldn't be decreasing, and the wealth gap wouldn't be steadily increasing. For some of the best counterpoints to Frankel's neoliberal economic apology, see anything by E. F. Schumacher, and Herman Daly's "Steady-State Economics" in particular.

And, oh yes, the chains really spread the wealth. In California, Wal-Mart spreads $86 million of it to the taxpayers of the state as Wal-Mart workers pick up their food stamps and health cards. To further say that workers in developing countries prefer working in toxic factories to subsistence farming and a healthy community life totally ignores the fact that they no longer have any choice in the matter as multinational corporations steal their land and American farm subsidies and trade policies make their own produce unprofitable.

The conclusion that the automobile and sprawl are here to stay is also unfounded. People are starting to wake up to the total bankruptcy of this myth, even as free-market cheerleaders and infinite growth economists continue to push this fantasy.

Peace _on_ Earth requires peace _with_ Earth.

Hated the article; loved the comments!

The more productive route is to deal with them where they are (actively demanding things like locally grown products, organic products, unions or higher wages), or - better yet but less common - stop them from showing up all together.  I am encouraged by both these options, as Wal-Marts are being challenged all over my state, and the hometown, large grocery store now has an organic produce section.

Even if all of us did our big box shopping in fuel-saving, once-a-month increments, big box retailers would STILL be bad for the environment in terms of transportation because the supply lines are so long. Tomatoes from Chile or (in season) an organic grower in your county? Clothing from China or a manufacturer in your own state? The ten or fifteen miles of driving I might save by doing all my shopping at Wal-Mart pales in the face of the 4,000-mile trip everything in the store made to get there.

Second, people "seem to prefer" working in overseas sweatshops to self- and community-sustaining agriculture? That's why people work in sweatshops? There are so many things wrong with this assertion I don't even know where to start. Please, Mr. Akst, do some reading about global economics and the way rich countries and their corporations have stolen land, water, and resources from what used to be sustainable local economies all over the world before you make such a wide-eyed, naive assertion. And please, Grist, don't let Akst publish another single thing until he demonstrates that he's read at least five books about the realities of global economics. Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano (a classic) would be a great place to start. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins would be a good supplement. After that, make him do his own research.

A better environment through more wealth...  Natives to the land begging to be sent to the factory...  The the necessity of "inevitable" forms of destruction as a precursor to any environmental and economical utopia...  Greater ease in monitoring large corporations...  The unfortunate side affect of massive parking lots and big box structure, merely rooted in aesthetics...

Mr. Akst, where are the numbers for any of these assumptions?  There are just too many rebuttals begging to happen, and fortunately many of you above successfully did just that.  

But still - oy vey!