The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [89]
However, as the online environmental magazine TreeHugger points out, details matter when evaluating today’s online and in-person shopping options. If you take public transit, bike, or walk to your local bookstore, it’s definitely a better choice than online shopping. They recommend shopping online only if “you live in the suburbs, or are surrounded by Mega-Marts, have to drive more than six or eight miles each way to go shopping, are scrupulous about bundling online orders, and choose ground shipping rather than overnight air.”60
Then there’s the whole issue of the digitization of books and devices like Amazon’s Kindle. While there’s no question that paperless books will slow the destruction of forests, this technological development means yet another electronic gadget on the market. And as we’ve seen with every other kind of electronics out there—be it cell phones, computers, cameras, what have you—that will likely mean a new version every few years, with the attendant mining of minerals, toxics in and toxics out during production, and ever higher mountains of e-waste.
Myself, I’m a fan of the following model: Local bookstores that I can walk or ride my bike to, with a friendly face behind the counter who can personally recommend titles to me. Once I’m finished with a book, I lend it to everyone I know, if I can recommend it; otherwise I Freecycle it (Freecycle is a 7-million-strong online network of people who post Stuff—and get Stuff—for free, in order to reduce waste61) so it finds a second life with someone else. My ten-year-old daughter churns through books very quickly, so every so often, we invite her friends over for a “book swap brunch” to empty out our overflowing shelves, get some new ones for free, and keep building community. The leftovers from the brunch (the books, not the waffles) get donated to local schools. And then there are libraries—in every place I’ve lived, the library has been one of my favorite places to find books, as well as to meet neighbors, attend public seminars, weigh in on community issues, and sometimes even hear live music. Amazon may be easy and fast and impressive in its scale, but it just doesn’t provide those quality-of-life extras.
Wal-Mart
Almost 20 percent of the consumer electronics purchased in the United States is sold by Wal-Mart,62 so it’s not unreasonable to imagine that the laptop I described in the last chapter was distributed through the Godzilla of retail.
If H&M’s special powers are speed and trendiness (in addition to rockbottom prices), and Amazon’s is unlimited choice (and lower than cover prices), Wal-Mart’s is a combination of reach, breadth, and low prices. Wal-Mart is truly vast—in comparison, pretty much every other retailer in the world is a tiny pipsqueak. In fact, you could lump together Gap Inc., Target, Sears, Costco, JCPenney, Best Buy, Staples, Toys “R” Us, Nordstrom, Blockbuster, and Barnes & Noble, and all of them combined don’t add up to the scope of Wal-Mart,63 with its revenues of $401 billion in 2008.64 It’s one of the top economies in the world, bigger than the GDP of countries like Austria, Chile, and Israel and one of China’s top-ten trading partners, ahead of the United Kingdom or Germany.65
There are more than eight thousand Wal-Mart stores worldwide, over four thousand of them in the United States, each of which averages nearly three football fields in size.66 Stacy Mitchell, author of Big-Box Swindle, comments that “with 600 million square feet of floor space in the United States, Wal-Mart could