The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [92]
I mean really: consider Wal-Mart’s boasting that “by reducing the packaging on one of our patio sets we were able to use four hundred fewer shipping containers to deliver them.”87 How many shipping containers must be required to ship the patio furniture around the world if there was an excess of four hundred containers just from tightening up some of the packaging? There’s something wrong with a distribution system that constantly ships everything from T-shirts to patio furniture halfway around the world. In the era of increasing resource scarcity and climate change, this model just doesn’t make sense.
Superstores: Superbad
Wal-Mart is the epitome of the larger phenomenon of the rise of big-box stores. Although maybe you can hardly remember—and certainly kids today can’t imagine—a time when stores like Target, Costco, and Wal-Mart didn’t exist at every turn, they are a relatively new phenomenon that really only took off in the 1980s. Chain stores like Woolworth’s started in the late nineteenth century, followed by stores like Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. By 1929 chains like these controlled 22 percent of the retail market. But by the mid-1950s they’d hardly grown, to less than 24 percent. That was partially because many people boycotted them, especially in the wake of the stock market collapse, believing (correctly) that chains drove down wages and undermined democracy by concentrating power in the hands of a few.88
But then in the 1950s came the explosion of suburban homes and with them the development of suburban shopping malls. Taxpayers paid hundreds of billions of dollars for the interstate highways that made this new style of life possible, while banks favored new suburban developments over established neighborhoods in their lending practices. Then, in 1954, Congress changed the tax code to make it more profitable for developers to create shopping malls, basically making a tax shelter out of shopping mall construction.89 As Stacy Mitchell writes in Big-Box Swindle, 6 million square feet of shopping centers were constructed in 1953; just three years later that figure had increased by 500 percent; and over the next twenty years, eighteen thousand shopping centers were built across the United States.90 And the owners of these shopping centers often preferred to make chain stores their tenants (considered a better bet for a landlord), some actually going so far as to bar independently owned stores.91
Today, cashing in on local municipalities’ eagerness to have one in their community, big-box stores receive local and state subsidies and tax breaks. Local municipalities hope that having a local big-box store will increase economic growth, provide new jobs, and boost tax revenues, but unfortunately that isn’t always borne out. Instead, big-boxes siphon money out of the local economy so those lucky Walton family members (and other chains’ shareholders) can acquire another private jet for their extensive fleet and build a new wing on their nuclear-disaster-ready underground fortress (it’s true).92 Big-box payroll typically accounts for less than ten cents of every dollar spent at a given store,93 and, in a domino effect, their low wages (16 percent less for Wal-Mart workers than the average retail worker in 2008, for example94) help suppress the wages of retail workers everywhere. Meanwhile, big-box chains have massive budgets and even specially trained response teams to counter any attempts of workers to unionize and improve their situations. According to WakeUpWalmart.com, the company has even created “A Manager’s Toolbox to Remaining Union Free.” The toolbox lists warning signs of potential organizing activities such as “frequent meetings at associates’ homes” and “associates who are never seen together start talking or associating with each other.”95
Because of their size, big-box stores and other chains are able to hold prices artificially low for as long as it takes to drive local independently