[Vision2020] Walmart

[joekc at adelphia.net]

Great post, Bruce!

One point that you mention below is related to a point that I was trying to make with yesterday's post. Sure we 'vote with our feet' but our votes often have consequences that are unintended. Perhaps you like Paradise Ridge and promise to continue to go there long after the Super Wal-Mart enters town. But once you start buying your food, clothing, gas, tires, and home supplies at the Super Wal-Mart you realize that it is too inconvenient to truck on down to Paradise Ridge, so you end up buying your CD's there, too. This is why places go out of business and towns change when a Super Wal-Mart moves in. It is not that people intend for that to happen, it just does. Sure they vote for it with there feet but it is not a reflective, conscious choice but a consequence of convenience.

I'm not asking folks to buy their CD's at Paradise Ridge -- though it is a great CD store, with a much better collection of jazz, for instance, than any other store in town. It isn't about my personal choices but about personal, individual choice in general. And it is about long-term reflective choices instead of quick unreflective ones. 

The point is that we need to reflect now on what changes a Supercenter will have on our town and whether or not those are the changes that we truly desire. What are the stores where you currently shop and what motivation would you have to continue going there once low-cost and convenience moves to town? I doubt that low-cost and convenience are the most important values for any of us but once the Super Wal-Mart moves in those are the values that your feet will be voting for. And in the process you will turn Moscow into Anytown, USA, e.g., all of the other places you chose not to live.

Joe Campbell

---- Bruce and Jean Livingston <jeanlivingston at turbonet.com> wrote: 
> Jeff, 
> 
> I agree with what you say about the simplicity of your cash register model -- consumers must want it because they are spending money there -- but I think you are leaving something out.  
> 
> Sure, consumers may support Wal-Mart with their dollars, but the community may be bearing other costs that are not factored into the simple buy-sell relationship with the consumers that you describe.  Local taxpayers have a different relationship with Wal-Mart, as does our local non-profit hospital and the citizens who have to navigate through the increased traffic generated by a Supercenter.  The affected economic and other relationships of all community members, not just the shoppers, ought to be equally significant to our decision on whether and on what terms to recruit Wal-Mart.  
> 
> We ought to protect those other relationships through a Big Box ordinance.  We should do so by requiring Wal-Mart (or any such large retailer that wishes to come here) to cover all of its "external" costs, those costs that are more typically dumped on the community Wal-Mart "serves," such as the increased demands on police protection, water consumption, traffic and related infrastructure changes, sewer expenses, uninsured medical expenses (that will be borne by Gritman), lighting poluution, etc.  
> 
> Nor are all retailers equal.  The costs to the community of having a particular retailer are not the same.  
> 
> In Butch Alford's talk to the LEDC today, he answered a Walter Steed question, something about "Valley Vision" (Lewiston-Clarkson's equivalent to the LEDC) and its experience with (and the desirability/value of) big box retail to the community, by noting that all retailers are not the same and that Costco pays very well -- real living wages -- and is an extremely generous member of the Valley community.  I believe he was pointedly distinguishing between Wal-Mart and Costco, in that instance, as two entirely different quality citizens.  The "citizenship" factors of our corporate big box retailers are not measured merely by the transactions at the cash register.  The various other factors that result from their entry in our community should all be part of the package of issues that our community considers and pursues, by requiring more from any big box retailer that seeks to open a new store in town than that they simply pay their property taxes.
>  
> Now, I do not support drafting a law peculiar to Wal-Mart, even though I find its practices, as I understand them, offensive.  But it seems to me that we as a community ought to write our laws in a way that we get retailers who are willing to meet our reasonable but high standards.  Frankly, given the seeming desirability of our community, we ought to be able to extract some real benefit to the community in return for the right to locate here and saddle us with traffic congestion, etc.   Among those benefits imposed on/extracted from any such new retailer ought to be: a living wage, for example; and substantially more green space in the 1000 space parking lot to avoid polluting Paradise Creek while also enabling better water recharge of the limited aquifer; as well as architectural and lighting design standards; guarantees not to leave buildings vacant; etc. etc.  
> 
> Another angle that I have not seen discussed is on another of your favorite issues: consumer choice.  I fear that a Super Wal-Mart will reduce that choice, not only by the gloom and doom tales of a shuttered Main Street, but by the simpler difference that Wal-Mart's preemptive, predatory opening of a Supercenter is seemingly designed to keep out other retailers.  
> 
> Isn't consumer choice enabled by doing our best to "hire", ok, attract, better citizen, retailing neighbors than Wal-Mart, an admittedly "naughty," law-violating, discriminatory corporate behemoth?  We have a Wal-Mart.  Isn't consumer choice greater if we retain the Wal-Mart we have and encourage a different choice to locate here?  And if that new store, while offering a different product line, is a better citizen of the community and foists fewer external costs on the community, are we not better off?  We have a relatively small population, and why wouldn't we want to encourage someone else in the retail industry who (unlike Wal-Mart, if the literature is true) is willing to pay living wages, if we choose to make that part of the ground rules to play here, for example?  
> 
> Everyone seems to assume that we will lose our Wal-Mart to Pullman, which I think is absurd.  We already HAVE a Wal-Mart, which is a point that Steve Cooke left out of his presentation the other night at the MCA forum on the economic benefits of Wal-Mart.  Apparently, the powers that be in Benton Arkansas are making so much money on their 90,000 sq. ft. store in Moscow, Idaho that they feel the upgrade to a 228,000 sq. ft. store here is a wise decision in their economic interest.  I have to believe that if they decide not to meet our requirements under a Big Box ordinance, and therefore choose not to expand, that they will still retain their "grandfathered" and profitable current store, rather than abdicate the market.
> 
> I encourage us all to think how best we might write a Big Box ordinance that will deal with the costs of these new stores which seemingly wish to locate here.  
> 
> And until we have a big box ordinance "with teeth" in place, unlike the emergency ordinance under which Wal-Mart seeks to play, I suggest to our City Council that you deny the necessary re-zone at this time, because it is not in our long term interest to allow such a significant new addition to our community under a vague, rushed, and temporary, "emergency big box ordinance" that Wal-Mart with its huge economic power can litigate to death until we cave to the expense of litigation and let it have its way.  I think the existence of an unsatisfactory regulatory mechanism for the desired use, along with avoidance of litigation of an ambiguous emergency ordinance is reason enough to deny the re-zone.
> 
> And frankly, I don't understand why we would cut-off from expansion our Alturas technology park.  Alturas was built at our expense for the attraction of living wage jobs.  Why should we limit its potential expansion and simultaneously hand that infrastructure to a new Big Box, especially one that is a less than stellar corporate citizen, when the obvious place for Big Box zoning in our community is along Hwy 95, to the south of town near JJ's?
> 
> Bruce Livingston
> 
> 
> 
> 
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: Jeff Harkins 
>   To: Shelly ; vision2020 at moscow.com 
>   Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2006 3:53 PM
>   Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Walmart
> 
> 
>   Phil, you have a very interesting view of the economics of retailing/merchandising.
> 
>   In a free-enterprise, free market economy, businesses survive or die by counting the votes (spell that dollars!) of their customers.  The model is simple - if you don't like a store don't shop there.  If enough customers shop at a store, it will do well - but you still don't have to go there.  Obviously a lot of people shop at the Moscow Walmart - the store is quite successful, customers have voted with their dollars and Moscow seems to have survived the current Walmart Store.  I have lived here almost 30 years now and the shopping in Moscow has never provided as much choice or diversity.  Where is the devastation in this picture?
> 
>   Why do you think you should be able to dictate where people shop?  Sounds like you are advocating the good old "company store" model where you are the company.
> 
>   I wonder how you would feel about Albertson's placing a store here?  How would you feel about Safeway offering gasoline? How would you respond to Target or Fred Meyer or Walgreens locating here?  Would you support a Lowe's or Home Depot or 84 Lumber?  Would you support TriState expanding their limited food offerings to a full-fledged grocery store?
> 
>   I am not trying to be argumentative - I am really trying to understand where you are coming from.
> 
>   At 11:57 AM 1/11/2006, you wrote:
> 
>     I know the best way in the world to satisfy the majority, where we are in a democracy, where the majority rules and the rest of us just grin and bear it. I think Walmart proposal should be put to the vote of the people and Walmart should pay for it. Since it will be financially devastating to our community.
>      
>     BJ who understands economics has warned everybody of the devastation that is about to become. If Walmart does what it plans on doing. I have said similar things. Charts, graphs, factual information also says the same thing. I think us as the people of Moscow should have the right to vote in our own death warrant.
>      
>     -Phil Roderick
>       
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