November 30, 2006

By CYDNEY GILLIS
Staff Reporter

Author Stacy Mitchell has some advice for the Seattle City Council as it contemplates raising building heights to allow two big-box stores — a Target and a Lowe’s — to go in just south of downtown: Don’t do it.

Big boxes and mega-malls don’t add business and jobs, Mitchell says; they merely steal from local retailers that they put out of business.

In the case of a 10-acre “lifestyle mall” planned at the site of a Goodwill on South Dearborn St., Seattle activists told the City Council this week at a public hearing that it could kill dozens of Vietnamese-owned shops and markets in nearby Little Saigon.

Mitchell is the author of Big-Box Swindle (Beacon Press), which she is scheduled to read from on Dec. 5 in Seattle. After researching the subject for the 32-year-old Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Mitchell details the negative economic, social and environmental impact of big boxes, along with case studies of local communities that succeeded in repelling supersize developments.

One way is to pass city ordinances capping store sizes, which Mitchell points out Port Townsend did to limit the size of a Hollywood Video on its main street. Another way is to put pressure on developers: In Portland, OR, activists succeeded in getting a Home Depot cut out of a development that was all but a done deal.

Some states are also considering outlawing the huge tax subsidies that municipalities give big boxes in the mistaken impression, Mitchell says, that the stores will boost tax revenue and jobs. Not only don’t they— more local retail jobs are lost, she says — but the public pays for mall sewer lines, roads, and freeway exchanges that promote more driving and pollution.

“When you add up all the costs, you’re lucky if you end up in the plus column,” Mitchell said in a phone interview,” and you’re “not very much in the plus column,” .

In total dollars, Wal-Mart tops the list in getting hundreds of millions in tax breaks to add stores. But Wal-Mart isn’t alone: Mitchell cites examples of Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Issaquah-based Costco reaping anywhere from $1 million to $10 million in public subsidies for new stores.

City officials often say the stores represent progress and growth, but the author counters that U.S. retail growth has far outpaced consumer spending, pushing the number of square feet of retail up from 19 feet in 1990 to 38 feet per person today.

But, “Building a Target store isn’t going to get people to buy more gallons of milk,” Mitchell said. “All you do is redivide the existing pie” — with 85 cents of every dollar spent at a big box leaving the local economy.

Mitchell calls this a new colonialism that sucks money and jobs out of a community, and not just in retail. Local retailers use local accountants, lawyers, and suppliers who lose business. With big boxes now manufacturing their own store brands in Asia, they also have the power to force U.S. manufacturers to do the same. Otherwise, they risk losing shelf space in America’s largest chains.

Mitchell says this threat caused 25,000 jobs to be lost at Levi Strauss, 4,000 jobs at Black & Decker, and 650 jobs at a Huffy bicycle plant. Such clout, she argues, has contributed to the decline of America’s wages and middle class, in turn forcing people to shop for bargains at the big boxes.

“We’re really on this terrible cycle,” Mitchell says. “The more they grow, the more they undermine the economy and the more desperate and impoverished we become.”

[Event]

Author Stacy Mitchell will read from Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Business on Tues., Dec. 5, at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., Seattle, (206) 624-6600.

[Resources]

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance offers strategies for beating big-box development at www.bigboxtoolkit.com.