Stone's and Gann's comments help explain what I encounter during my trip to Boston. After the Superstore Sprawl conference is over, I take the opportunity to check out some nearby towns that have had conflicts over mega-retailers moving in. It's Sunday, and I'm in Quincy, a suburb a few miles south of Boston, at the future home of a contested Wal-Mart. The site is just flat ground at this point, with nothing but a rusty front-end loader indicating future development. Across the road is a condominium complex.
"It's going up and I think it'll help out," says a real estate agent. She's there to meet a prospective buyer at the condo development. "You know, the town was going downhill, practically deserted. But it's coming back the past few years. People squawk a lot, but things usually work out OK. My husband and I both think it's good when [superstores] come in. But then again, growth is good for me. And for my husband. He's a contractor, so he was really happy when Home Depot came to town in '92. The smaller stores charge an arm and a leg for a few hammers and nails."
Across town, the Home Depot parking lot is about three-quarters full. The store is truly gigantic--it's like walking into an airplane hangar. It is packed with customers and salespeople, with the sights and sounds of heavy business: registers ringing, P.A. announcements, calls for price checks, the hum of customers' conversation.
Behind the service counter are two workers whom I'll call Judy and Janice. They are adamant about the benefits of Home Depot. "We both used to work at Grossman's [another big chain store] up the expressway," says Judy. "But it charges too much for everything. It's going under."
"When we heard they were opening up the Home Depot," says Janice, "we applied right away. This is a better store. It's cheaper and it's better. It's helped a lot of people." They won't discuss pay, but they assure me they are getting a better deal here than they were at their previous jobs.
In the parking lot, I almost bump into a man and his son loading floor tiles into a truck. "See these?" he says, pointing to the tiles. "These cost about half of what they are most other places. I wouldn't even be redoing the bathroom floor otherwise." The amount of extra activity generated by lower prices is worth reflecting on. Most of the anti-superstore activists are zero-summers of one stripe or another, claiming that there is a fixed amount of economic activity in a given area. But it's true that as costs fall, people buy more, remodel more, go out more.
But I am skeptical of my experience so far, if only because it all too perfectly confirms the pro-superstore theory. A real estate agent, superstore workers, and customers--this is a self-selecting sample. Of course these people would like superstores. So after Home Depot, I drive down the road a mile to Curry Hardware, a small store squeezed into a corner lot so cramped that it's tough getting in and out of the parking area. These people, I figure, should have a different take.
But the three salesmen I talk with inside are having none of it. "You know, when Home Depot opened up, we were really worried," says one. "They made us change our attitude. Now, we work to serve the customers better."
I mention a banner hanging at Home Depot, one boasting "Nobody Beats Our Service." "Yeah, right," the salesman laughs. "They can't compete with us on service." Besides training the help to be more responsive to customer needs, he says, the owner opened up on Sundays for the first time and varied the store's product line to stay competitive. "We get some customers who see us on the way to Home Depot, and we get some who get tired of Home Depot." Overall, he says, sales are up, and his boss has even added employees.
After Quincy, I'm off to Avon, further south of Boston and home to an actual Wal-Mart. The lot is about half full, which strikes me as skimpy for the Christmas season. A huge U.S. flag blows in the wind and a banner stretched across the building spells out Wal-Mart's basic formula for success: "We Sell for Less, Satisfaction Guaranteed." The chain seems big on banners. Inside, there's one over the checkout lines proclaiming, "You Are the Boss!" Another proclaims that the store is hiring and paying "competitive" wages.
There is, it seems, everything here: clothing, books and magazines, toys, gifts galore, hardware, and automotive products. An item I'm interested in doesn't have a price tag on it, so I ask a saleswoman to help me out. "How do you like working here?" She tells me that it's just fine. She had been unemployed before, and the hourly wage of $5.75 pays better than her last job did. She puts in about 20 hours a week on a flexible schedule, which works out since she has a child and does babysitting on the side as well.
In the checkout line, the woman in front of me asks me to move ahead of her. "I don't want my friend to see what I'm buying her," she explains. When I ask her if she likes Wal-Mart, she nods vigorously. She doesn't have a car, so she doesn't come here that often. "But when I do," she says, "I pick up everything I want for a long time. It certainly made Christmas shopping easier--and cheaper."
Who should decide where that woman can and can't shop? The community, say the anti-superstore folks. But kicking decisions up to the community level always sends a shiver down my spine. After all, who gets to decide what exactly the "community" is, much less who should speak for it and where its best interests lie? Communitarianism always assumes that a group has a collective will somehow at odds with the choices made by individuals expressing themselves through voluntary activities, associations, and transactions.
In Greenfield, the townspeople employed that almost mythic mechanism of direct participation--the town vote. What could be more democratic, more attuned to vox populi? Do we want a Wal-Mart or not? Let's put it to a vote. While such direct democracy seems more American than apple pie, it actually contains the seeds of mob tyranny. If the people get to OK every new enterprise, could they legitimately vote an existing business out of town? Or an unpopular family? Once the democratic process is extended to private-sector issues, it becomes very difficult to define meaningful limits.
James Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel prize winner in economics, is critical of winner-take-all approaches that, by design, frustrate individual preferences. When Greenfield, for instance, held its referendum on Wal-Mart, only one outcome was certain: A segment of the town would not be able to satisfy its preference, either for having the store or not.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
nfl jerseys|11.17.10 @ 1:17AM|#
chdd
سهمي|12.11.10 @ 4:39PM|#
asgasg