Given our druthers most of us would prefer to see clusters of pedestrian friendly mainstreet style shops and stores. Sadly, most of us can't afford what they'd have to charge us for goods and goddess knows where we'd park if these were the only type of retailers available.
Big box retailers are designed more by economies of scale than corporate conspiracy. To keep shipping costs down an efficent retailer needs to have a loading dock that can accomodate tractor trailer trucks. To attract a critical mass of customers a retailer has to offer a large storeful of items to choose from. And of course parking space for a hundred or so customers and employees cars.
It sounds to me as if you are writing about some alternate reality to mine.
In the city and metro area where I live, the number of small, neighborhood stores far outnumber the big box stores. Most of them have been in business for years. Even more interesting is that their prices are roughly competitive with the big box stores, too, especially when you factor in the cost and time of having to drive to the big box, instead of walking up the block to the local store.
There is such a thing as economy of scale, no doubt about it. It has a far greater effect at the production (manufacturing) end of the process than it does at the retail end.
What passes for economy of scale is often more a case of externalities being paid by the tax payers, rather than by the big box retailer as they ought to be. Among them are automotive traffic considerations, surface water run-off and the contamination of same, impact on neighbors (noise, light, traffic) and their property values. I can't count the number of times that cities I've lived in have had to build new roads, new intersections and new traffic signals to handle the traffic from one big box opening -- and the developers never pay for it. How many small retailers have ever gotten government development support, such as TIF?
A healthy big city is made up of healthy neighborhoods, and each of which is much like a small town, with its own services, shops, schools and churches. Minneapolis and St. Paul were decidely that way until the 1950s. Parts of both cities still are. Generally, they're the most desirable places to live in those cities.
If your idea of improving the city is drop big box stores into each area
so the residents can "afford" to shop, I don't want to live in that city. You can take my neighborhood hardware store (Settergren's, same
location for 40+ years) when you can pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Chris Johnson Fulton
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