On Saturday, April 5, 2003, at 10:42 PM, Chris Johnson wrote:
Dyna wrote: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.
Chris, I note you're posting from the chaska,org domain. Chaska is now a suburb, and suburbs are the natural habitat of the big box. This means that big boxes are the reality in your community. Perhaps you're in an alternate reality?
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.
Most of us can't just walk a block to a store- they tend to be farther away. And yes, the small specialised retailers you speak of will always outnumber the big boxes. They survive by filling the niches the big boxes can't fill.
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.
Economies of scale effect costs all through the supply chain. For example, if your "neighborhood" grocery store has no loading dock and cannot accomodate semis, distribution costs will be 3 to 4 times higher than if it had a proper loading dock that can accomodate semis.
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?
You making the questionable theoretical assumption that if the big boxes did not exist we would not need roads, The big boxes tend to cluster around the roads, so the capital investments to serve them are actually rather small. The most wasteful big boxes are the new car dealerships, and GM or Ford won't give you a dealership unless you're locating along a freeway.
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.
But not the most desirable places to shop. I am forced to do much of my shopping in the adjoining suburbs to North Minneapolis and frequently see my Northside neighbors there. We Northsiders either can't afford or can't find what we need in the way of groceries, building materials, or whatever in Minneapolis and are forced to shop in the suburbs and their big boxes.
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.
There is still a place for the neighborhood hardware store- if I need just a small inexpensive part it's not worth running all the way out to Fleet Farm or Menards (Homer's is useless).
Chris Johnson Fulton
Thank you Chris. I note the near religious zeal with which some folks have responded to my post on big boxes. I'm no great fan of big boxes, I'm just stating the facts- the big box is a "disruptive technology" that will thrive for some time to come. In fact, the big box is evolving and will if anything expand it's range- a CUB could easily be compressed to a one acre footprint with rooftop or basement parking, better inventory control, etc.. Put a traditional exterior on it and it will look "new urbanist" to a fault- and be hard for neighborhoods to resist.
hanging on in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
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