On Wednesday, June 25, 2003, at 12:35 PM, Garwood, Robin wrote:
First of all, Dyna, your application of the word "yuppie" as a pejorative to everyone who shops at a local co-op not only crosses the line to inflammatory rhetoric, in my view, but is also quite false. It's still eminently possible to buy cheap food at North Country - buy your food in bulk. There are plenty of people of quite limited means who go the co-op route. They have certain commitments/convictions you seem not to have - which is fine, don't get me wrong. It's not fine for you to call them names for following their beliefs.
The food at the perverse co-ops we have here is so expensive you need to have the income of a Young Urban Professional to afford it. Or else a yuppie wannabe that lives in a cheap apartment in the 'hood and can't afford a car because they spend so much of their meager income at the co-op.
in my opinion, big boxes are a facet of an unsustainable growth / land use / energy use pattern that we will, at some point, be forced to revisit, much as we're having to revisit and at least partially undo our 50-year experiment with road-only infrastructure.
First, lets define big box as a building with a footprint of over a hectare. The Sears building and Dayton's (I refuse to call it Marshall Field's) downtown store thusly qualify as big boxes. Both of these buildings pretty much predated mass automobile use and suburbanization. So it is proven that the big box can survive without the automobile, in fact Sear's was canabalized by suburban Sear's.
The less wholly Minneapolis embraces the big box, in my opinion, the more flexible we are, the more easily we may resist major problems if the big box trend is reversed.
The big boxes are here, deal with it. We cannot legally harass them in hopes they'll leave.
For instance, what might happen if the third-world economies producing many of our retail goods are allowed to develop to the point where they refuse to work for peanuts - either due to the gradual increase in living standard promised by free-marketeers or by a local revolt against the export economy? If Walmart cannot push its prices down by pushing its suppliers' prices down because said suppliers' bottom line rises due to fair pricing for labor, can Walmart still function? Will the current retail system hold up to such a challenge?
You underestimate the big boxes ability to adapt, and labor cost increases will affect WalMarts competitors too.
b) Given that avenues of local, small business are a major factor in the success stories of the most successful areas in the Twin Cities (and many other cities), we should do our best to even the playing field between local small business and multinational corporations. This means, at very least, not giving the latter taxpayer-funded incentives to locate in our communities. If Targets and Rainbows are truly more efficient, better businesses, let them take care of themselves. If Jerry's turns around a few years from now and demands a handout to stay, we must allow the "free" market to rule.
None of these businesses are currently asking us for a handout, and it is not the business of Minneapolis to favor small business over large.
This all leads me to the most fundamental doubt I have about your - and other big box boosters' - view of economics: that size is always better. There are benefits to bigness, no doubt. But I'm not convinced that these benefits have as much to do with "efficiency" as they do with economic power. Walmart has the power to force its suppliers to lower their prices by threatening to cut them out. Walmart has the power to squelch competition by losing money at a given store at a rate it can absorb, due to its size. Neither of these are examples of an "efficient" use of resources; they are examples of the bullying of the weak by the powerful.
What you are talking about monopoly abuse of power and I abhor it as much as you.
Major corporations have, historically, used their resources in quite inefficient ways. Examples (Enron, Kmart, etc.) surely come to mind. Think of the loop between the producer of a material good, the retailer, and the consumer (who, in classical capitalist thought, is her/himself a producer) as an electrical circuit. Which system allows more "current" to escape, the one shifting voltage to a plug it will be siphoned off by power-guzzling appliances like CEO Salary and Advertising Budget, or the one with a small, steady rate of loss along the transmission line? I'm not sure there's a "factual" answer to this question - especially if one reduces the loss in the latter system by shortening the transmission lines in question.
However, the percentage of revenue going to CEO pay in a small business could easily be much higher in a small business. You also forget that economies of scale in larger business tend to reduce administrave costs.
In short, modern centralized economic systems may have the appearance of efficiency while paradoxically being the most wasteful resource distribution scheme in history.
One of the reasons the big box is such a disruptive technology is it's distribution efficency. The ability to take in 20 ton loads of inventory versus a ton or less for a small business greatly boosts distribution efficencies. Once unloaded, the goods can be quickly distributed by forklift about a single floor big box instead of laborously dragged up and down stairs in a traditional store.
"Being that your cite [sic] is 13 years old that means we now have 4 million
or so farm workers with said illness?"
The borders to this country - as I'm sure you know - are a little bit porous. New sub-poverty migrant workers are available to replace those who die or leave the agriculture sector. Your attempt at refutation here was pretty weak: no counter evidence, just a sarcastic tone.
Even if we include undocumented immigrant workers the numbers still don't pass inspection.
One anecdote, which I will counterbalance with one of my own: when I worked at a co-op, (Seward) I received health care. My wages, while not stratospheric, were by far not the lowest I've had. I know folks in co-ops who make a very decent living - rivaling my current 28K. Perhaps not enough to raise a family of four, but how is that different from the situation at Cub?
Peanuts, and how about a pension?
"Some of us work nights."
Your basic approach to this debate has been to paint yourself as the prototypical Northsider. Are you trying to claim no Northsiders would be interested in Friday night entertainment?
We Northsiders have a well earned working class heritage. We don't need southsiders and Northeasters to come up here an minister to us cultural heathens. BTW, we have a culture already... to us the old Farmer's Market is a historic site where our worker's blood was spilled, and we don't complain about trains, except when they're late. If you worked for a railroad or dray line like many Northsiders you spent your friday nights at work, if not the whole weekend. BTW, we know how to sing too.
Do you really want those of us who do not live on the Northside to eschew spending our money on the Northside?
Given the lack of places to spend it here it wouldn't make much difference.
To carefully keep out of your neighborhood? How many of your Northside neighbors trying to improve your community take this stand towards other Minneapolitans? My guess is not a majority. In my opinion, it would be unfortunate if your view was shared. As a Seward resident, I welcome the input, help, and retail dollars of residents every other neighborhood. When outside of my neighborhood, I do my best to find cool local businesses to support (Joe's Market in Como comes to mind).
I'd love to be able to shop in Minneapolis, but I often can't afford too. That's why I and many of my neighbors have to shop in the suburbs. And often times we can't even find what we need here- how many new car dealerships are left here?
Really, though. The concern you express most often on this list centers around crime. Would you advocate a system under which the Northside funded its own cops, without help from other Minneapolis taxpayers? Or are there limitations to how far we should "bugger > off"?
Strangely enough local control of the police might actually work better. For example, downtown gets a huge police presence despite having a small population. That said, the shopping behavior of Minneapolitans cannot save our city- the much larger decisions made at the state and federal capitols have a much larger effect.
hanging on in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.)
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