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The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition (Bk Currents) - Softcover

Shuman, Michael H.

 
9781576754665: The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition (Bk Currents)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1576754669 ISBN 13: 9781576754665
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Bigger isn’t always better. Contrary to popular belief, small, locally owned businesses often out-perform their “big box” and Fortune 500 competition—both in outright profitability and the value they bring to consumers, workers, and communities. Unlike mega-stores and multi-national chains like Wal-Mart, these small businesses stimulate the economy by buying supplies and services locally, adapt to (rather than fight against) higher local environmental and labor regulations, and stick around for many years, often many generations.

The Small-Mart Revolution details dozens of specific strategies small and home-based businesses are using to successfully out-compete the world’s largest companies. And it shows how consumers, investors, policymakers, and organizers can revitalize their own communities by supporting local businesses.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Shuman, an attorney, economist, and writer, is Vice President for Enterprise Development for the Training & Development Corporation (TDC) of Bucksport, Maine. Since publication of his previous book, Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in the Global Age (Routledge, 2000), he has been considered one of the nation’s fore- most experts on locally owned business.
After growing up in the suburbs in Long Island and St. Louis, Shuman entered Stanford University, where he received a bachelors’ degree with distinction in international relations and economics in 1979 and a law degree in 1982. In 1980 he won First Prize in the Rabinowitch Essay Competition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on “How to Prevent Nuclear War.”

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FROM WAL-MART TO SMALL-MART

Nobody’s perfect. Today is the one day each year I permit myself to be a petty thief. As my childhood shoplifter buddies used to explain, there’s a thrill in being bad, plus there’s cheap stuff to be had. Let me clarify—I don’t plan on breaking any laws. My indulgence is perfectly legal, and many would even consider it smart shopping. But I shouldn’t mince words. What I’m planning on doing ought to be called “community lifting.” I’m going to make my annual summertime sneakers shopping run at Wal-Mart, even if it means snatching just a little bit of well-being from my neighbors.

Why am I doing this? Because for fifteen dollars I can get basic footwear that lasts a year. After twelve months of regular deployment, these puppies smell so bad they just might qualify as weapons of mass destruction. It’s high time to bury the old pair and replace them with fresh rubber. And I don’t want to spend a penny more than necessary.

Using the WalMart.com online directory, I discover that there are ten stores in the vicinity of my home in Washington, DC—not exactly your typical rural area targeted by the retailing giant. The closest one is in Alexandria, Virginia, sixteen miles away. Following directions from MapQuest, I wind my way through the region’s sprawling suburbs, at one point ominously passing the reconstructed side of the Pentagon where terrorists crashed a plane in 2001. My mind flashes on the image of Mohammad Atta, leader of the 9/11 gang, caught on videotape on 9/10 buying his infamous box cutters at a Wal-Mart in Portland, Maine. Forty-five minutes later I arrive. The parking lot is jammed.

At the entrance is posted an official notice from Fairfax County indicating that the Wal-Mart Real Estate Business Trust is now seeking permission to expand the store. Business must be doing well.2

Nationally, of course, Wal-Mart is one of America’s greatest success stories. It began in 1962, when Sam Walton set up a chain of small variety stores in Kansas and Arkansas. For many years Wal-Marts were only selling novelties in remote rural towns. Today five thousand outlets throughout the United States and in nine other countries sell just about everything. Wal-Mart “Supercenters”—of which there are nearly two thousand in the United States—are each as big as four football fields. As Simon Head writes, “With 1.4 million employees worldwide, Wal-Mart’s workforce is now larger than that of GM, Ford, GE, and IBM combined. At $258 billion in 2003, Wal-Mart’s annual revenues are 2 percent of US gross domestic product (GDP), and eight times the size of Microsoft’s. In fact, when ranked by its revenues, Wal-Mart is the world’s largest corporation.”1

“The secret of successful retailing,” Sam Walton wrote in his autobiography, “is to give your customers what they want.”

But I digress. Even though the Fairfax store seems larger than a typical National Park and few staff are in the aisles to help, I quickly find my sneakers, the exact same kind I bought last year. A perfect fit! Off to the checkout line.

As I snake my way triumphantly through the aisles, I notice a few other items I could use. We just ran out of Crispix cereal and Chips Ahoy cookies. There’s a great horse toy for my daughter Rachel, two years old, and some AA-batteries to fire it up. Hmmm, now I have to come back with something for Adam, my six-year-old, who’s apprehensive about beginning kindergarten. Whew, there’s a Back to School video, featuring Franklin the Turtle. He’ll also like this new Jump Start computer program to help with his math and spelling, and a new folding chair to sit at the computer. And there’s the Guinness Book of World Records book he and I were talking about the other night—got to get that. Bill Clinton’s book, My Life, for only twenty-two dollars? What a steal! And all this other stuff: a 120-foot extension cord to vacuum my car, a new plastic box for my loose files, a halogen reading lamp for bedside table, four new glasses for end-of-the-day drinks, a gigantic bottle of Tide, cheap bottles of Advil and Aleve for my chronic back pain that’s going to get worse when I carry this load to the car. Enough!3

I tag the checkout line as if it were home base and finally catch my breath. I consider asking the clerk to put me in a straitjacket so that I won’t buy anything else.

It’s the week before school opens, so long lines of exasperated parents and their screaming children make the nearly half-hour wait compare unfavorably to my experience squatting in a New Delhi bus station a decade earlier. My own checkout line is so long that by the time I reach the front the brain-dead clerk is relieved halfway through scanning my items. The new clerk begins by ringing me up again for the chair, a mistake to which I politely draw his attention. A bit grudgingly, he removes the extra charge. As I’m about to walk away, I look again at the receipt and discover that I have just parted with $275; I also realize that the new clerk double-charged me for the one item I came to buy in the first place—those damn sneakers!


Bargains

What kinds of deals did I secure during my whirlwind community-lifting experience? Research shows that the “savings” from shopping at chain stores generally turn out to be vastly overestimated.2 A 2002 survey by the Maine Department of Human Services, for example, found that local drugstores actually provided better deals than the pharmacies at Rite Aid and CVS.3 Wal-Mart prescription prices, which fell roughly in the middle of the group surveyed, also varied significantly from place to place, depending on the degree of local competition.4

In the days that followed my shopping spree, I decided to do some comparative shopping at various stores in my neighborhood in northwest Washington, DC. It is true that for most of the generic items, Wal-Mart offered prices about 5 to 10 percent less than what I could find locally. Applying the upper end, I “saved” about $27.50.5

But recall that I was overcharged forty-six dollars on two items. Had I not caught these errors in the chaotic checkout process, I would have lost money. Okay, to be fair, Wal-Mart fixed the errors once I brought them to the irritated clerk’s attention. Later, however, I learn that an NBC undercover team found that deep discounters like Wal-Mart are overcharging 10 to 25 percent of the time and that these mistakes are three to one against the consumer.6 I had assumed that the error was not deliberate dishonesty, just poor training and low morale. But several recent academic studies have found Wal-Mart scanners yield error rates as high as 8.3 percent of the time, four times the federal standard, prompting investigations by several state attorneys general.74

Next, consider the time and money it took me to get to the Alexandria store. That year the Internal Revenue Service allowed businesses to write off about 40.5 cents per mile for auto wear and tear, gas, insurance, and other incidentals. The thirty-two-mile round trip thus cost fourteen dollars. I spent ninety minutes driving round trip and thirty minutes in a checkout line. Assuming I’m worth at least a living wage of ten dollars per hour, that’s twenty dollars of my time. The transaction cost of this trip was thirty-four dollars, again, greater than my savings.

When I returned home my wife, whose instincts for taste and quality are far more trustworthy than my own, took one look at my four discount scotch glasses and told me that she was promptly dispatching them to the local recycling facility. She declared the reading lamp too...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1576754669
ISBN 13 
9781576754665
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
2
Anzahl der Seiten
312
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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