Would you or wouldn't you? The Anti-WalMart movement

[sfa]

A couple of blocks from my front door is a Main Street that is beginning to thrive again. Since we moved in there have been numerous restaurants and small shops (generally specialized and boutique-y things) that have opened, and we patronize them whenever possible, but also go to larger stores further away for things that our Main Street doesn't have, including to Wal Mart. I would buy local currency as a way of supporting my Main Street and encouraging people who don't live a block from it to do the same, but not as an anti-Wal-Mart statement.

OTOH, the people on my street are working hard to keep another development from happening. Right now my street ends at a state owned hospital center. A developer has bought up land adjacent to the hospital and wants the state to release some of its unused property for him to buy so that he can build one of these huge promenade-type districts anchored by a Target store and including a hotel, movie theater, shops and restaurants. To do this, the county/state would agree to build a new exit from the beltway that would go OVER the houses down the street and dump off into this proposed development, then to avoid having traffic backed up down at my end they'd make my end of the street (the end that turns onto our Main Street) a dead end. So the only access to my currently small little quiet street would be through a beltway exit or through a horrible shopping center, my neighbors would be living underneath a beltway exit ramp, and our thriving Main Street would be dealing with another level of competition that it likely couldn't handle.

So I'm not feeling very friendly towards huge chain stores and big box developments at the moment.

Sarah

[Zen]

Holy schneikeys. Where is this? (I know it's not Frederick)

[Crankin]

We already have a strong "indie" movement in Concord. The town government is making a concerted effort to get people to shop locally in our 3 shopping districts (for the holidays). While it's true that these stores don't meet all of my regular shopping needs, I don't go to any big box stores. Heck, I don't even go to big department stores anymore; small national brand stores, yes.
My husband, who does tons of work around the house, tries to patronize our 2 local Ace Hardware stores. The one in Concord rarely has what he needs, but the one in the next town where we used to live does. But, he does have to go to Home Depot for many items.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

This is a good thread about a very interesting local movement that is being very successfully used in small communities these days.
Unfortunately, Mr. Silver, you put "The Anti-Walmart movement" right in the thread title, which pretty much guarantees a whole 'nother heated Walmart argument thread, and sadly pulls the thread attention away from a genuinely interesting and thought provoking idea that communities have been putting into successful use.
It is not that different from buying shares in your local food co-op...an idea that has been successfully promoting local food producers for many years now.

I suggest that before everyone starts arguing about Walmart again , they read the links that Mr. Silver posted in his first post, and discuss the actual thread subject.

[Mr. Bloom]

Unfortunately, Mr. Silver, you put "The Anti-Walmart movement" right in the thread title,

You're right - really bad judgment on my part; Topic changed

[sfa]

Holy schneikeys. Where is this? (I know it's not Frederick)

Catonsville, in the southwest area of Baltimore County.

And now with that information, anyone here can find me! There's only one road in Catonsville that leads down to the state hospital center. Just look for the house with the tangle of bikes on the front porch.

Sarah

[OakLeaf]

Yup. It's really only tangentially about Wal-Mart. Grocery stores are the same thing. Even though Kroger's is union and I feel MUCH better about shopping there than I do about shopping at XXX, I try to do as much of my grocery shopping as possible at farmer's markets and locally owned stores. Yes, even though there may be many things I can only get at Kroger's, and even though the price of staples and local dairy products may be higher than mass-distributed staples and factory-farmed dairy.

On the average, spending money in a locally owned store even for non-locally produced goods returns 30% more to the local economy. So for my 10% extra expenditure, I get better JOBS (which if I were working, might benefit me directly), better roads (and have to spend that much less on shock absorbers and tires), better funded schools (so parents have to spend less out of pocket for books, supplies, and extracurriculars), more police, EMT and fire protection (decreasing losses in those areas), etc. Well worth the investment IMVHO. Shopping at any non-locally owned store for price reasons alone is a deeply false economy.

Yes, there are times that I do it for convenience reasons. So having already purchased "local bucks" would be an incentive for me to take my wallet to the local store first even though it might mean an extra trip to the big-box store if local doesn't carry what I need. Then there are people who are so impoverished that that extra 10% makes a huge difference in their ability to afford their basic necessities. "Local bucks" would help them avoid sucking even more money out of the local economy, ultimately helping themselves earn higher wages and avoiding placing more of their neighbors into their own position.

So I vote yes.


PS.... since Mr. S used the old cliche about the "better mousetrap," I had to add this little story, which is pretty closely on point in a couple of different ways. Somebody DID build a better mousetrap. It's called a "Mice Cube," and even though they're manufactured in China of cheap plastic, they are ingeniously simple, wondrously effective and reusable many, many times. (We have a big problem with mice at our house. ) What happens when somebody literally builds a better mousetrap? Stores stop carrying it, because they can make more money selling mousetraps that don't work as well and break after a few uses (or are intended to be single-use). When we broke a couple of our 5-year-old Mice Cubes this year and tried to find new ones, we wound up having to order them online. At least they're still available, but somehow I doubt it will be for long. If I were a little more enterprising I'm sure they'd be very easy to make out of a sheet of thin Plexi-Glas.

[eclectic]

Organizations and people here participate in the Scrip program

http://www.scrip.com/about.html

It is a win/win situation

2 cents about Walmart
interestingly enough super walmart opened its doors here a few years ago. I talked to managers of local grocery stores and they said their business dropped the first quarter but it has been better than ever since.
Why? Walmart has shoddy meat and vegetable products, staff is under trained (I mean who stacks an entire palette of peaches on top of each other?)
Wait line averages 20 min to 1/2 hour per till and the shelves are never stocked.
Many blame the oil boom we are having (move to ND BTW if you need a good job w/ good wages) But then why do all the other grocery stores still have average wait times and their shelves are always stocked?

BTW Kmart and Target started doing better once Super walmart moved in.

[Thorn]

But...do people still use large amounts of cash? I do almost all purchases with credit card. No, I don't carry a balance--it gets paid off at the month and I get REI dividends for the purchases.

The two neighborhoods referred to in the article are very progressive. They're associated with the university. I found Mr. Silver's second post interesting because one of the businesses that should thrive under the local currency concept is Milwaukee's grocery co-op. While the store has expanded and moved, it has been in that neighborhood for at least 35 years. Currently, it is threatened by the Wal-Mart across the street and the Trader Joes' down the road. So, in this case, yes, those local bucks would be for both of his big-chain store arguments.

Would I use the local bucks? Probably not--I just don't use cash. Will I shop local instead of chain? Yes, whenever I can. Small businesses are the foundations of a solid economy (says, the non-economist).

[PscyclePath]

As late as the middle of the 19th century, all currency was local... we didn't really go to a national paper currency ("greenbacks") until the Civil War, and as Mr. Silver can probably explain better, didn't really go to the current system ("federal reserve notes" in lieu of "silver certificates") until FDR came along in 1933 or a little later.

The antebellum economy operated on the barter system and a system of hard money. For most folks (not all), it was rare that they would ever have more than several dollars in their hands at one time. Think of it this way. How many of us today routinely carry over $1000 in cash around with us? We don't need it, because most of our purchases when conducting our normal business are relatively small. The barter system was helped along by limited issues of bank notes. Paper money in the form of bank notes was issued by private and state banks, and was also used as a medium of exchange. It had no intrinsic value, and was only redeemable for hard money at the place of issue, i.e. the bank that had it printed. So bank note paper money had a very limited distribution, and was mainly used locally. Exceptions to this rule would be money from trade centers such as New Orleans and some eastern cities. Some folks claim that the word Dixie, meaning the South, comes from the proliferation of New Orleans notes in the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys.

Because of the large French/Creole population, New Orleans banks' paper money was bilingual. Supposedly, the ten dollar note was referred to as a Dixie, dix being printed on the bill and also the French word for 10. I cannot confirm or refute this story. Anyway, because of the far reaching trade on the Mississippi, New Orleans notes were practically national currency all along the Mississippi basin. So while it might be uncommon to see Boston bank notes or Philadelphia bank notes in Minnesota, it would not be that uncommon to see New Orleans notes there, and thus spreading the term Dixie up and down the river.

To put things in modern perspective, private bank notes were similar to modern bank checks. They were issued in good faith, and other banks would usually honor them, but normally they could only be exchanged for hard currency at the issue bank. Sometimes, even the bank would not issue specie for its notes. The value of the note might be expressed in other economic staples, such as cotton or corn. Look at it this way: let's say I'm a cotton farmer in the South, or a corn farmer in the Midwest. I raise my crop, harvest it, and take it to the local brokerage house. I receive fair market value for my crop, but not in hard money. I get notes, the ones that look like money to us today. The notes come from a local bank, or possibly even from the brokerage house itself. Everyone in town knows that the local brokerage house or bank backs its notes, and if you really wanted to, you could go and get the cotton or corn or specie from them for the notes. But in the mean time, you can use the notes to go to the grocers and trade your notes for some of his items, or go to some other place. The notes become a medium or exchange, because they are backed by the faith that the local folk have in the brokerage house or bank. These notes are basically no good 100 miles from home, but what do the locals care about that? Most of them aren't going that far away to transact business anyway. If the local brokerage house or bank ever goes out of business, all the locals are in big trouble economically, but that's what happened anyway. The notes hold their value because everyone thinks that if everybody would all of a sudden get together and try to turn in their notes for hard money or a staple good (called a "panic" or a "bank run"), everyone will get the exact value of the amount printed on the bills. In fact this is not true, but few people care about this. Even in today's economy, we all think that if we decide to withdraw all of our money from a bank, there will be enough in the bank for all of us. Well, the fact is that banks, the last time I looked, only had to have in cash 17% (I think) of the total value of all deposits in the bank. Which is why the FDIC was created during the 1930's, but that is wholly another story...

Bank notes and local currency are essentially barter... and back in the old days nearly all our transactions were simply barter -- using these notes as substitutes for paying your grocery bill with a bushel of wheat -- and today we've gotten away from barter completely by the use of U.S. federal reserve notes or an electronic equivalent.

Now, if the brokerage house or bank would carelessly print notes without backing them with hard money or staples, then the perceived value of these notes would lessen, because everyone would know that you really couldn't get full value for the note. So instead of that item in the store costing you $1 in notes, it would cost you $2. this is called "inflation," and while it can be caused by a number of factors in the modern world, the biggest cause of inflation in the 19th century was a surplus of paper currency. There was a great mistrust of paper currency which is why, with rare exception, it was not valuable outside the local economy. How could you tell if the bank issuing the notes was printing them like leaves, or issuing them out only for goods or specie actually received?

If I happen to conduct Mississippi river business, I might receive these notes from a New Orleans business concern at my destination. When I get back to Illinois, or Missouri, or Minnesota, I will still be able to use these notes as money because others will be making that trip also, and they know that when they get to New Orleans, the notes are good. So a local currency becomes a regional currency because of faith. And this is how "dixies" are spread around the region.

The beginning of the Civil War put tremendous pressure on the United States economic system. Goods and services were needed at rates never seen before, and there was no method in place for paying for them. In the South, a brand new government had no Treasury deposits to speak of, and needed to quickly get a system in place to handle and produce currency.

In the North, a huge demand was put on the economic system by the war effort. Currency practically dried up, because there just wasn't enough to pay for all of the economic activity going on. The government desperately needed to inject more currency into the present system to continue economic growth. By the way, adding more currency in this manner is also inflation, but the true cause of inflation here was increased demand for war goods and limited supply of those goods, (like that "must have" Christmas present) not a lack of faith in the currency.

The government found that it had no real way to increase the availability of money. State banks and brokerage houses did not want to issue more of their notes, because that would deflate the value of their currency. The war economy was beginning to slow down, because there wasn't enough money to pay for it. So in 1862 the government passed a national currency act, which basically gave the United States the right to print money, for the first time in its history. This money was not backed by any particular financial reserves, just by the full faith and credit of the Federal government. Because of the colors used in the printing of the money, and the fact that most currency of the time was only printed on one side, the notes were called greenbacks because of the green printing on the back. For smaller denominations, the government used its existing stocks of postage stamp dies and printed what it called Postage Currency. These were notes that looked like blocks of stamps glued together, and were worth the face value of the combined stamps.

The government also passed an excise tax law, which meant that there was a government charge for conducting normal business. You paid the excise tax by purchasing stamps that were placed on certain documents such as bank checks, express bills, and playing cards, among other things. The amazing thing about this tax is that almost exactly 100 years before, the British did the exact same thing to the then colonies (The Stamp Act) and it caused a tremendous public outcry. Then the Stamp Act was enacted to help pay for the cost of conducting the war against the French and the Indians, from 1755-1763.

At the conclusion of the Civil War, the Federal government stopped printing money to try to control inflation. There was so much of it in circulation anyway that it continued on its own momentum. The advent of a national medium of exchange, good anywhere in the country, was new and unique. People really liked the idea of being able to use these notes anywhere. Soldiers stationed all over the country (and coming home) could use the currency anywhere they traveled. Remember, it was a new thing in 1865 that the people in Boston and Philadelphia could use the same paper currency as the people in St. Louis and Chicago. It made the transacting of business so much easier that a national currency was immensely popular. Bank and Brokerage notes dried up quickly, and passed out of existence shortly after the war. The national currency system was here to stay.

And now, we may be coming full circle... as the Good Book says, there ain't nothing new under the sun ;-)

Tom
a history buff in the non-biking side of life...

[GLC1968]

I would in a heartbeat...but determining what is 'local' to me would be the deciding factor. My town has 620 people in it, 1 high school, 1 grocery store/mart, a feed store, a post office, 2 bars, a coffee shop, a library/police station and a firestation. Local bucks in my town would be hard to spend (except maybe at the feed store)!

That said, we are already trying to keep things local. We trade our wind-fall apples for extra pieces of local grass-fed meat from our CSA. We trade goat's milk for flowers and fruit from our neighbor. Once we have eggs, we'll expand. I think that people need to think less globally, and more locally. And I agree that doing the 'local bucks' thing in a more suburban (less rural) area than what we live in is a great start. Changing the way people think about where their food and products come from is even more important.

Interesting tidbit about Walmart. When we first moved here, we needed some inexpensive supplies for our temporary apartment (extra towel hooks, hangers, door mats, etc) so we punched in Walmart on the GPS in my car. No matches? Weird. So we tried my husbands Garmin - again...no matches? We figured there must be something wrong with it. We found two local discount stores to shop at instead and later learned that the reason the GPS found no Walmart is because there are no Walmarts within 50 miles of us. Unreal (and cool!).

[Tuckervill]

a bias to giving a 10% discount...why don't the stores simply lower their prices 10%? Frankly, because they don't have the margin...so they're cutting off their nose to spite their face

That was my first thought.

I'm pretty sure our local merchants don't have that 10% to give across the board. I'm sure most see it as the same thing as a coupon. Not everyone is going to participate, so it's not 10% on everything they offer. I'm sure the currency doesn't apply to some high-dollar items, either (restrictions apply).

I wouldn't participate, because of the hassle factor. I don't get Wal-Mart gift cards for cheaper gas for the same reason. I'd rather just assume my time is worth more than the 3 cents a gallon I would get by buying a gift card when I'm in the store. It's inconvenient, and I would be ticked off to be inconvenienced to go in the store, stand in line, make the transaction, just to save the 30 cents on 10 gallons. (Although I think you can recharge the cards at the pump, now.)

I live in the town where Sam Walton almost landed, instead of Bentonville. It has one of the oldest Wal-Marts in the store's history (20,000 people). We have a thriving local merchant scene. They simply don't carry what Wal-Mart does, or if they do, they have more variety and are more specialized. We have two grocery stores, more than a few tire shops, an office supply, several drug stores, shoe stores, etc., all locally owned. I would say our town is part of the post-Wal-Mart era.

I never hear anyone complaining about Wal-Mart putting local merchants out of business. It didn't happen when WM first came to town, either, because WM started as a Main Street business in those days, too. The truth is, if you can't compete in your business, the market will force you out. Whether that's a big-box coming in or just better competitors in your demographic. The businesses that are still here 30 years after the first Wal-Mart, and the second and now the third or fourth (it's a super size, now), are just better at what they do. That's the way I look at it.

Karen

[Tuckervill]

And sadly for some folks, saving a few bucks outweighs any political feelings they might have.

Oh, I think it's way more complicated than that.

Karen

[pardes]

It's called a "Mice Cube," and even though they're manufactured in China of cheap plastic, they are ingeniously simple, wondrously effective and reusable many, many times.

Very effective. They are always in stock at Walmart.

[Irulan]

Interesting idea, but is a "local currency" really necessary to get people to shop locally?

I think it's a community attitude. Where I live, city of 180K, county of 300K, there is a very strong "shop local" ethic. We have many succesful locally owned businesses.

We have walmart too, lots of us choose to shop local for many differnt reasons. And sadly for some folks, saving a few bucks outweighs any political feelings they might have.