Stacy Mitchell’s Posts

• A beautiful day in the neighborhood

  Neighborhood stores: An overlooked strategy for fighting global warming 7

  Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago

  A revival of small, neighborhood retailers could be an important strategy for countering climate change, enticing people to run errands without driving their cars.

• Keep Your Eyes on the Size

  The impossibility of a green Wal-Mart 27

  Posted 2 years, 7 months ago

  With its recent flurry of green initiatives, Wal-Mart has won the embrace of several prominent environmental groups. "If they do even half what they say they want to do, it will make a huge difference for the planet," said Ashok Gupta of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Environmental Defense, meanwhile, has deemed Wal-Mart's actions momentous enough to warrant opening an office near the retailer's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. "If [we] can nudge Wal-Mart in the right direction on the environment, we can have a huge impact," said the organization's executive vice president, David Yarnold.

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Stacy Mitchell’s Recent Comments

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  Cliff: Thanks for correctly clarifying my point about transportation infrastructure.  As far as sea transportation, that's actually favored by international trade treaties that exempt fuel for international travel and transport of goods from normal fuel taxes that we and other countries charge:

  Putting pollution on grocery bills - NY Times

  So another subsidy for the big-box model...

  Caitlin: Please take a look at our web site: http://ww.newrules.org/retail  On the right you'll see tabs for LOCAL POLICIES, STATE POLICIES, etc.  These include a number of land use policy models that constrain retail sprawl and foster local business districts. 

  Also, Big-Box Swindle has a chapter on environmental impacts that gets at some of the shipping issues.

  Feel free to email me directly with further questions (see Contact page on the site).

  ~Stacy

  On Neighborhood stores: An overlooked strategy for fighting global warming posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago 7 Responses

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  Matt, I think those are astute observations. There's no question that the our transportation system and big-box stores are intimately connected. Had we not opted for a primarily car-oriented development pattern, the occasional large store would still exist, but not big-box retailers as we know them.
  
  There's a direct connection between the scale of roads and the scale of retail businesses. In a traditional town pattern, there is a hierarchy of street sizes, with small neighborhood streets supporting small neighborhood stores, and larger streets converging on a central location (the downtown) that supports the largest stores in town. Because people use alternate modes of getting around (walking and transit) and because car speeds are relatively low, proximity to customers (location) generally matters more than scale when it comes to the success of a business. Small stores properly situated can do quite well.
  
  In a suburban pattern, there are no central locations and the value of being proximate to one's customers has been rendered largely irrelevant by the regional road network. When you leave the street network of your subdivision, you go immediately to a 4 or 6 lane arterial. Once you are on this high-capacity, high-speed road network, large distances can be covered in minutes. The size of the store now matters much more than proximity. People bypass smaller stores in this environment and are generally willing to drive about twice as far to reach a store twice as large. So, you get an arms-race of store sizes ever increasing. And because there are no central locations - the value of any one location is mainly a function of how big the road alongside it is - there's virtually an endless amount of land that can be developed into ever bigger stores.
  
  I think that you are right that big-box retailers are able to offer lower prices in large measure by externalizing costs and that one of the big costs is transportation, both public spending on roads and private spending on cars. When tend to think of Wal-Mart as a retailer, but really these companies are distributors. That's what they've figured out how to do: move huge quantities of goods around the planet and across the county with a degree of precision and timeliness that is remarkable. People always say that Wal-Mart's efficiency is in buying in volume, but that's not really it. You can achieve those efficiencies at much, much smaller volumes that Wal-Mart.
  
  It's really in the distribution. And in both sides of it. On one end, Wal-Mart saves by getting customers and taxpayers to absorb the cost of the last 5-10 miles on average that the goods move. And on the other side, the global transport of goods. Wal-Mart's global and nationwide distribution network is highly efficient (ditto for Home Depot, Target, etc.), but only if you ignore the huge externalized cost to the environment, human health, and government of the fossil fuel consumption involved.
  
  I talk about this in chapter 4 of Big-Box Swindle, if you want to read more and also follow the footnotes to other sources.
  
  I'd love to know what Bellingham is up to with its ordinance. Feel free to email me through our site.
  
  Stacy

  On Neighborhood stores: An overlooked strategy for fighting global warming posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago 7 Responses

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  Shoddy journalism ignores facts

  It's laudable that Grist would strive to include diverse viewpoints.  However, I am disappointed that the editors would accept such a shoddy piece of journalism.  Having a minority opinion (at least among environmentalists) is one thing.  Failing to include and address crucial facts about one's subject is another.  

  Yes, chains have been around for a century.  But they have grown dramatically in the last 15 years, amassing an unprecedented level of market power.  Take Lowe's and Home Depot for instance.  These were big chains in 1990 when they had a combined total of 450 stores.  Today, the two have 3,000 stores and capture more than 50 percent of all hardware and building supply sales nationally.  

  Over that same period, the environmental impact of shopping has also increased dramatically.  And it is no coincidence.  

  Suggesting that being able to get everything under one roof has reduced shopping trips completely ignores the actual data that the federal government has compiled on travel behavior.  We take the same number of shopping trips today as we did in 1990.  But the average length of trip has grown by about two miles.  Altogether, Americans are driving 95 billion miles more each year just for shopping.  

  Yes, this is part of the larger problem of suburban sprawl.  But building larger boxes that entail more driving is also a core part of big-box retailers' growth strategy. They are not passive actors in this problem.  They purposefully build more and bigger stores than local market areas need:  they flood an area with excess capacity, which makes it easier to capsize smaller competitors.  The larger the store, the larger its market radius.  So, as the boxes get bigger and smaller retailers embedded in neighborhoods and town centers close, trip lengths increase.  

  All of this excess building explains why the amount of retail store space per capita in the U.S. has doubled since 1990 (and it's not like we were "under retailed" then).  There's no sign of an end to the land binge either:  Wal-Mart plans to develop an additional 50,000 acres over the next decade.  

  Do we need all of this additional retail space?  Hardly.  A staggering amount of it now sits vacant (as much as one billion square feet by some estimates).  But even idle, all of this pavement continues to send polluted runoff into our lakes and streams.  

  Akst fails to note that global shipping is expanding much faster than the world's economic output, and shipping is now one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gases.

  Poverty is indeed bad for the environment.  But it doesn't follow that wealth creation via any path is good for the environment.  Just look at us, leading the world on carbon emissions.

  Lastly, regarding the bit about pressuring companies to do good: Since when, in a democracy, is it our roll as citizens to plead and cajole companies to do right by us?  We should be enacting better laws, which would be much easier if our political process had not be hijacked by huge global corporations.  
  On Could chain stores actually be good for the environment? posted 4 years ago 19 Responses