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6/13/2007
The Small-Mart Revolution: How local businesses are beating the global competition
Michael Shuman, 2006. Don't be fooled by that guy that looks like Parker Fennely on the cover of The Small-Mart Revolution. Fennely was the folksy Nor'Easter who did those Pepperidge Farm commercials for pastries. This belies the import of a serious book about economics and survival.
Small-Mart Revolution is the real deal. It debunks the canards about the inevitability of Walmart and Home Depot running the market for everything once the playing field is leveled and tribute is no longer paid by local municipalities in the form of tax breaks, services and subsidies. Those canards include the one about big box enterprise bringing in new jobs and increasing revenues for the community. A brief example: For every job a national chain enterprise brings to the community, 1.47 jobs are lost. And once the subsidies in the form of cash, tax breaks and services from zoning regulations, roads and infrastructure are removed, those revenues are whittled down considerably. And revenues made by the big box stores reduce the money re-spent within the community.
Every one knows people like bargains. The big box stores provide those bargains and so consumers are happy to go out to the town fringe to buy a spatula. In The Small-Mart Revolution, Michael Shuman calls this the TINA mentality. TINA – There Is No Alternative. But in a carefully argued and fun to read style, Shuman (also the author of Going Local: Creating Self Reliant Communities in a Global Age) shows that the alternative, Local Ownership and Import Substitution (LOIS) is a solution to the countless dollars siphoned from communities that could be used in what Shuman calls 'dollar multipliers.' Dollar multipliers are those dollars that stay and are re-spent in the community. Shuman also shows that a LOIS business is less likely to move off in a couple years and that the owner tends to be more civic minded and active in support of schools and services that keep a town going.
But there's something even more interesting in Small-Mart Revolution for readers here in the Fox Valley. One example cited of a LOIS business is the Green Bay Packers. (You see, it’s not always a folksy hardware store owner fronting The Small-Mart Revolution). LOIS businesses come in all sizes but the thing that makes them different is that they have community ties. The Hershey Chocolate Company is used as another example: Hershey Chocolate has many ties to it's community. When a proposal was made to move production offshore, the company changed its mind when it saw what moving would do to the Hershey, Pennsylvania community.
Small-Mart Revolution should be an idea-starter and conversation-builder on how local economies can become self-sufficient and prosperous in an age when scarcity looms on the horizon. That's where that bit about survival comes in. The Small-Mart Revolution will not take place overnight. It does however have the possibility of offering a solution to the next business or plant closing and the one after that: a solution that says: Yes, there is an alternative.
To be released in softcover edition August 1, 2007.
Lon Ponschock for FoxPolitics.net
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