Research: Chains vs. Local Stores

The results of a new study suggest that the key to reversing the long-term trend of stagnating incomes in the U.S. lies in nurturing small, locally owned businesses and limiting further expansion and market consolidation by large corporations. More

I winced yesterday when James Gavin, chair of the Partnership for a Healthier America, said he'd like to see Walmart double its U.S. store count. He was speaking at Michelle Obama's event announcing that several retailers will open stores in "food deserts." It was a sort of half-jokey remark, but, still, in a conversation about food in America, the suggestion that Walmart should have an even bigger role in our food system is pretty disturbing. This is a company that already captures 25 percent of grocery sales nationally and more than 50 percent in some metro areas. More

Raising the pay of Wal-Mart's U.S. workers to a minimum of $12 an hour would lift many out of poverty, reduce their reliance on public assistance, and cost the average consumer, at most, $12.49 a year.

That's the conclusion of a new study published by the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.  The study is primarily concerned with the question of how raising Wal-Mart's wages would affect poor families, including both those who work at its stores and those who shop at them.  The benefits to poor families, the study concludes, would far exceed the costs.
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Perhaps we’re not doomed to an economy controlled by a few giant corporations after all.

A growing number of signs suggest that local, independent businesses might just be making a comeback. 

Number of new independent bookstores that have opened since 2005...

Increase since 2002 in the number of small specialty food stores...  More

An overflow crowd of hundreds turned out yesterday at a New York City Council hearing on the impact Wal-Mart would have if allowed to expand into the city. The world's largest company, which currently has no New York City stores, wants to open dozens of outlets across all five boroughs.

ILSR's New Rules Project was invited by the Council to testify as part of the first panel of speakers.  Here's what we said about the impact Wal-Mart would have on New York. More

A groundbreaking new study, the Indie City Index, ranks all 363 metropolitan areas in the U. S. according to the vitality of their independent retail sectors.

Produced by Civic Economics, the index analyzes the share of retail sales captured by independent retailers and assigns a score to each metro. In regions that score above 100, independent retailers capture a larger than average share of spending, while chains are more dominant in those metros that score less than 100. More

The good news is that overall sales at independent retailers grew by about 4 percent, after adjusting for inflation, between 2002 and 2007. The bad news is that chains grew faster and independents still lost market share, falling from 31 to 28 percent of consumer retail spending. That decline in market share, however, was considerably slower in this five-year period, compared with the preceding 20 years, in which independents lost ground at a faster rate.

Digging deeper into the new data, we found a number of interesting trends, including a sizeable increase in both the number and revenue of independent greengrocers, bakeries, and other neighborhood food stores, and notable gains among independent pet supply, fabric, clothing, and office supply and stationery stores. The data also show that employees of independent retailers earned 35 percent more per year than employees of national chains. More

Newly released data from the U.S. Department of Transportation show that the average American household is driving less than it did in 2001. But, while the number of miles logged going to work, social events, and other activities declined over the last decade, the number of miles families drive for shopping each year continued climb.

But the good news is that the growth in the number of miles Americans log for shopping has slowed substantially from the rapid increases of the 1990s, and there are signs that neighborhood businesses may be making a comeback. More

What journalists and even environmentalists so often fail to do in reporting on Wal-Mart's sustainability announcements is to provide some context.

Context is everything. Consider Wal-Mart's latest announcement: It will push some of the factories that supply its stores to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. That's a good thing in and of itself, but what happens when we measure it against Wal-Mart's overall impact on the production of goods? More