Retail

Borders Books is on "death watch," according to one industry observer.  Virgin shut down its last U.S. record store this month. Office Depot and Staples are struggling.  Circuit City is gone.  Best Buy has launched a desperate ad campaign.

While the decline of independent businesses has leveled off, the rest of the retail sector is undergoing dramatic consolidation as a small number of massive companies become ever more dominant. This is an ominous trend for manufacturers and consumers, and it exposes serious flaws in U.S. antitrust policy.  More

Last week, Wal-Mart announced that it would create 22,000 new jobs in the U.S. to staff new and expanded stores.  More than 100 newspapers and magazines reported this news as a welcome bright spot amid the downturn.  But had these news outlets turned to sources beyond Wal-Mart's press release and attempted to provide at least some analysis of the broader impact, the headlines might not have been so rosy. 

In all likelihood, Wal-Mart's expansion will make the U.S. employment picture worse, not better.  There's plenty of evidence to suggest that the addition of 22,000 jobs at Wal-Mart will lead to the loss of at least as many, and probably more, jobs at other businesses.  

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Not content to accept Wal-Mart's own impact study, a citizens group in Exeter, PA, has persuaded its town council to order an independent community impact analysis of the proposed development. More

When the small town of Clark, South Dakota, lost its last variety store, they had a choice: drive 40 minutes to a nearby town for basic supplies or pull together and jointly create a new, community-owned store.  They pulled together.

[M]ore than 100 people in Clark have purchased $500 shares to finance the opening of the Clark Hometown Variety Store. The store will take the place of the Duckwall store, which was one of 20 underperforming stores parent company Duckwall-Alco Stores of Kansas closed in 2005.

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The nation's 7630 community banks have average assets of $150 million.  The nation's four largest banks lost $13 billion in the last quarter of 2008.  As a result community banks FDIC premiums will increase by 1000 percent. More

Independent businesses are largely at the mercy of Visa and MasterCard when it comes to the fees they must pay every time they swipe a credit card.  These fees, which are ultimately passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, have soared from $27 billion in 2004 to $48 billion last year (or $427 per household).

Recognizing the tremendous market power held by card processors, many countries now regulate credit card transaction fees, setting them at rates as low as one-sixth of what U.S. businesses pay.  More

The newly published Sustainable Food Retail Framework aims to help cities struggling with a lack of grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods better balance the need to quickly fill the gaps (a mandate that often favors large supermarket chains) with the advantages of fostering development that delivers more long-term stability and greater economic, community, and environmental benefits (a framework that favors local business). More

Doing so would ease budget shortfalls and restore a measure of fairnessfor small businesses, which lack access to these loopholes and end upshouldering a heavier tax burden than their big competitors. Some evidence even suggests that leveling the playing field may help spur entrepreneurialism and job growth. More

"Despite an enormous commitment of public funding to support retail development, neither taxable sales nor retail employment has grown significantly region wide," concludes a new report by the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, a metropolitan planning and problem-solving organization governed by top officials from the region's seven counties and the city of St. Louis.

The report also concludes that development incentives have done nothing to boost tax revenue in the metro and "the overall fiscal health of local governments in the region is increasingly tenuous." More