Stacy Mitchell’s eye-opening book, Big-Box Swindle, has just been released in paperback.  It’s a book that you’all should read and maybe give as an early holiday gift  to your city council and state legislators so they can have the ammunition to shoot down big-box tax advantages and pass new policies that foster equitable and sustainable economies.

    We posed a few questions for Mitchell, who works for the New Rules Project, a program of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

 What’s your take on the recent rash of toxic product recalls?

It’s just the tip the iceberg.  We think we’re getting a deal shopping at these stores, but we’re paying for it in a thousand other ways, from poisonous toys to the decline of the American middle class. 

In Big-Box Swindle, I tell the story of a family-owned toy company in St. Paul, Minn., that has to decide whether to sell its toys to Wal-Mart and Target.  The two chains account for more than 45 percent of the toy market.

That’s tough to pass up, but this toy company finds that selling to them would require laying off its employees and shifting production to China.  They couldn’t accept what that would mean, both for the community and for the quality of their products.  They opt instead to pin their future on the nation’s embattled independent toy stores, which consider more than price when deciding what to carry and how to operate.

That’s an illustration of why I think the movement against Wal-Mart has to focus not only on reforming Wal-Mart, but on decentralizing the economy and reviving local businesses.

Wal-Mart is a corporation and, as such, its only obligation is to its own bottom-line.  It has no real concern for anyone: employees, suppliers, neighbors, and, as we’re seeing with each new product scandal, even its customers.  

   Wal-Mart has been getting a lot of good press lately for its environmental initiatives. Should we be cheering the company on?

No!  What Wal-Mart is doing is actually far more dangerous than conventional corporate green-washing.  There’s just enough substance to their initiatives to distract the media, and even some environmental groups, from the big picture. 

The emergence and rise of big-box retailers, led by Wal-Mart, has made running our daily errands vastly more polluting than it was twenty years ago.  One reason is that shopping-related driving has grown three times as fast as driving for all other purposes.  Compared to 1990, Americans are now logging more than 100 billion extra miles on the road each year just for shopping. 

As I detail in the book, this increase in driving is a direct result of the growth of the big boxes and the impact they have had on neighborhood and downtown businesses.  We’re driving further than ever to pick up a gallon of milk or can of paint.

All this extra driving generates an additional 150 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, which dwarfs the emissions reductions that Wal-Mart’s various energy measures are slated to produce. 

Not only that, but the new stores Wal-Mart plans to build in the U.S. over the next three years, will consume far more energy than all of its efficiency measures combined will achieve in the next decade.  And it’s not as though we need any more Wal-Mart stores.

   You helped pass a landmark big-box law in Maine this year.  Tell us about that. 

It’s called the Informed Growth Act.  It requires economic impact studies for large retail stores and establishes an economic impact standard in state statute that gives communities the authority to reject such stores on the basis of their impact on jobs, wages, local businesses, and other economic factors.  It went into effect a few days ago.  It’s the first law of its kind in the country. 

 ILSR worked with the Maine Fair Trade Campaign (MFTC) and a broad coalition of labor, environmental, and community groups to get this passed.  MFTC ran an amazing field campaign, recruiting more than 200 small business owners who gave very powerful testimony and effectively countered the argument that this bill was "anti-business" or would impede economic growth. 

Our experience well illustrated the case I make in Big-Box Swindle—see how my publisher taught me to bring everything back to the book—which is that independent businesses could be potent allies for labor and environmental groups and could tip the scales on many of the polices we’ve been trying to enact.  They have long lacked a political voice, but that’s changing with the emergence of groups like the American Independent Business Alliance (http://www.amiba.net).  

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Okay, so buy it….