The study raises an interesting point in terms of unsold books (an average of 25 to 55 percent of what gets printed, depending on the genre57), which are usually either trashed, recycled, or sold to a discount bookstore—all of which at least means further transport, if not also waste. Because in the online model the central warehouse is a single inventory point, there are fewer unsold books, meaning less wasted paper and less transport. In the end, using average fuel consumption rates for the planes, trucks, and cars, average packaging for an average-sized book, and the average rate of books that go unsold, the study found that online shopping was more efficient and sustainable in terms of energy used, conventional air pollutants generated, waste generated, and greenhouse gas emissions.58 This efficiency might even increase as print-on-demand technology is more widely available—where a book with a small readership would not even be printed until a reader puts in an order, using the printing press closest to the consumer. Some industry observers predict that by 2010, half of the books sold around the world will be printed on demand at or near the place of sale.59
However, as the online environmental magazine TreeHugger points out, details matter when evaluating today’s online and in-person shopping options. If you take public transit, bike, or walk to your local bookstore, it’s definitely a better choice than online shopping. They recommend shopping online only if “you live in the suburbs, or are surrounded by Mega-Marts, have to drive more than six or eight miles each way to go shopping, are scrupulous about bundling online orders, and choose ground shipping rather than overnight air.”60
Then there’s the whole issue of the digitization of books and devices like Amazon’s Kindle. While there’s no question that paperless books will slow the destruction of forests, this technological development means yet another electronic gadget on the market. And as we’ve seen with every other kind of electronics out there—be it cell phones, computers, cameras, what have you—that will likely mean a new version every few years, with the attendant mining of minerals, toxics in and toxics out during production, and ever higher mountains of e-waste.
Myself, I’m a fan of the following model: Local bookstores that I can walk or ride my bike to, with a friendly face behind the counter who can personally recommend titles to me. Once I’m finished with a book, I lend it to everyone I know, if I can recommend it; otherwise I Freecycle it (Freecycle is a 7-million-strong online network of people who post Stuff—and get Stuff—for free, in order to reduce waste61) so it finds a second life with someone else. My ten-year-old daughter churns through books very quickly, so every so often, we invite her friends over for a “book swap brunch” to empty out our overflowing shelves, get some new ones for free, and keep building community. The leftovers from the brunch (the books, not the waffles) get donated to local schools. And then there are libraries—in every place I’ve lived, the library has been one of my favorite places to find books, as well as to meet neighbors, attend public seminars, weigh in on community issues, and sometimes even hear live music. Amazon may be easy and fast and impressive in its scale, but it just doesn’t provide those quality-of-life extras.
Wal-Mart
Almost 20 percent of the consumer electronics purchased in the United States is sold by Wal-Mart,62 so it’s not unreasonable to imagine that the laptop I described in the last chapter was distributed through the Godzilla of retail.
If H&M’s special powers are speed and trendiness (in addition to rockbottom prices), and Amazon’s is unlimited choice (and lower than cover prices), Wal-Mart’s is a combination of reach, breadth, and low prices. Wal-Mart is truly vast—in comparison, pretty much every other retailer in the world is a tiny pipsqueak. In fact, you could lump together Gap Inc., Target, Sears, Costco, JCPenney, Best Buy, Staples, Toys “R” Us, Nordstrom, Blockbuster, and Barnes & Noble, and all of them combined don’t add up to the scope of Wal-Mart,63 with its revenues of $401 billion in 2008.64 It’s one of the top economies in the world, bigger than the GDP of countries like Austria, Chile, and Israel and one of China’s top-ten trading partners, ahead of the United Kingdom or Germany.65
There are more than eight thousand Wal-Mart stores worldwide, over four thousand of them in the United States, each of which averages nearly three football fields in size.66 Stacy Mitchell, author of Big-Box Swindle, comments that “with 600 million square feet of floor space in the United States, Wal-Mart could fit every man, woman, and child in the country inside its stores.”67 The stores’ ubiquity in the United States means that virtually no one is ever farther than sixty miles from the nearest one, and the chain is constantly expanding, by about 50 million square feet every year.68
As for their breadth, what can’t you get at Wal-Mart? It’s now the number-one seller of groceries, clothing, home furnishings, toys, and music in the United States.69 Americans are buying many of their DVDs, cameras, home appliances, and common household items like toothpaste, shampoo, and diapers there too. It sells gas. It’s even opened health clinics. And it has been trying to overturn laws that keep it from offering banking services.70 Remember the corporation in the film WALL-E that basically owned the planet, providing every good and service on, and then beyond, earth? It’s really not that far-fetched; Wal-Mart seems to be headed in that very direction.
In contrast to Amazon, however, Wal-Mart offers at most only a couple of varieties of any given product. About 40 percent of products sold are its own private label brands, meaning they’re produced exclusively for Wal-Mart.71 Yet, even without the variety available at Amazon, the “always low prices, always” promised in these huge one-stop-shopping emporia are enough to keep people coming back again and again.
The funny thing about those “always low prices” is that they’re actually not always so low. Sam Walton’s whole shtick, starting with his very first store in Arkansas in 1962, was to stack popular items like shampoo and toothpaste at the front of the store, marked with ostentatious price tags that were well below cost. These are known as “loss leaders”: they lured customers into the store and away from competing vendors. Once inside, people would usually buy additional products that were priced to make a profit.72 A 2005 Consumer Reports analysis showed that big retailers like Wal-Mart rely on tricky pricing structures that make customers think their prices are lower, but that’s not always the case.73 Also, Wal-Mart often opens a new store in a new market with steep discounts to snuff out the competition and then raises its prices when there’s no place else to shop.74 That practice has earned Wal-Mart massive criticism from activists across the country, who blame the retail giant for undermining diverse local economies and communities.
And regardless what the price tag says, the true cost of every single product at Wal-Mart is actually much, much higher. The real costs start with raw materials that are often pillaged from poor countries or subsidized by the government and which leave behind a trail of tragic consequences for the earth’s water, animals, air, forests, and people. The costs continue with hot, poorly ventilated factories in Asia, where thousands of workers slave away for less than five dollars per day, often exposed to toxic chemicals without adequate protection or health care, forced to work unpaid overtime, with little hope of rising out of their dismal situations. And the costs culminate in the stores, where many employees earn so little that they fall underneath the federal poverty line. According to WakeUpWalmart.com, a U.S. campaign working to make the megastore improve its operations, the average full-time associate (as Wal-Mart workers are called) earned $10.84 an hour in 2008. The annual salary of $19,165 (for a thirty-four-hour work week) is $2,000 below the U.S. federal poverty line. By contrast, in 2007 Wal-Mart’s CEO, Lee Scott, earned $29.7 million, or 1,550 times the annual income of an average full-time Wal-Mart associate.75
Watchdog groups report that stores are regularly understaffed to save the corporation even more money, and managers have been caught secretly deleting hours, especially overtime, from time cards.76 Employees are paid so little that most can’t afford the company health car
e program, resulting in about half of Wal-Mart’s 1.4 million U.S. employees not being covered by the plan.77 Often workers are outright encouraged by Wal-Mart management to get federal assistance like Medicaid, food stamps, and subsidized housing. In fact, according to the Washington, D.C., based organization Good Jobs First, in the twenty-one out of twenty-three states for which data is available, Wal-Mart forces more employees to rely on taxpayer-funded health care than any other employer.78
So instead of Wal-Mart providing many employees with health care coverage, the American taxpayer does. Nor does taxpayer support of the company end there. We unwitting taxpayers have heavily subsidized Wal-Mart’s success. Good Jobs First maintains a project called Wal-Mart Subsidy Watch that tracks and exposes how U.S. taxpayer money supports Wal-Mart’s operations, like the “more than $1.2 billion in tax breaks, free land, infrastructure assistance, low-cost financing and outright grants from state and local governments around the country.”79
And just try to put a dollar value on the social fabric of a community, which Wal-Mart megastores have repeatedly undermined. What’s the value of pedestrian-friendly town centers and neighborhoods, bustling with a diverse and locally-based retail mix, with storekeepers who know our names leaning over their counters to ask our kids how school is going or willing to let us pay tomorrow when we accidentally left our wallet at home? Priceless.
Not to mention the wetlands, farmland, and forests which are often cleared for the twelve-acre plots that an average big-box retailer plus its mandatory parking lot takes up.80 Wal-Mart also operates over 100 distribution centers in the United States, vast warehouses churning away 24/7, each with five miles of conveyor belts that pump nine thousand different tracks of Stuff into waiting trailers.81 Each of these distribution centers takes up 400,000 to 1 million square feet of space.82 To put that in perspective, 1 million square feet is about twenty football fields. Across the country, Wal-Mart has eviscerated thousands of small towns and natural landscapes; those losses are part of the true cost of the “always low prices” too.
And the costs don’t end there. What comes between the raw materials, factories, distribution centers, and stores? Those trucks, container barges, and airplanes I mentioned earlier. Not surprisingly, no company has more trucks on America’s roads than Wal-Mart, with more than eight thousand drivers racking up more than 850 million miles per year.83 Wal-Mart, like most major retailers, frequently deals with trucking brokers who sell their services as independent contractors. This means Wal-Mart doesn’t have to buy or maintain the trucks, pay for fuel, or provide benefits for these contracted drivers—no health insurance, unemployment insurance, workers’ comp, Social Security, pension plans, vacations, or sick days. This also means they’re not required to ensure compliance with federal OSHA (Occupational, Safety and Health Administration) regulations for drivers.84 A study in New Jersey found that 75 percent of truckers (statewide, not Wal-Mart’s alone) were independent contractors, earning just $28,000 per year on average, with zero employer-paid benefits.85 Like Wal-Mart’s store employees, these drivers have to rely on public health care programs, so taxpayers are essentially also subsidizing Wal-Mart’s and other retailers’ transport systems.
Given all of this, it’s hard to take Wal-Mart seriously when it broadcasts its commitment to sustainability. Yes, Wal-Mart has made some real environmental improvements in its operations. Sources that are closer to the company than I am swear there’s a sincere environmental awareness growing among many within the company leadership. Wal-Mart has switched its corporate fleet of cars to hybrids, made more of its packaging biodegradable and recyclable, installed solar panels on some stores, and even committed to eliminate PVC shower curtains and kids toys containing the toxic chemical phthalates.86 The question is whether, in the big picture, these steps even matter. Wal-Mart still has a major problem with scale. It is moving so much non-durable toxic-laden Stuff so fast and so far that all the hybrid cars and solar panels in the world couldn’t negate its enormous footprint.
I mean really: consider Wal-Mart’s boasting that “by reducing the packaging on one of our patio sets we were able to use four hundred fewer shipping containers to deliver them.”87 How many shipping containers must be required to ship the patio furniture around the world if there was an excess of four hundred containers just from tightening up some of the packaging? There’s something wrong with a distribution system that constantly ships everything from T-shirts to patio furniture halfway around the world. In the era of increasing resource scarcity and climate change, this model just doesn’t make sense.
Superstores: Superbad
Wal-Mart is the epitome of the larger phenomenon of the rise of big-box stores. Although maybe you can hardly remember—and certainly kids today can’t imagine—a time when stores like Target, Costco, and Wal-Mart didn’t exist at every turn, they are a relatively new phenomenon that really only took off in the 1980s. Chain stores like Woolworth’s started in the late nineteenth century, followed by stores like Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. By 1929 chains like these controlled 22 percent of the retail market. But by the mid-1950s they’d hardly grown, to less than 24 percent. That was partially because many people boycotted them, especially in the wake of the stock market collapse, believing (correctly) that chains drove down wages and undermined democracy by concentrating power in the hands of a few.88
But then in the 1950s came the explosion of suburban homes and with them the development of suburban shopping malls. Taxpayers paid hundreds of billions of dollars for the interstate highways that made this new style of life possible, while banks favored new suburban developments over established neighborhoods in their lending practices. Then, in 1954, Congress changed the tax code to make it more profitable for developers to create shopping malls, basically making a tax shelter out of shopping mall construction.89 As Stacy Mitchell writes in Big-Box Swindle, 6 million square feet of shopping centers were constructed in 1953; just three years later that figure had increased by 500 percent; and over the next twenty years, eighteen thousand shopping centers were built across the United States.90 And the owners of these shopping centers often preferred to make chain stores their tenants (considered a better bet for a landlord), some actually going so far as to bar independently owned stores.91
Today, cashing in on local municipalities’ eagerness to have one in their community, big-box stores receive local and state subsidies and tax breaks. Local municipalities hope that having a local big-box store will increase economic growth, provide new jobs, and boost tax revenues, but unfortunately that isn’t always borne out. Instead, big-boxes siphon money out of the local economy so those lucky Walton family members (and other chains’ shareholders) can acquire another private jet for their extensive fleet and build a new wing on their nuclear-disaster-ready underground fortress (it’s true).92 Big-box payroll typically accounts for less than ten cents of every dollar spent at a given store,93 and, in a domino effect, their low wages (16 percent less for Wal-Mart workers than the average retail worker in 2008, for example94) help suppress the wages of retail workers everywhere. Meanwhile, big-box chains have massive budgets and even specially trained response teams to counter any attempts of workers to unionize and improve their situations. According to WakeUpWalmart.com, the company has even created “A Manager’s Toolbox to Remaining Union Free.” The toolbox lists warning signs of potential organizing activities such as “frequent meetings at associates’ homes” and “associates who are never seen together start talking or associating with each other.”95
Because of their size, big-box stores and other chains are able to hold prices artificially low for as long as it takes to drive local independently owned enterprises out of business, even if this takes years. Other local economic activity is also hampered: for example, rather than hiring local accountants or graphic designers and placing ads in local newspapers as locally owned smaller stores do, the big-box headquarters handles it. Commercial real estate prices have been shown to drop the mi
nute there’s a plan for a new big-box in town, because people foresee hardships for existing businesses and difficulty finding new investors for the emptied-out storefronts.96
Obviously, because so much of their manufacturing-related work has been outsourced overseas to lower-wage factories in regions with weaker environmental regulations and enforcement, the big-boxes have effectively eliminated thousands if not millions of jobs in American manufacturing. That was the “giant sucking sound” that U.S. 1992 presidential candidate Ross Perot claimed NAFTA would create as scores of jobs disappeared from the U.S. economy and relocated to Mexico.97 (More recently, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman opined that “the Mexicans... are hearing ‘the giant sucking sound’ in stereo these days—from China in one ear and India in the other.”98)
All of this has fundamentally changed the landscape of this country. I mean that physically, with the total amount of retail space doubling between 1990 and 2005, from 19 to 38 square feet per person, and for every new square foot of store space, another 3 to 4 square feet paved for cars.99 But I also mean it socioeconomically: this country’s middle class, traditionally sustained by manufacturing jobs and small business ownership, has lost one opportunity after another while the rich accumulate unprecedented profits. So even with the nation’s overall economic growth, the gap between rich and poor keeps widening. CEO pay versus worker pay is just one indicator of this: In the 1970s, for example, the head of a large corporation earned 30 times as much as the average worker. By 1997, CEOs earned 116 times as much as the average worker. And by 2007, CEOs were earning nearly 300 times as much as the average worker.100
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