Mom-and-pop stores

Some do not lament the passing of Mom-and-pop stores from cities (especially urban centers, i.e. "downtown") as big box stores like Walmart gain ascendancy. After all, Walmart satisfies the needs of its customers, does it not? And gives them what they want at low, low prices. Given the role of the merchant and the trader to the economic life of a community, is it not surprising that those who can achieve positive economies of scale and have advantages conferred by governments will win out over small business owners?

Stacy Mitchell recommends in "What to Do About Walmart":

3. Support Small Business Creation
We've lost tens of thousands of independent businesses over the last decade and, with them, an important part of the fabric of American life. Small businesses contribute significantly to the vitality of local economies. They nurture social capital, disperse wealth and vest decision-making in local communities rather than corporate headquarters. They are the means by which generations of families have pulled themselves into the middle class.

But small businesses have long been on the losing end of government policy. Local and state governments have spent billions subsidizing the construction of big-box stores. Nearly half the states have corporate income tax policies that give significant advantages to national chains. Local zoning boards routinely bend and break the rules to accommodate big retailers, while telling small businesses that it's their own problem if they cannot "compete."

What might our economy look like if we reversed these policies? What might happen if we redirected all those corporate subsidies to small business development? We could set up business incubators, training programs and revolving loan funds. What if we stopped creating tax increment financing zones to support Wal-Mart and instead established Independent Business Investment Zones, as some in Austin, Texas, are calling for? What if our land use and transportation policies no longer fueled big-box sprawl but fostered small businesses embedded in neighborhoods and town centers, so we could once again walk to the store?

But does this go far enough, fostering the businesses of small merchants? Relocalization, either as a response to peak oil, or as a requirement of good practical reason, demands more. Why?

Merchants do not produce anything, but instead act as intermediaries, facilitating the exchange of goods between producers, those who obtain raw materials and producers, producers and other merchants, producers and consumers, or merchants and consumers. (This is not mean to be an exhaustive list of possible relationships -- merchants can also act as middle-men between other merchants.) I'll reserve the term trade for exchanges between communities or members of different communities, and not exchanges that take place within a community. (And by community I am usually referring to that lowest level of political organization which can be considered as such, being perfect as Aristotle explains in the Politics, or close to it.)

It seems uncontroversial to say that the agrarian base of larger American towns and cities has gradually been lost. I do not know who produced the majority of the other goods used in those cities--members of the community? Or were these brought in by merchants? One cannot give a narrative that applies to every single American city--undoubtedly some were more self-sufficient than others.

When we talk of relocalization, we do not mean that what we are aiming for is an economy of mom-and-pop merchants, though an increase in their may be laudable in so far as a local economy is preserved (and this can especially done through the adoption of local currencies). Rather, in the ideal arrangement producers would sell directly to those who would use their products, and thus the need for a merchant/middle man would be eliminated. I don't see why this would not be feasible for a city of a reasonable size. This would be true even of farmers selling food at the market; living and farming in close proximity to the city there would not be a need for highly advanced modes of transportation (i.e. vehicles running on fossil fuels).

In self-sufficient poleis, there would be no need for retail corporations like WalMart, though there is a place for corporations like guilds. While WalMart does not necessarily initiate the destruction of self-sufficiency and in many cases its dominance may just be the final phase of that process, nonetheless it has its own negative impacts on the political economy peculiar to it and the other corporations behind the big box stores.

wiki: Returns to Scale not the same as economies of scale