Two weeks ago I wrote about how Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz’s former organization is the opposition in the Monona Wal-Mart Battle and commented that Monona citizens should be concerned that Madison is “in effect” working to control their municipal development. The opposition has set up a website called A Better Monona which covers their campaign to prevent a new store from opening. One post reads in part:
“The Supercenter will certainly raise the property tax value of that land, and provide jobs to staff and manage the store. But the NET taxes and NET jobs within the city depend also on how many local businesses have to cut jobs or close down in the face of Wal-Mart's predatory pricing.”The post then offers a link to a “balanced and thoughtful” article entitled How Do You Deal with the Entry of a New Wal-Mart Supercenter into Your Town?
“My studies of Wal-Mart supercenters in Iowa and Mississippi have shown that total local sales usually increase after the opening of a supercenter. This is because a huge store like this one will keep a lot of residents shopping at home, rather than outshopping to other localities, and it will also attract more residents from outlying areas.This is an absolutely fair and balanced assessment of the local economic effects of a Wal-Mart Supercenter. It makes me wonder if Dane County Commissioner Brett Hulsey or anyone from Dave Cieslewicz’s 1000 Friends of Wisconsin actually read the link they were posting. In all probability, some eager “activist” took the “resources” Kevin Pomeroy provided and liked the title of this article enough to include it in the post.
This effect can be observed in most communities of up to 50,000 or so in population. In larger places, the impact of one store is hard to measure;
In summary, a new supercenter makes the host place more of a regional trade center. In larger communities, it sometimes forms a critical mass that attracts such other chain stores as home improvement and office supply retailers and restaurants.”
Let me put the findings in other terms. A Supercenter has both good and bad economic effects and the size of the community is directly related to the severity of any adverse effects. If I drop a bowling ball into a 25 gallon aquarium it pretty much messes everything up. If I drop a bowling ball into Lake Monona the ripples are barely enough to bounce a floating baby duck. The opposition will attack with wave after wave of anecdotal evidence of small business disruption, so it will be useful to question what size of little town suffered the horror stories.
