The coming implosion of big box retail implies tremendous opportunities
for young people to make a livelihood in the imperative rebuilding of
local economies.
Global currency wars (competitive devaluations) are about to destroy
trade relationships. Say goodbye to the 12,000 mile supply chain from
Guangzhou to Hackensack. Say goodbye to the growth financing model in
which it becomes necessary to open dozens of new stores every year to
keep the credit revolving.
Then there is the matter of the
American customers themselves. The WalMart shoppers are exactly the
demographic that is getting squashed in the contraction of this
phony-baloney corporate buccaneer parasite revolving credit crony
capital economy. Unlike the Federal Reserve, WalMart shoppers can't
print their own money, and they can't bundle their MasterCard and Visa
debts into CDOs to be fobbed off on Scandinavian pension funds for quick
profits.
They have only one real choice: buy less stuff, especially the stuff of leisure, comfort, and convenience.
The
potential for all sorts of economic hardship is obvious in this
burgeoning dynamic. But the coming implosion of big box retail implies
tremendous opportunities for young people to make a livelihood in the
imperative rebuilding of local economies.
Back in the day
when big box retail started to explode upon the American landscape like a
raging economic scrofula, I attended many a town planning board meeting
where the pro and con factions faced off over the permitting hurdle.
The
meetings were often raucous and wrathful and almost all the time the
pro forces won — for the excellent reason that they were funded and
organized by the chain stores themselves (in an early demonstration of
the new axioms that money-is-speech and corporations are people, too!).
The
chain stores won not only because they flung money around — sometimes
directly into the wallets of public officials — but because a sizeable
chunk of every local population longed for the dazzling new mode of
commerce. "We Want Bargain Shopping" was their rallying cry.
The
unintended consequence of their victories through the 1970s and beyond
was the total destruction of local economic networks, that is, Main
Streets and downtowns, in effect destroying many of their own
livelihoods. Wasn't that a bargain, though?
Despite the obvious
damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home
town, WalMart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American
Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola. In most of
the country there is no other place to buy goods (and no other place to
get a paycheck, scant and demeaning as it may be). America made itself
hostage to bargain shopping and then committed suicide. Here we find
another axiom of human affairs at work: People get what they deserve,
not what they expect. Life is tragic.
The older generations
responsible for all that may be done for, but the momentum has now
turned in the opposite direction. Though the public hasn't groked it
yet, WalMart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own
yeast-overgrowth death spiral. In a now permanently contracting economy
the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality
is now poised to squash them.
Diesel fuel prices are heading well
north of $4 again. If they push toward $5 this year you can say goodbye
to the "warehouse on wheels" distribution method. (The truckers, who
are mostly independent contractors, can say hello to the re-po men come
to take possession of their mortgaged rigs.)
At this stage it is
probably discouraging for them, because all their life programming has
conditioned them to be hostages of giant corporations and so to feel
helpless. In a town like the old factory village I live in (population
2500) few of the few remaining young adults might venture to open a
retail operation in one of the dozen-odd vacant storefronts on Main
Street.
The presence of K-Mart, Tractor Supply, and Radio Shack a
quarter mile west in the strip mall would seem to mock their dim
inklings that something is in the wind. But K-Mart will close over 200
boxes this year, and Radio Shack is committed to shutter around 500
stores. They could be gone in this town well before Santa Claus starts
checking his lists. If they go down, opportunities will blossom. There
will be no new chain store brands to replace the dying ones. That phase
of our history is over.
What we're on the brink of is scale
implosion. Everything gigantic in American life is about to get smaller
or die. Everything that we do to support economic activities at gigantic
scale is going to hamper our journey into the new reality. The campaign
to sustain the unsustainable, which is the official policy of US
leadership, will only produce deeper whirls of entropy.
I hope
young people recognize this and can marshal their enthusiasm to get to
work. It's already happening in the local farming scene; now it needs to
happen in a commercial economy that will support local agriculture.
The
additional tragedy of the big box saga is that it scuttled social roles
and social relations in every American community. On top of the insult
of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also
destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the
duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt
citizens to care for each other.
We can get that all back, but it won't be a bargain.
