Town & Country Planning, July/August 2006
Last week, I went to see the latest in the American trend of Michael Moore-style committed documentaries as feature films. Wal-mart: The high cost of low price wasn’t quite Fahrenheit 9/11 or Supersize Me, but it carried a pretty powerful message.
I left the private air-conditioned cinema in Soho – this is not a film on general release – completely convinced the civilisation needs to act against Wal-mart and all those like them. This might be an extreme reaction, and it was a hot day, but I’ve stayed pretty much of the same view since.
Before watching the film, I had assumed that the damage to communities, local economies, families and suppliers was somehow an unexpected side-effect of centralised monopolistic supermarket chains. The film made me re-consider this: I now believe it may actually be deliberate.
Not perhaps the damage to families, but the destruction of communities does seem to be a planned policy. The strategy, and the pricing policy is designed to ruin small competitors and to make neighbourhoods dependent.
That is a hard message to swallow, but as Wal-mart closes its stores all over America, shifting into their new ‘Supercenters’ – each one with space for 26,000 cars – they leave behind utterly dependent, impoverished, crime-ridden, rubbish strewn towns, and that must not be allowed to happen here.
Two incidents since have reminded me of just how similar the situation is in the UK, potentially at least.
One is the saga of Queen’s Market in Newham, east London, which features in the Wal-mart film because it is a successful, traditional, multi-cultural market which is about to be bulldozed to make way for an Asda, which – as you probably know – is part of the Wal-mart evil empire.
My New Economics Foundation colleague Guy Rubin has been studying the potential impact of the development and found that the market actually generates £13m a year for the neighbourhood and supports 581 jobs, most of them local people – way beyond what Asda would manage.
It also provides an enormous variety of fruit and vegetables at prices 53 per cent cheaper than the nearest Asda.
Thanks to this research, and the film, and the skilful campaign by the Friends of Queen’s Market, Asda has now pulled out, though the market still has to be saved from the vandalism of Newham Council (who should know better) and developers St Modwen Properties.
UK local authorities are demonstrating exactly the same kind of naivety that their American equivalents did when they gave Wal-mart a subsidised toehold and ruined themselves.
They still believe that big superstores are somehow such a valuable addition to the local scene – providing jobs and low cost food – that they must be subsidised, like none of their smaller competitors, to set up locally.
The low cost food is a myth, at least compared to local markets. Beyond that, the truth is this: except in some specific circumstances when there really is nothing else, big supermarket developments tend to leech money and employment out of a local area, under the noses of the local councillors – who imagined that those vast headline figures they heard when the whole project was planned were somehow going to stay put.
The rejection of a number of Wal-mart Supercenters after a series of local ballots in the USA is some evidence that this is becoming more generally understood.
The other incident which makes the parallels between the USA and UK apparent took place at the rare semi-public appearance by a nervous Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco, at the Work Foundation in London.
I should explain that, at the end of the Wal-mart film, their CEO Lee Scott is asked what he thinks about the local campaigns against new Super-centers. He replies that it would be a mistake to listen to a “small minority”.
Oddly enough, Leahy was asked almost exactly the same question at the Work Foundation meeting, having announced that they will “consult local communities before building new stores”. What would they do if they communities say no?
Just like Scott, Leahy appealed to the “silent majority” who really wanted a new Tesco.
I don’t know quite what he meant, but he certainly gave the impression that – consultation or no consultation – Tesco will not be taking no as an answer.
I usually find myself in this column raging on about the centralisation of the public sector, but the centralisation of the private sector is probably even more insidious – and for much the same reasons. Centralised monoliths, that recognise no local diversity and no individuality, corrode what is most valuable, human, adaptable and sustainable.
And effective, which is why they don’t work for local economies very well in the long run. A quick glance at the devastated communities where Wal-mart has been and gone is evidence enough for me.