RURAL BANTER

Author: ERICA GOODMAN

Some towns pass along gossip. Others send the good old flu circulating. Middlebury has its own ideas of what to spread through a community. A petition to limit retail expansion with nearly 1,000 signatures from Addison County residents was brought to the meeting of the Select Board on Tuesday night. Although Hannaford may seem like a godsend of supermarket modernity - and a double blessing for our wallets - opening huge retail stores does a number on the local economy. Wal-Mart has announced plans to erect more stores in Vermont, and they have a profound interest in our area. So what effect would a store like Wal-Mart have on a small community like Middlebury? That is precisely the issue which Middlebury-area resident and Scholar in Residence in Environmental Studies Bill McKibben tackled in last week's Addison Independent. He has spent time researching the rise of superstores for an upcoming book on local economies and here is what he has uncovered.

Indeed, the retail giant would offer a variety of goods at much lower prices and at a greater convenience. Frequent shoppers at Wal-Mart would save an estimate d$54 a year! Enough to.... well, buy a pair of sneakers. The cost of every Wal-Mart customer sporting a new pair of kicks would mean the shutting down of local businesses. An average 84 percent of Wal-Mart sales come at the cost of area stores. The fact is drilled into the company's work methodology. A former Wal-Mart employee slogan perhaps could summarize it best - "Stack it deep, sell it cheap, stack high, watch it fly, hear those downtown merchants cry." Forth ' n' Goal, the Alpine Shop. Oh how we will miss you so. But wait! The long-standing Middlebury merchants may lose their beloved shops, however, a new flurry of jobs awaits the hard-working, motivated individual ready to "roll back the prices." Right? Umm, not quite. As McKibben pointed out, Wal-Mart actually destroys more jobs than it creates - an average 230 to 140, respectively.

Recent studies have shed light on the huge vacancy left in towns where Wal-Mart or other superstores have put down their aisles. Wal-Mart employees are more likely to rely on state-provided healthcare or arrive at the emergency room without any insurance at all. Areas with the presence of a Wal-Mart have seen a rise in family poverty rates as money allocated back to the superstore is directed to the faceless stockholders, not the surrounding community. Local stores, in turn, reimburse their communities by donating four times as much profit percentage to local charities as do the superstores. I suppose the bouncing smiley face in TV commercials is meant to brighten customers' and employees' self-esteem and not their bank accounts. But just think how great those $54 pair of shoes will look on everyone in Middlebury.