Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses

By Stacy Mitchell

Beacon Press, 2007, 336 pp., $15 paperback

Big-Box Swindle, one of the most informative books yet published on how chain stores expand and on the damage that many of them do to communities and the built environment, has been brought out in a paperback edition. Written by Stacy Mitchell and first published in hardcover in 2006, Big-Box Swindle explores the cost of mega-retailers on many fronts — blighted landscapes, independent merchants put out of business, civic engagement reduced, local property tax revenues endangered, prices cut for some items but not for others.

Perhaps the most surprising finding made by Mitchell, a senior researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, is that big-box stores often end up reducing the breadth of merchandise from which consumers can choose. Though large chain stores carry plenty of products, the effect of the giant retailers is to drive out of business many independent merchants that offered things not found in the nationally or globally operated stores.

“Although individually they are considerably smaller than their big-box rivals, collectively, independent stores stock a much wider array of products,” Mitchell reports. “This is because they each make their own decisions about what to carry, while at the chains these choices are determined by a handful of buyers at corporate headquarters. This is especially important with regard to books, music, and movies.”

On prices, she writes: “Surveys in several states have found that independent pharmacies, most of which belong to buying groups, have the lowest prices on average, beating drugstore chains, supermarkets, and even Wal-Mart and Target. Independent appliance dealers had better prices than Wal-Mart and most large chains, according to a 2005 Consumer Reports analysis.”

Mitchell examines why the US has more shopping centers per capita than Canada and why they tend to be of so little lasting value. One reason, she says, is the shift made in the US tax code in the 1960s to accelerated depreciation. “Structures built under accelerated depreciation were intended to be disposable,” she says, quoting historian Thomas Hanchett. “You reaped the tax break as long as the law allowed, usually seven to fifteen years, then unloaded the project.”

Mitchell does an engrossing job of covering the major flaws in the American retailing system. Read this book and you’ll have a deeper understanding of the forces that new urbanists are up against in the effort to produce retail environments imbued with character.