Shopping to feed the beast...

When we think back to the “good old days” of the 50’s and 60’s we think about the birth of the automobile, prosperity and a better future. It was the combination of wanting to improve your life (a need created by consumerism), the ability to pay for it (thanks to a rising standard of living), and increased opportunity brought by the increased mobility of the automobile. Stores, most notably the food drive-ins, seeing this reliance on the automobile realised that if they made accommodation for it, people were more likely to visit there stores over other, thus leading to an abandonment of the downtown, with its limited parking, for the wide open parking lots of the suburbs. The birth of a mobile society addicted to the car, and its bloated parking lots, lead, inevitably to a powerful yet simple idea. Get together several stores onto a single location that could share a common parking lot would have several befits. They could share the costs of construction (for the common lot). They would also create a ready clientele for each other because as a person went to one of the stores for a need, it would be simple for them to stop and the other stores because they were so convenient. It was at this time that we saw the birth of the strip mall.
In the early days of the malls, stores would band together to stimulate sales. This effect could be amplified by enclosing the mall and the strip mall turned into the mega mall. There was no need to compete directly with each other (unless you were selling the same products) because the standard of living was rising so people would “always” have more money tomorrow to spend, there was plenty for all. To increase this money pump malls expanded to include more than stores and services but entertainment facilities became both a means to drive more people into the malls and to ensure they left with yet lighter wallets. This was possible, achieving an increase in sales each year, because prosperity was shared, thanks to some degree to unions, and progress was every onward this model worked, but this changed in the 70’s when this was no longer the case.
As capitalism reached it peak and corporatism because to replace it, people were not getting the rise in income as they did before. Corporatism changed the ethos to an "all for the head and nothing to the hands"; this coupled with the beginning of the destruction of the union movement meant an end to the prosperity of the west. Coincidently the rising independence of the “third world” mean that there was no longed a limitless pool to create more wealth as those people were no longer willing to ship the benefits offshore and demanded more for themselves, thus progress was no longer a moment up but of spreading out that which already existed. So now we still had the mobile society but the era of prosperity and progress was gone, but the stores remained and now need to rethink their business as their customers began to reduce their spending.
The first response to this crisis was not to change the business model to accommodate this more stable environment, no; the insatiable appetite of corporatism forced the business to find new ways to feed off the consumer. The invention of credit, well the credit card and financing, allowed the consumer to spend beyond their means, to artificial experience a rising standard of living at the expense of their long term economic health. Businesses created a new culture of buy to day and pay tomorrow, and if done right there would be no tomorrow as revolving credit meant you would always be able to charge as long as you were willing to sign over your pay cheque, all you cheques to the credit company. Those business people, who thought about it, could believe that people would use credit as a tool, and not as a drug but if we learned anything about the birth of the automobile, western cultures love addiction and soon we were addicted to credit.
By the 80’s we had a consumer society that saw credit the same as most see food, both a necessity of life and a status symbol but then the recession hit which showed the less fortunate that credit would not always be there and some entrepreneurs saw the writing on the wall when the credit flood would crest. This is why in the 90’s we saw the introduction of the box store. This took the basic idea of the shopping mall but reduced the number of stake-holders, thus profit takers, to one. The mall was failing because as money and credit dried up stored were competing for an ever shrinking pool of money. It was no longer the consideration of where will I buy my stereo, it was do I buy a stereo, cloths or food, this new competition made the enclosed space of the mall a liability because people who were going to your store to buy something could be lured away and spend there money else were. But people expected one stop shopping, there was no going back to the small independent, so the big box store provided the perfect, well for them, answer to this problem. By providing a complete line of goods people would still be driven to your store, but because you were the one selling everything, there was no risk of loosing sales because there were all yours. There was also another side effect that made this more profitable than first hopped, by locating these big box stored in isolated areas, you could buy land cheap, get concessions for local governments, prevent people from wandering to competitors or worse price comparing and finally you could afford to loose money on some items because you could make it back on others. Once you had them in your store they would buy, so you created the lost leader, an item sold below cost to people out of your competitors store and into yours. If you were lucky and were the first big box in town you could use this strategy no only to get customers but kill the competitions because the smaller stores did not have the depth of products to make up for the losses of the lost leader, so they could not compete as the mindless consumer were to the cheapest appearing price. Eventually the other local stores close and now the big box could make it highest profits because there was no need to have the lost leader, there were no other stored to buy from so they could dictate pricing. But it does not end there, because they have become, thanks to their predatory pricing, the biggest employer in town, they can dictate to local government, and they are the only ones with enough capital to buy the not-so-local politicians.
Thus the big box has removed its competitions, enslaved its consumer base and bought the tools of civil control, government. There is one show in town and you let it happen, when you go to Wal-Mart, or its many imitators, you save money now, but at the expense of your future. Don’t let it happen in your neighbourhood, protest and block any plans to build them in you community. If they already have a foothold in you life, cut them off, you have the choice to buy from them or not, so don’t. Frequent that local shop, even if it does cost a few more pennies, think of it as investing in your future, the future of the generations to come. Evil only need good people to sit back and do nothing to triumph, do not let you shopping habits feed the beast.