Across the river in New Hampshire a Wal-Mart supercenter is going in.  On iBrattleboro, someone linked their local currency campaign to concern that Wal-Mart was going to sap away the business from the two existing supermarkets in town (which I presume it will).

Two issues here - the local currency, which sounds good to me - and Wal-Mart vs. Hanniford's and Price Chopper. It's that latter that I want to address.

I can't cry too much for Hanniford's or Price Chopper loosing business to Wal-Mart. They are all big corporations.

Do you know anything about Price Chopper and Hanniford's? I thought not.

Price Chopper is actually the most local and least corporate. It's 55% employee owned and 45% owned by it's founding family and based out of the Albany area. They operate 116 stores. More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_Chopper_%28New_York%29

Hanniford's is part of a large multi-national, the Belgian Delhaize Group, Delhaize America, which owns over 1,500 stores along the Eastern Seaboard including Food Lion and Sweetbay Supermarket, and 2,705 worldwide. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_Chopper_%28New_York%29

And Wal-Mart we do something about, it's a publicly traded American company with about 6,000 stores world wide (40% outside the US).

An argument can be made that Price Chopper is a good corporate citizen that deserves our support, but I don't here people saying that. What I hear is simply anti-Wal-Mart. Frankly I believe a lot of that snobbishness, a prejudice against people with less income and education. I'm not defending Wal-Mart, but I think they are simply quite successful at playing the same game that all the rest of the corporate players (including Price Chopper) are playing. I don't agree with Wal-Mart's hiring practices, but I don't see that Hanniford's and Price Chopper are significantly better (a little maybe, but still with all the same problems). Wal-Mart has a decent environmental and charitable record when compared to other stores. What really needs to happen isn't choosing to shop at Wal-Mart or Target or Sears or whatever, but rewriting our relationship to stuff. That means not shopping locally, either.

Besides the whole 'Shop Locally' debate ignores the realities of the retail distribution system. The Brattleboro Coop is a local retailer and that's good, but most of what it sells is from the same distributors in New Hampshire or New Jersey that supply the rest of the Northeast. Same idea with Brown & Roberts. And that's good - it uses less energy to do it that way. If you really want to shop locally, go to the farmers market or Harlow's Farm Stand. But understand that that system is not necessarily energy efficient because moving food short distances actually uses much more energy per mile than using the conventional retail distribution system, built on volume.

People have voted: they want to shop at Wal-Mart. Not accepting that is either to contradict people's democratic free desires or to play into the campaigns of competitors.