3c hapter - Index of

The Local Imperative 55
In their relentless quest for ever- lower prices, the mega- retailers
squeeze the margins of their suppliers, prompting virtually all
to seek the lowest cost manufacturing overseas. Suppliers often
look to make up some of the lost margin with less powerful retailers—the
independents. In recent years, the mega- retailers have
expanded into private label, launching their own brands, which
compete with the products of their longtime suppliers. That’s
driven many consumer- products makers to merge with competitors
or worse, into bankruptcy. Four of Walmart’s top 10 suppliers
in 2004 fi led for bankruptcy protection by 2006. 19 In this way, the
big- box squeeze has contributed to the consolidation of corporate
power and the bleeding of jobs overseas.
And we haven’t even touched on environmental issues such
as massive runoff from the acres of parking lots that pollutes our
waterways, the abandoned big-box shells that litter the landscape,
and the increased car travel involved in going to the store. As
Mitchell has noted, in the late 1970s, the average household drove
1,200 miles a year for shopping. That fi gure has tripled, to about
3,600 miles. After the 1970s, she writes, “stores got a lot bigger.
Between 1982 and 2002, more than 100,000 small retailers disappeared.
The big- box stores that replaced them were many times
larger, far fewer in number, and thus served larger geographic
areas.” 20
The Price of Power
As corporate power has consolidated in every fi eld, from healthcare
to agriculture to fi nance, Big Business has furthered its stranglehold
on government and society. Corporations spend hundreds of
millions of dollars every year on lobbying and political campaigns.
Many of these corporations’ executives and lobbyists end up running
government agencies that oversee their former industries.
Corporations not only infl uence legislation, they also write it.
In 2009, as important legislation from health care to fi nancial
reform was being considered by Congress, big business mobilized.
Less than a year after their near- death experience, fi nancial fi rms
poured a record $78 million into the coffers of federal candidates