Tag Archives: big box store

When you build a Walmart in Chicago, you better make sure public transit goes there

Posted on by

A new Walmart under construction on Chicago’s South Side has a problem: public transit doesn’t make it all the way to the store.

CTA bus routes No. 106 East 103rd and No. 111 111th/King Drive currently stop at Cottage Grove Avenue, which is several blocks from the store that is part of a $135 million development.

Beale said he is outraged and he threatened to convene public hearings on the CTA bus routes if the situation is not rectified by the time the Wal-Mart opens this week.

The alderman said the retail developer built the site to accommodate buses with a bus turnaround and nearby sidewalks for commuters. He said CTA officials told him it would cost $680,000 a year to extend the two bus routes to the Wal-Mart. But Beale said the costs would be offset by the additional riders making trips to the store.

CTA officials, acknowledging that they signed the 2011 contract Beale described, said late Monday afternoon that the transit agency is working with the developer and Beale and will implement service “as soon as possible.”

It sounds like the CTA is behind on this one. At the same time, this provides an interesting contrast to the typical suburban or exurban Walmart which relies on a large parking lot full of drivers. Big box stores are still relatively rare in denser big cities, even as companies like Walmart and Target (their first Manhattan location opened three years ago) are looking to expand. Thus far, the Walmarts in Chicago are more on the edges of the city, lending themselves to driving.

It would be interesting to hear how the companies themselves, local residents, and the city describe how the big box experience changes in an urban area. This would be ripe for participant observation as the store opens and both changes and is influenced by the surrounding urban neighborhood.

How suburbs deal with the loss of a major big box retailer

Posted on by

Big box stores can provide a lot of tax revenue so when a big box store leaves a suburban community, it can be a big blow:

The unexpected closure — it was announced in April and the store shuttered in May — forced village officials to approve a series of last-minute budget cuts totaling $216,000.The largest savings came by cutting hours for part-time firefighters, a move that limited response times out of one of the village’s two stations. West Dundee also moved its 54 employees to a cheaper health insurance carrier, reduced hours for part-time and seasonal employees, eliminated a community service position in the police department, canceled a National Night Out event and decided to hold fewer board meetings…

But Rolling Meadows officials found themselves scrambling in January 2010 when Sam’s Club abruptly closed after eight years in business, City Manager Barry Krumftok said.

The closure meant the loss of about $600,000 in various annual revenues from the retailer — nearly an 8 percent loss to the general fund…

The city responded by eliminating two part-time jobs and four full-time positions among the police department’s civilian staff, delaying the hire of a finance director, eliminating holiday decorations and glow necklaces for kids at the tree-lighting ceremony, ending a program reserved to commemorate employee and volunteer milestones, and holding off on painting its historical museum, digitizing city records and parkway tree replacement, removal and trimming.

In many cases, big-box stores leave one town to build a bigger, better store just out of the taxman’s reach.

To paraphrase a common saying, if you live by the big box store, you can also die by the big box store. I can see why communities would want big box stores since they generate tremendous tax revenues but at the same time, communities would prefer to have a diversified economy where a single employer or firm doesn’t control a sizable portion of the municipal budget. This hasn’t just happened to suburbs reliant on big box stores; it has happened to communities reliant on single factories or industrial firms that might be prosperous for years or even decades but when business dries up, the community doesn’t have much recourse. It doesn’t sound like the big box stores are as big of a loss as some factories to some towns but a 5-10% revenue loss can be huge, particularly in a down economy.

Once the initial budget adjustments are made, then the loss of the big box store becomes perhaps even more problematic for smaller communities: can they find someone else to lease or buy the property? Should the community continue to pursue big box retailers or does it pursue different directions? In an economy that in recent years has been built on a consumer economy, many suburbs will probably redouble efforts and continue to pursue more white-collar, high-tech jobs but there are not enough of these to go around at the moment.

Illustrating problems with big retail in Naperville: push for more landscaping but offer sales tax rebate

Posted on by

The response from the city of Naperville to a proposal for a new Walmart in the suburb illustrates some of the issues communities face when approving big retail stores:

Councilman Grant Wehrli said he would like to see the store follow the lead of nearby Costco and Whole Foods by going “above and beyond” the city’s landscaping requirements.

“I would love to have Walmart come in, but I’m concerned about the landscaping. What I would like to see done there is for Walmart to follow the lead of the other two developments, literally across the two streets, and go above and beyond with the landscaping. It’s relatively inexpensive and the benefit to society is massive,” Wehrli said. “If we go to the higher standard of landscaping, we’re not just going to be like the Walmart in Buffalo Grove. It’s going to take that intersection to a higher level.”…

Wal-Mart representative Aaron Matson called the timing of the request “eleventh-hour,” but said they were doing the best they can to address the concerns…

“If we’re not careful with what we’re asking for, they may decide to say, ‘Hey, let’s move right across the street (to Aurora),” Krause said…

Wal-Mart officials still hope to break ground this year on the store that has also been awarded a $1.75 rebate in sales tax revenues over 10 years.

Here is how I interpret this:

1. The community is concerned with how Walmart looks and how it fits in with the nearby Springbrook Forest Preserve. Naperville has its share of ugly retail stretches, notably Ogden Avenue east of Washington Street and Route 59 south of the Burlington Northern tracks. In order to present a nicer image befitting of a wealthier suburb, Walmart needs to add some landscaping and go beyond typical requirements. I am amused by the comparison to Buffalo Grove. According to the Walmart Store Locator, there is no Walmart in Buffalo Grove though there is one very close by in Wheeling. Regardless, Naperville doesn’t want to have any run of the mill Walmart; they want one that reflects Naperville and helps distinguish it on the higher end from other suburbs.

2. Yet, the city may not be able to push the landscaping requests too far because Walmart could still locate their new store in nearby Aurora. In other words, the city has to offer a sales tax rebate because it cannot pass up this revenue source. Naperville officials may be particularly attuned to this because Naperville has lost retail business to Aurora before. In one notable case, the developer for the Fox Valley Mall played Naperville and Aurora against each other in the early 1970s, Naperville was less willing to budge, and the mall was built just across Route 59 in Aurora.

Overall, the community needs the tax money Walmart generates but they also want the store to be presentable. Such are the tensions today regarding big box stores.

Targeting suburban “Wal-Mart moms” in 2012 elections

Posted on by

Similar to the 2010 elections and echoing an analysis from November 2011, a commentator suggests the 2012 elections could be decided by suburban “Wal-Mart moms”:

Those voters most likely to remain undecided about their presidential preference are taking on a distinct profile, according to pollsters on both sides of the aisle: They’re suburban white women, between the ages of 35 and 55, who probably haven’t attained a college degree and who have kids under the age of 18. They very likely voted Democratic in 2008, then turned around and voted Republican two years later — if they voted at all. And polling and consumer research shows their focus is on their own household rather than national events…

Bratty and Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster, have extensively surveyed a group they call “Wal-Mart moms,” part of a clever campaign by the retail giant to associate itself with this year’s ultimate swing voter, similar to the oft-cited NASCAR dads of 2004, the soccer moms of 1996 or the hockey moms of 2008. The retailer has avoided getting too specific in terms of race, educational attainment, or geographic area — it defines the women as mothers who are registered to vote, have at least one child under 18 at home, and have shopped at Wal-Mart in the last month — but the group tracks closely with suburban, noncollege whites…

Consumer data backs up that sentiment. Wal-Mart moms are three times more likely than the average American to be interested in family or animated movies, dogs, and products like ketchup, frozen vegetables, and air fresheners, according to data collected by the consumer research firm Lotame. That indicates the women are the ones shopping for their families and are interested in saving pennies wherever they can. They are more interested in information on cruises, too, suggesting they’re eager to get away when their economic situation improves…

With such weighty economic situations on swing mothers’ minds, both pollsters say neither Obama’s nor Romney’s campaign has truly reached these voters yet. And both candidates face challenges in relating: Obama contends with a sense of disappointment that his first term hasn’t sped the economic recovery as much as they expected or that the recovery is leaving them behind. Romney contends with a growing sense that his business experience demonstrates he would favor the wealthy over the middle class.

For all of the talk about big money in elections, the American voter tends to be suburban and working/middle-class people looking for deals at places like Walmart.

One issue I have with analyses like these: they rarely give us the numbers to truly know the size of this group (how many Walmart moms are there really, particularly compared to other cleverly named demographic groups). Additionally, is this group distributed in such a way to really swing an election (in other words, are they located in sizable numbers in the swing states that matter)?

Might Target want to get in on this and start discussing “Target moms”? I assume these might be more educated, slightly more wealthy shoppers…

When the store with a cult following comes to town

Posted on by

I recently ran into an article about “16 Brands That Have Fanatical Cult Followings.” This got me thinking about how people want certain stores to move near them. Take this example from this article as several people expressed how much they wanted a Wegmans.

On its website, Wegmans writes that in 2003, almost 5,800 loyal customers wrote “love letters” to the company, with almost half of the letters including pleas to build supermarkets in their communities. One letter included rewritten lyrics to “Yesterday” by the Beatles:

Yesterday,
A Wegmans store, it seemed so far away.
But a new one opened in Dulles today.
Now I will drive
Towards Wegmans’ way.

Wegmans mania reached a new high when a group of musical theatre students in Massachusetts created an entire musical based on the brand. They rewrote popular Broadway songs in praise of the store.

That’s some devotion. And yet, this sort of interest isn’t uncommon. I’ll briefly mention some of the stores that prompt reactions from loyal residents and communities:

-Trader Joe’s is on this list. Multiple friends have told me how much they like this store and one mentioned how while on trips he was prone to finding the Trader Joe’s before leaving to grab things for home.

-I’ve heard similar things about Ikea.

-The article has an interesting conclusion: do some of the bigger brands count as cult favorites?

The infamous Cult of Mac spans far and wide, with a deep obsession with anything and everything Apple. Starbucks blankets America, driving endless droves of coffee-lovers to its baristas. Whole Foods fans swear by the huge supermarket chain’s pesticide free cantaloupes.

Are these followers still a cult if the companies they fawn over have grown into some of the world’s biggest and most successful multinational corporations?

I say yes. Even though these may be big brands, having one of these stores indicates that the community is on the map. This is a bit of strange logic – corporate America wants to be near us! – but it suggests some prestige. Plenty of communities around the United States would have to have a Starbucks. Now only would it bring in revenue and people, having a Starbucks indicates a community has a certain kind of customers (i.e., people with money to spend on coffee) and can also help attract other businesses. Second, I saw that several Facebook friends were very excited about Whole Foods moving to Mishawaka, Indiana. This is a classic case of a cult brand moving in: the South Bend/Mishawaka area is more blue-collar, middle America but having a Whole Foods suggests it has some more sophistication and wealthy residents. Third, Apple stores are less common so perhaps more meaningful: the Apple store in downtown Naperville suggests the place is akin to an upscale shopping mall or thriving big city.

Granted, there is some breaking point to this. Not every place is thrilled to have a Starbucks and some might argue that there are too many already (the company itself suggested this in recent years). In comparison, fewer people are thrilled about a Walmart moving in. There must be some threshold when too many chains are viewed negatively and start impinging on local culture. This threshold likely differs by type of place: places that hope to be “up and coming” likely welcome such stores while wealthier communities with some tradition and enough prestige resist such chains, no matter how cult friendly.

This discussion of cult brands also gets at the heart of Naomi Klein’s arguments in No Logo. Do we want to live in a world where people regularly select and interact with cult brands? Does this kind of devotion detract from more authentic civic life?

Study: home values increase several percent very near a Walmart

Posted on by

A new study suggests that the value of a home increases a few percent if it is located within a half-mile of a Walmart:

It turns out, according to their recently published research, that values increase an average of 2 to 3 percent for homes within half a mile of a Wal-Mart store and 1 to 2 percent when the home is a half mile to 1 mile from a store…

The duo studied more than 1 million home sales between January 1998 and January 2008 near 159 Wal-Marts that were built between July 2000 and January 2006. They compared the prices of homes within four miles of a store that sold up to 21/2 years before an opening or 21/2 years afterward. The long time frame was picked on purpose, after the researchers discovered that the median number of days between when Wal-Mart announced a new store and when it opened was 516 days.

The study also noted that Wal-Mart’s entry into a market often acts as a beacon, generating other economic development nearby…

“On average, the benefits to quick and easy access to the lower retail prices offered by Wal-Mart and shopping at these other stores appear to matter more to households than any increase in crime, traffic and congestion, noise and light pollution or other negative externalities that would be capitalized into housing prices,” the professors wrote.

One interpretation of these findings: people are willing to pay a little more to be located near some commercial development. They may not want to live right next to it evidenced by the fact that most municipalities have some strong guidelines about how commercial areas to demarcate the space between development and residential areas, often with some combination of a berm, a fence, and trees/bushes. But, being a few moments away from a place where you can quickly buy groceries (and Walmart is the country’s biggest grocery store) and other goods is a plus.

One thing that is likely ironic about this data is that while homes close to the Walmart are a little higher, it is unlikely that residents walk to Walmart even though they could. You could interpret this data as evidence people want to live closer to some denser commercial development but having a Walmart nearby is probably not about walkability.

I wonder if these researchers could also tell how much development Walmarts tend to attract. Do they tend to act as anchors for one corner of a busy intersection? Is it enough for development on multiple corners? How many square feet of retail space, on average, can be successfully operated once a Walmart moves in?

I’m now going to look for real estate ads that mention the proximity of a Walmart…I’m not holding my breath.

Ruminating on the American parking lot

Posted on by

Here is part of a review of a new book that discusses better ways to design large-scale parking lots:

Mr. Ben-Joseph does offer some parking-lot success stories, few that there are. He introduces us to the Herman Miller factory in Cherokee County, Ga., whose segmented, 550-car lot is sympathetically integrated into the surrounding woodscape. He also approvingly notes the canopied car plaza in front of the Dia:Beacon Museum in Beacon, N.Y. (a collaboration between American artist Robert Irwin and the architecture firm OpenOffice), where the angled planters separating the parking spaces point the way to the museum entrance. Renzo Piano, redesigning the old Fiat Lingotto factory in Turin, Italy, took a similar approach, creating dense and splendid colonnades of trees…

Mr. Ben-Joseph is also guilty of sociological overreach. “Parking lots are a central part of our social and cultural life,” he writes, calling them “a modern-day common.” Wait, what? They are? Yes, teenagers gather in parking lots for one rite of adolescence or another: fighting, racing, dancing. True, community farmers markets spring up over the weekend in business and municipal parking lots; tailgating is a ritualized feasting before sporting events; RV drivers form impromptu villages in Wal-Mart parking lots, a practice known as “boondocking.”

But these interactions happen despite the forbidding nature of open parking lots, not because of them. I find parking lots to be intensely anti-social. I do not engage with strangers on my way to or from the car, and because these tracts are typically shelterless, there is no architectural cue as to where to congregate even if you wanted to. One can’t let go of a child’s hand in a parking lot for even a second. If you’re in a car, a parking lot is an obstacle course to negotiate. If you’re on foot, it’s a place to escape unscathed.

Surface parking lots don’t have to be the minimalist slabs of nowhere-ness we’ve grown accustomed to, Mr. Ben-Joseph suggests. Maybe. And yet there are few signs that this aspect of our infrastructure will get much better anytime soon. For now, I was glad to reach my car and drive away.

I think you could make a case that parking lots really do matter beyond what kind of social activity takes place in them. Thinking more broadly, parking lots represent the American love affair with the car and development based around driving. The zoning laws about the required number of parking spots suggest that one of the worst things we can imagine in everyday life is the lack of an easily available parking space. Shopping malls and big box stores and fast food restaurants are dependent on these giant lots. In cities, parking lots are often profitable holding operations until the land is profitable enough to justify a large development. Overall, the big parking lot is emblematic of a whole lifestyle built around cars and trucks that took over America starting in the 1920s.

Residents in Chicago suburb of Palatine oppose proposed Starbucks

Posted on by

For suburban communities, the arrival of a Starbucks can be seen as a sign that the suburb has the ability to attract national stores. But some residents in suburban Palatine are opposed to a proposed Starbucks:

The Palatine village council Monday referred the proposal back to the Zoning Board of Appeals on the village attorney’s advice so that it can review the results of a traffic study despite its earlier unanimous vote to recommend the project. The postponement also grants a request by McDonald’s Corp., which operates an adjacent restaurant, the opportunity to look the study over.

The Starbucks would make up one of three tenant spaces to be built on a vacant lot between the fast-food restaurant and Harris Bank on Northwest Highway near Smith Road. Charley’s Grilled Subs would fill the second space with the third still undetermined.

A couple dozen residents attended the council meeting to oppose the national coffee chain, which they believe will ultimately force nearby Norma’s Coffee Corner to close.

“We as a town should embrace diversity, and I would hate to see Palatine become a national franchise town if there are no mom-and-pops around,” Roman Golash of Palatine said.

Four things strike me about this story:

1. Traffic is a common complaint in NIMBY cases. However, this Starbucks would be located near several other chain/strip mall type businesses on an already busy road. Is Starbucks the problem or the type of development that is already there?

2. The residents seem interested in buying local and Starbucks is one of those companies, perhaps along with Walmart, Walgreens, and others, that represent sprawl and big box stores. At the same time, as far as I can tell from Google Maps, Norma’s is also in a strip mall. So are these residents opposed to all national stores in town? Why is Starbucks singled out in particular? This isn’t quite the battle of a long-time downtown business versus the big national chain. While national stores may not be local businesses (unless they are franchises), they can still bring in tax revenue.

3. Diversity equals having a mix of national and local businesses? This doesn’t sound like the traditional definition of diversity which is typically associated with race and perhaps social class. I wonder if suburbanites use these altered definitions of diversity because they really think that racial or class diversity is not really desirable but they think people like to hear about diversity. (To be fair: Palatine is 76.9% white, 10.3% Asian, and 18% Latino.)

4. Some Chicago suburbs are interested in attracting Starbucks and similar businesses to their downtowns in order to bring in more people. For example, the Starbucks that opened in downtown Wheaton in the late 1990s was seen as a sign that Wheaton’s downtown was an important shopping area (and had a wealthy enough demographic to support such a business).

The widespread (yet sometimes controversial) use of tax rebates for development in Illinois

Posted on by

It is common practice in Illinois for communities to give tax rebates to firms and companies to locate within their community. The primary reason: it ends up bringing in more sales tax revenue.

Communities throughout the region and the state share sales tax revenues to woo retailers — and they are within their rights to do so under Illinois law. In fact, rebate researcher Geoffrey Propheter found the rebate programs to be more heavily used in Illinois than elsewhere around the country.

For the most part, these programs have flown under the radar until this summer, when the Regional Transportation Authority, the city of Chicago and Cook County legally challenged a variation on their use. In lawsuits, they alleged Channahon and Kankakee used sales tax rebate agreements to divert sales tax collections unfairly from metro Chicago to small “sham offices” in their lower-tax towns — allegations denied by both communities.

With a spotlight now directed at sales-tax rebate programs, some observers are quick to say they stand behind the more common use of rebate programs to attract big-box stores and auto dealers…

But other observers say the programs can skew economic development efforts toward retail. This can be effective in filling city coffers but may not produce as much regional economic growth as office or manufacturing developments, which tend to have higher-paying jobs and an ability to sell products over a much wider geographic range.

The rebate programs also tend to foster bidding wars between towns, with taxpayers picking up the tab. Propheter, a research assistant at the George Washington Institute of Public Policy, found the rebate offers have been used in border skirmishes around the state, from Belleville, outside St. Louis, to southwest suburban Joliet.

This is not a new story: states and communities across the United States have been engaging in such battles for years. In most places, governments are looking out for themselves and have little incentive to participate in regional planning or cooperation. Particularly today, in an era when many municipalities are desperate to find some extra money, providing incentives for developments likely looks attractive.

It would be interesting to know why this has become such a popular tool in Illinois.

Critics of sprawl argue that this helps feed sprawl. Communities look for ways to bring in easy money and big box stores and strip malls are relatively cheap to build. It is also interesting to see what happens when sprawl moves past these communities and the big box stores become less attractive and the new ones are even further out from the city. Shopping malls and big box stores tend not to age well.

Several examples of this come to mind:

1. Some of the verbal back-and-forth between Illinois and several other states, including Wisconsin, Indiana, and New Jersey, over the increasing tax rate in Illinois and casino revenues.

2. The story of how the Fox Valley Mall came to be in Aurora. The story is that the developer played Aurora and Naperville off each other in order to get a better deal for developing land on either the east or west side of Illinois Route 59. Naperville was not as willing to negotiate – and things were looking relatively good for them with the relocation of Bell Labs and a Amoco research facility along I-88 in the 1960s – and the developer picked Aurora. Naperville knew that it had lost a significant source of revenue. To compensate, city leaders turned quickly to drawing up plans to revitalize their downtown, putting into action a plan that suggested building a park along the river (put together a few years later as the Riverwalk), grouping municipal buildings in the downtown (new City Hall, new downtown library), and beautifying some of the streets (see Jefferson Avenue and Jackson Avenue between Main Street and Washington Street). I wonder how the story would be told today in Naperville if their downtown hadn’t become a destination.

The real America can be found at Wal-Mart

Posted on by

I vividly remember what one professor told us one day in a sociology of religion class in graduate school: “If you want to find real Americans, just go to Walmart.” Several members of the class gasped – could the real America really be at Walmart, that exemplar of crass consumerism, low wages, and the loss of community life in America? This story from NPR makes a similar point:

The Wall Street Journal spotted the phenomenon recently. The headline: “Today’s Special at Wal-Mart: Something Weird.” “Almost any imaginable aspect of American life can and does take place inside Wal-Mart stores, from births to marriages to deaths,” observed the Journal‘s Miguel Bustillo. “Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin once officiated a wedding at the Wal-Mart in her hometown of Wasilla.”…

What is it about Walmart? As a species, we are fascinated by the place. The Web is awash with sites that scrutinize the Arkansas-based retailer’s every move. Walmart Watch, funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, says its mission is to challenge the multibillion-dollar retail chain “to more fully embrace its corporate responsibilities.” The now-infamous and snarky People of Walmart posts photos of shoppers. Hel-Mart offers anti-Walmart merchandise, such as T-shirts that say, “Resistance Is Futile.” Videos of people praising, mocking, pranking, walking around, dancing in Walmart are continuously posted on YouTube…

Officially, Walmart explains the apparent zaniness this way: “Over the years, Walmart has become a microcosm of American life,” says company spokesman Lorenzo Lopez. “With stores serving millions of customers in communities nationwide, it’s not uncommon for us to see our share of what happens every day in cities and towns all across the country.”…

* Of the 3,822 Walmart stores, 2,939 are Supercenters, which means they are open 24 hours a day. So in virtually every county, 500 people work at Walmart, and there is a Walmart open every hour of every day, and every one of those Walmarts is being visited by 37,000 people a week — that’s 220 people an hour, in every Walmart, in virtually every county in the whole country, every hour of the day.

So how come there are not more sociologists doing studies at or about Walmart? I suspect many do not like the place – even though some may even shop at Target and other big box stores. But just because sociologists might disagree with the practices of Walmart does not mean that it shouldn’t be the focus of much research.

This story also illustrates something Joel Best likes to talk about: the scale of numbers. Some of the statistics about Walmart from the article include half of American adults visit Walmart each week covering 70 million hours and the company has 1.5 million employees. This is hard to visualize because these are big numbers. We know what a couple of hundred people looks like but to understand 1.5 million, we might need to make some comparisons such as this is about the population of the City of Philadelphia or is around the same size as the metro area of Nashville or Milwaukee. Another way to understand these big numbers is to break it down into how often something happens per hour or minute or second. In this article, this translates to “that’s 220 people an hour, in every Walmart, in virtually every county in the whole country, every hour of the day.” We know what roughly 220 people looks like so we can then grasp a little better the enormity of the figures.