on the cover / By Bob Doran

Black Friday

Those same oft-quoted figures, from a study done in the Andersonville neighborhood on Chicago’s north side, cropped up at a talk last Tuesday by author/activist Stacy Mitchell. Local business owners, progressives and politicians (a few councilmembers and a couple of supervisors-elect) gathered at the Eureka Women’s Club last week to hear Mitchell discuss “Promoting Our Local Options: Strategies for a strong local economy.” Those assembled were not necessarily thinking about the holidays.

Mitchell, author of Big Box Swindle and The Hometown Advantage, is a senior researcher with something called The New Rules Project (named before comedian Bill Maher started using the term). The subtitles of her two books give an outline of her talk that night. Big-Box Swindle takes on “The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses.” Hometown Advantage offers advice on “How to Defend Your Main Street Against Chain Stores and Why it Matters.”

Mitchell also serves as board chair of the American Independent Business Alliance, comprised of 50 regional alliances including the relatively new Humboldt County Independent Business Alliance.

Indie business alliances serve several functions. One is educational. They let people know about the value of community-based businesses economically, culturally and socially so that, as IBA puts it, “residents view themselves as citizens, rather than as consumers,” citizens who make conscious choices about where and how they spend their money.

In some cases the IBA takes on group promotion and even branding, leveraging members’ numbers to get deals closer to what chain businesses can demand because of their size. And last, through strength in numbers, the IBAs “give a voice to the locally-owned independent business community and promote policy that supports community-rooted enterprise.”

Mitchell laid out some cold hard facts about the state of retail Tuesday. In an earlier conversation, from her home office in Portland, Maine, she touched on the trouble with those “mega-retailers.”

“Just look at the growth of large retail chains and how much they’ve come to dominate the market, and how many independent businesses we’ve lost nationally,” said Mitchell. “I think people are waking up to the fact that there’s a real high cost for that and that the benefits of the big box model are not what they appear to be. In fact there are all these hidden costs.”

The folks whose indie businesses have survived are well aware of the impact of chains and big boxes, but it isn’t always easy for them to get their voices heard, or to band together for that matter. As Mitchell noted, “The thing about independent businesses is, they’re very independent. The people who run them like working for themselves. But they’ve realized more and more that their survival depends on building alliances with one another, that they’re really interdependent.”

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