Prior to the multiplication of national chains, grocery shopping in America was both diverse and yet very uniform: city dwellers bought food at small, family-owned markets near their homes. These markets were as dispersed as mist compared to the big boxes we shop in today. As one-of-a-kind businesses, they varied from dangerous and corrupt to clean and honest. But in doing so, they mirrored the variety of human communities they served.
Over the last 100 years or so, we have traded that variety, particularity and locality for uniformity and predictability. And this whole process played out in the marketplace with - as far as I can tell - not one word of comment from the Christian community.
In one sense, this is unsurprising: at the same time that the first grocery chain, A&P, was changing the world of food retailing, Christianity in America had retreated from changing the world to changing individual hearts, one at a time. After the Civil War, Christianity became more interested in soul saving than in the shape of public life, including commerce. Only recently have North American Christians begun to take these topics up again.
So the “While You Were Out” slip for the church - broadly understood as evangelical Christianity in North America - shows that we went from a nation of family-owned groceries to a nation of chain stores ranging from locally huge to nationally gigantic. Does this matter to the church? Well, nine out of 10 churches started in the last 20 years have “Community” in their name, so it would seem to matter.
But what does shopping at a local grocery versus a chain have to do with community? For all its faults (and they are not insignificant), a local grocer was embedded in its neighborhood. The store suffered the ups and downs of its “parish,” developed relationships with its customers, extended credit to people short of cash and, in short, practiced that odd verb of Wendell Berry’s: neighboring.
A chain supermarket, on the other hand, can be counted on for lots of things: a wide variety of products, competitive prices, standards of cleanliness and accountability to distant owners who know nothing of the particular location of that store (except its demographics, which they know very well). As a society, we have made this trade (localness for variety, personal knowledge for consistency) over and over and over again, without the church ever once weighing in.
Were I to speak for the church, I would want to say, hold on a minute. Isn’t the corner grocery store, within walking distance of my home, some component of a flourishing community? And isn’t sending all my grocery money to a company in Des Moines or Cincinnati (or wherever) an act that betrays my neighbors in some small way? And isn’t there a benefit in the small-scale accountability of a local grocer (“You’re out of Hamm’s beer, Sam.” “Well, you drink too much beer, anyway, David.”) versus the impersonal, large-scale accountability of a chain (“Everyday low prices!” “Triple rinsed produce!”)?
I’m not saying that supermarkets are evil. Supermarkets are the result of billions of consumer choices accumulated over the last 100 years or so. I’m only saying that when it abdicated the public square, the church missed an opportunity to consider what we were giving up when we sold out the corner grocery for the supermarket a few miles away.
Well, now that we’re at least thinking about it again, can we get the local grocery back? Maybe. It depends on the choices we make every day. We can choose to buy direct from producers at farmers’ markets, where that option exists. We can protest (a little) against overhyped national brands by shopping at Trader Joe’s. And should we be fortunate enough to have a local grocer in our neighborhood, we can choose to shop there. Because we vote things in and out of existence with our wallets every day.
You want to be a real radical? Open a local grocery. I’ll shop there.
(Photo courtesy of iStockphoto.)
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It deserves to be pointed out too that the big-box stores have had success bringing more natural and organic options to shelves at affordable prices than smaller grocers can. From a health and wellness perspective, this is a win across the community.
Here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the big-box supermarket (Meijer) also happens to our neighbor with its headquarters on the NW side of the city. They’ve done some terrific work in our community, such as building a beautiful botanical garden. Shopping there isn’t necessarily supporting my down-the-street neighbor, but it is supporting a lot of people in my community, including friends who work there. The other chain supermarket is also headquartered locally.We still get our produce, eggs, dairy, and select meats from the farmer’s market. It’s not a perfect compromise, but at least where I live, regardless of where I shop, the money stays in the community.
And the profits would stay in town—doubly so if the shopowner makes an effort to sell local products.
I have to agree with the other commenters here. It's fun to be nostalgic for the simpler time of the corner grocery store, but with 5 people to feed, I wouldn't shop there anyway. The big box stores can get a variety of good quality products for lower prices, including organic and gluten-free.
I'm not sure I see the parallel between being a radical Christian and opening a local grocery store. If I wanted to reach a community--and there are several food deserts in my city--I would rather work to bring them substantial, diverse, affordable food. I wouldn't really care if it was a national chain or not.
The family mom and pop still exists and even flourishes where it is still relevant. Even if they could compete on price point and variety of products, they and their supply chains would be crushed under the weight of trying to handle the same kind of traffic that larger grocery stores are capable of handling.
For every Walmart in a city there would have to be hundreds if not thousands of smaller mom and pop grocery stores just to handle the foot traffic alone. Think of the consequence that this would have on the environment, and the economy, and local infrastructure. The math alone just doesn't work.
Many of the mom and pop stores died natural deaths simply because they weren't capable of coping with the growth in their locale. Many still survive today because their locale hasn't grown.
And please don't tell me to open a store so that you can shop there. That simply isn't true.
If Christians want real radical - do something that most churches reject, evangelize.
At every Wal-Mart, each and every dollar of profits leaves the community and goes to Bentonville or to Wal-Mart's shareholders. Wal-Mart has been known to close in a community once they decide to open a store nearby—or if the workers threaten to organize. And Wal-Mart is known to cause massive infrastructure problems, because when they want to come to a community, they get the local officials to offer them all kinds of tax breaks to do it—to say nothing of many Wal-Marts not being required to pay for the road widenings, extra traffic lights, extra police protection, etc. they draw from the community.
And all for a bunch of minimum-wage jobs from a company that is known to abuse its workers, deny their right to organize, keep as many of them part-time as possible, and do anything and everything in their power to "keep labor costs down" regardless of if it has any shred of morality.
Quite simply, Wal-Mart—and each and every other big-chain retailer—has absolutely no commitment to and no concern for the communities in which they reside. Don't let their "we care" things about how much community service they do deceive you; at the end of the day, your money is leaving your community instead of circulating around it, and if they decide that leaving your community in the lurch would make them more money, each and every one of those big-chain retailers will do it in a heartbeat.
On the contrary, a community-based shopowner knows that his or her employees are also his or her neighbors—so there's an incentive to treat them right. When the business is profitable, the money stays in the community and the shopowner will often invest it right back into the community—often by keeping those profits in a local community bank instead of a national chain thus enabling it to lend to other community members, or by donating lots of money to community groups or worthy causes within the community, or by expanding the business or investing in other area businesses and providing even more for a healthy community. And a community-based shopowner will stay open in a community until the very bitter end, because this is their community, not Store #2251, and they have committed to being a part of it.
To reduce all of that to an economic equation is disturbingly robotic; the trend among Christians to make "business" a separate category of pursuits, a sector in which the Christian's goals aren't to love God and their neighbor before themselves, is incredibly problematic and a deep heresy. To the Christian, there is no such thing as a matter that isn't a religious matter.
Know what's expensive? Buying pineapples out of season, thousands of miles away from where they grow.
Eating in-season and local is significantly less expensive, as my farmer's market will attest... they take food stamps there too, so that folks who are receiving government food assistance are able to take advantage of fresh food that tastes better than a tomato grown in Peru and picked and shipped while green, and that benefits the local community too.
Also, as an aside—maybe if those of us who can afford it weren't sending our money out of the community by saving a dime on spaghetti at the MegaLoMart, fewer people in our communities would be on tight budgets, as the more often money circulates within the community, the more people it helps.
Larger stores can afford to serve diverse ethnic communities (read my earlier comment about the Bhuttanese, Koreans and Hispanics) and organic consumers at reasonable prices.
In my neighborhood, there are several small grocery stores that serve primarily the local Latino/a population. Where I used to live, in Koreatown in Los Angeles, there were more than a few Korean grocery stores that served that population. In both cases, the food there was/is less expensive than the big chain grocery store.
The local store, if it exists, is probably teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and no doubt deals with the same Bank of Americas and Citibanks that we all deal with.
Perhaps if fewer of us dealt with those Bank of Americas and Citibanks—and instead dealt with our local community banks or credit unions—it would make it easier for the local store to deal with them too.
Small local banks offering loans to local folks? Get real. This is not Bedford Falls. No matter how low the interest rate goes, no one today is getting loans. Instead of being ideological, be humanitarian.
I've heard Wal-Mart described as many things, but "humanitarian" has never been one of them.
I believe in local stores, but only as specialty retailers offering fairly expensive ethnic foods, organics and local farm produce for audiences with more discretionary income.
Organics aren't that much more expensive, when locally grown; we just have to get over this ridiculous cultural expectation that it's somehow a good thing to go buy a "fresh" tomato in February, and return to the old ways of eating foods in season and canning and preserving for the winter. Communities used to be able to provide for themselves in such a way; we could do the same, if we simply changed our expectations from the instant gratification mentality we have as Americans to a more sensible mentality that's in tune with the rhythms of nature and the climate of our local areas.
If I could divide a 100,000 square foot Walmart into 20 5,000 square foot stores that sold food, clothing, hardware, tires, etc., what have I given up except for Walmart's extraordinary supply chain? Those 20 stores would employ as many "associates" as the Walmart (or more), with the added benefit of knowing their names and their families. They would be owned by local residents, keeping not only the employee wages but also the company's profits in town. I grant freely that stuff would cost more than it does at Walmart, but I think I could live with that.
First, if Christians should care about the implications of where they shop and what they buy (and this seems reasonable), we really ought to do so with a lot more products than food. Almost no one one buys locally produced clothing anymore. Almost no one can find locally produced automobiles - even here in Michigan it is difficult to conceive of what it would mean for a car to be "locally" produced. The reason is that there is a large cost saving from increasing scale in both production and retail, and this should not be ignored. Waste is waste, and we should have a really good reason if we are going to reject the efficiencies of scale. If everyone decided to buy local we would be poorer, there would be fewer good jobs, not more.Moreover, we ought to consider "large vs. small" or "local vs. national" separate from the business practices of the firms. For every comparison between a virtuous small town retailer and evil Walmart, we could just as easily point out that the wages for a high-school graduate cashier are often higher at Target than at the corner neighborhood drug store. Small firms are often less likely to offer their employees health benefits as well. Thus, I think the scale question is at least plausibly independent of the question of business practicesAll that said, perhaps community relationships provide a reason to buy local. Maybe there is something important about buying from and selling to people who live near us. This is not a "local jobs" argument though, it is an argument about relationships being the proper context for market exchange. If this is something that Christians should commit to, then lets make that case separate from the false economic populism that dislikes large corporations because the money goes to some other community that needs it, as if shareholders are only people if they go to church with us or live down the street. And lets not romanticize the small "Mom & Pop" shops too much. They are good at doing what Greusel argues they are, but as he says, there is plenty to dislike as well.
Thanks for your comment. I have thought a lot about the economies of scale, which seem to drive nearly everything in commerce these days, and I keep coming back to thoughts like those expressed in my post above. Certainly waste in the sense of flushing money down the toilet is not godly--using Benjamins to light your cigar, so to speak--but I wonder if spending a few dollars more at a local store versus a supermarket (whether of food, clothes or electronics) is really waste? I struggle to find a biblical mandate to always find the lowest cost option. It seems to me, rather, that the Bible often teaches that we should suffer a little more to help our neighbor. At least that's how I read it, but I could be mistaken. Maybe you see it differently.
I do think your intuition about preserving relationships that undergird commerce is important. This may be worth giving up some economies of scale. I am just not certain about how to make those decisions well. Moreover, I worry that a lot of the "buy local" rhetoric is not primarily about enabling us to embody more virtues in our commerce, but mostly about an "us vs. them" mentality which I can't accept. So the important point, I think, is to do our best to separate the two - which must leave us open to buying from large national conglomerates if they are doing business in way that enhances the community, and buying from small local stores if they are. And if the business model looks about the same, then there is nothing wrong with going for the lowest price.