In prior posts, I’ve made clear the difference between competition between private merchants and local government’s endorsement of a campaign that expressly favors one kind of merchant over another. That’s not the place for government, either on principle (government should be limited) or prudently (government has a poor record of picking winners in the marketplace). Whitewater has a Buy Local campaign, but the City of Whitewater’s government has neither the business nor the business skill to endorse that campaign. See, Whitewater Local Government’s Favoritism of Some Local Businesses Over Others for prior commentary on the city’s role in the Buy Local campaign.
Over at the Wall Street Journal, there’s a story about how some private businesses secretly fund campaigns against Walmart. See, Rival Chains Secretly Fund Opposition to Wal-Mart.
(Note: I am not suggesting that there’s secret funding of the Whitewater Buy Local campaign. There’s nothing secret, so far know, about that effort. Whitewater’s campaign is so public that it even has the backing of Whitewater’s city government, choosing some taxpaying businesses over others.)
Ann Zimmerman’s WSJ story reveals how hypocritical even a private anti-Walmart campaign can be: some anti-Walmart campaigns are funded by other retail chains. (In my Friday comments section from a few weks ago, The Phantom Stranger pointed out the irony of some chains opposing others.) Zimmerman writes that
Robert Brownson long believed that his proposed development here, with its 200,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter, was being held hostage by nearby homeowners.
He had seen them protesting at city hall, and they had filed a lawsuit to stop the project.
What he didn’t know was that the locals were getting a lot of help. A grocery chain with nine stores in the area had hired Saint Consulting Group to secretly run the antidevelopment campaign. Saint is a specialist at fighting proposed Wal-Marts, and it uses tactics it describes as “black arts.”
As Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has grown into the largest grocery seller in the U.S., similar battles have played out in hundreds of towns like Mundelein.
Local activists and union groups have been the public face of much of the resistance. But in scores of cases, large supermarket chains including Supervalu Inc., Safeway Inc. and Ahold NV have retained Saint Consulting to block Wal-Mart, according to hundreds of pages of Saint documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former employees.
There’s hypocrisy in this sort of campaign, a cynical refusal to stand for something consistent. It’s much worse, though, when government embraces — in the name of all the public — these hypocritical tactics.
The City of Whitewater’s embrace of a private campaign against chain stores is both unprincipled and imprudent.
It’s unprincipled because Whitewater officials will tout an anti-chain store campaign all the while supporting for Walmart’s expansion in town. This is, I suppose, the idea of being a cheerleader for every idea that comes along. Someone who cheers for everything cheers for nothing. If Whitewater officials truly believe the anti-chain store rhetoric of the Buy Local campaign, then they should oppose Walmart’s expansion as bad for our local economy. The same is true with our local Chamber of Commerce — they’re listed as supporters of the Buy Local, anti-chain store effort, but are among first to welcome Maurice’s, part of a 700 store chain, to Whitewater.
There’s no likelihood that Whitewater’s city manager would truly want to stop Walmart’s expansion, thereby stopping the introduction of lower-priced groceries to Whitewater. It must seem convenient to back the Buy Local campaign of a group of merchants, but city manager Brunner must realize that thousands of consumers in Whitewater are hoping for additional offerings from Walmart. Here, the city manager takes both sides of an issue: cheerleading to pay lip-service to the Buy Local campaign, all the while assuring that Walmart will expand. If he took these issues seriously, he would pick one side or the other.
He won’t, of course.
(My own beliefs are clear, consistent, and easy to describe. I believe that Walmart’s expansion would be good for Whitewater, I oppose government’s siding with one kind of merchant over another, and I think that private anti-chain store rhetoric is legitimate and predictable, but misguided. I am convinced that local merchants who offer specialized products and exceptional services can flourish in a town with an expanded Walmart. Whitewater can and should welcome new merchants, including chains like Walmart and Maurices, without either preferential treatment or discriminatory regulations and rhetoric.)
It’s also imprudent of Whitewater’s municipal administration to become involved the marketplace competition, because this is a city bureaucracy that hasn’t picked well in the marketplace before. They’ll not be likely to do so now. We have a business park that’s half full, a pricey roundabout on the east side of town that leads nowhere, a tax incremental district that needs a respirator, and a multi-million dollar tech park and Innovation Center project that’s shaping up to be the wasteful boondoggle of the decade.
Millions for nothing.