Wal-Mart Decade

 A post by Paul Krugman attributes a data bump to Wal-Mart and muses about why Europe didn't have a similar bump.  Thereafter ensued rather off-topic Wal-Mart bump envy, fear and loathing in comments.  Like this:

walmart has been unsuccessful in europe--it's not about land use. it's about culture. europeans want higher quality goods and a pleasant store in which to shop. europeans also like to patronize local shops where the service is personal.

No it isn't, you snob.  Our poor taste is not why we have Wal-Mart.  It's about cheap energy, US transportation networks, car dependency, and hugely scaled transfer facilities, stores and parking lots on cheap land. 

In part Krugman says:
 

Van Ark’s data point to a huge surge between 1995 and 2004 in US productivity, not so much in producing goods as in distributing them. And we know what that’s about: Wal-Mart and other big box stores.

I’m not denigrating these productivity gains. What’s interesting, though, is that if you’re looking for a story about the relative American revival from 1995 until recently, it’s not so much a broad, generic economy thing as it is a story of one particular innovation that for whatever reason — land use regulations? — Europe was slow to imitate.

The major question is how an economist can call distribution "production."  But since he mentioned  land use regulation I got all hot under the collar and had to be the first to comment.  It didn't go well.

cocolaboca
Santa Fe NM
January 29th, 2011
10:16 am
The reason is less about land use regulations than land use. The sprawl paradigm enables Wal-Mart scale. Such land use's relationship with regulation is far more complicated, (ie attempts to curtail sprawl or argument that regulations encourage it in the first place.)

Whaa?  I promise I wasn't drunk but it makes no sense to me now either.   And that near nonsense was read by Paul Krugman.  I could have said it much much more clearly, like Bart did at the very same time.

Bart

NY

January 29th, 2011

10:16 am

Suburbia + housing bubble = Wal-Mart

Comments

[Hunter]

I can only make this observation. I moved here in 1996 from the San Fernando Valley which has roughly the same population as the entire state of New Mexico and includes its share of low income families. I came from a area with no WalMarts to Albuquerque which had 5 or 6 to serve about a third of the population of the SFV. Since 1996 the SFV now has three WalMarts, only one of which was site built. The other two are re-cycled mall anchors. My conclusion, cheap land + low income = WalMart demographic = Albuquerque. That cheap land is the same reason that SDPs coming out of the Planning Department calling for retail with structured parking is wishful thinking. As to the sprawl, it costs less to buy cheap land and hire an expensive land use consultant than to buy expensive land.