A recent letter from some residents of Greenfield Acres said: “We are hoping that our new mayor will make it a priority to work with a big box store and find an alternative to the Mackin property, which Al Norman has deemed unavailable thus far, and fill all the empty storefronts on Main Street.”
I am old enough to remember the retailers that once welcomed shoppers in Greenfield. Most of these family-owned or regional stores shut their doors because Greenfield shoppers chose to travel to Hinsdale, or Hadley to buy cheap Chinese goods.
In 1993, landowner Peter Mackin approached our Town Council with a deal: give me a special commercial zone that allows very large stores at the end of the French King Highway, and I will donate land to the town’s industrial park. The Town Council voted to accept that deal. But in October 1993, the voters of Greenfield rejected the Town Council vote in two articles on the ballot: one that opposed the spot zoning for Mackin’s parcel, another that vetoed the minimum square footage requirement. Many local retailers the Hi-Risers now miss were active in that campaign to stop Walmart. “You can spend a lifetime building up a small, locally owned business,” Bud Foster warned in one ad, “only to see it wiped out overnight. I have seen first-hand what these hyperstores can do to the Main Streets of America.” Our business leaders understood that a Walmart would kill many long-time merchants in town.
That’s exactly what happened anyway. There were enough Walmarts ringing Greenfield that shoppers could leave local merchants behind. By 2003, all our regional discount stores were dead, including Rich’s and Ames. Land along the French King highway was rezoned from industrial to commercial.
Walmart reappeared in 2005, fronted by a Connecticut developer, who bought 19 acres of land from Mackin, and presented a 165,000-square-foot big box store based on a Walmart prototype building. Local homeowners appealed a Planning Board special permit decision in 2011, and the case took eight years to litigate. It is now on appeal in Boston. During this time, Amazon rose to prominence, and anyone in Greenfield with a smart phone or laptop could order discount store merchandise with one click. Local merchants were dead, and entire malls started to close as ecommerce took hold.
Today the media focuses more on Amazon as the retail killer, but two things remain unchanged: 1) big box stores extract more dollars from the local economy compared to locally owned businesses, and 2) they create low-wage jobs that cannot match the economic multiplier from tech/manufacturing jobs, which create more disposable income for families to invest back into the local economy.
Walmart and Amazon will never fill “all the empty storefronts on Main Street.” Just the opposite. But Walmart is building very few new stores this year, because it is obsessed with Amazon grabbing 50% of all online sales. It may be comforting to some to blame Al Norman for the retail apocalypse that has destroyed thousands of Main Street merchants, but the solution is not to let more national chains bleed us dry. The answer is not to expand our dependence on a Chinese supply chain — but to try to implant better paying locally owned retail jobs, and industrial jobs that make products in America for a national or international market. I would like to see affordable department store merchandise for sale in Greenfield but it should be located in our central commercial district to stimulate other merchants, and it does not need to be the size of three football fields.
City government should be thinking hard about the 10 acres of land that the Connecticut developer was grooming for Walmart — and what another big box would mean for our downtown. The 1993 economic impact study of Walmart in Greenfield showed existing merchants would lose $23 million in estimated sales. The 2008 impact study by the developer did not even look at lost merchant sales, and refused to admit their tenant was a Walmart.
If Hi-Risers want to see our downtown flourish, we need to: avoid more big box “edge development;” make the boxes we have pay their fair share of property taxes; subsidize first year rents downtown for local retail entrepreneurs; remove all the parking meters downtown; and rezone the French King back to industrial to attract green tech companies who want to locate or expand in our community.
It’s time to stop chasing the big box, and develop locally.
Al Norman has been involved in Greenfield land use issues for nearly three decades. He posts about retailing twice daily on Twitter @SprawlBusters.