Twenty-nine years ago tonight, I was standing on the steps of the Greenfield Town Hall. I had just heard Town Clerk Maureen Winseck read out the voter tallies on two referendum ballot questions regarding a proposed 121,267-square-foot Walmart store on the French King Highway. The first question called for rezoning 63 acres of land from industrial to commercial for a Walmart. The second question was to allow buildings larger than 40,000 square feet in the General Commercial district.
A total of 5,708 voters turned out for these questions — a 60% voter turnou — twice as high as most elections according to Winseck. The anti-Walmart vote on Question 1 was 50.08%, the pro-Walmart vote was 49.92%. On Question 2, the anti-Walmart vote was 50.75%, the pro-vote was 49.25%. The ballots were hand-counted twice. The majority of voters voting had spoken.
I walked down Main Street to join a room full of supporters at the Knapp Sack deli. I didn’t get home until well past midnight. I emptied out my back pocket, which had a bumper sticker which read: IF THEY BUILD IT, WE WON’T COME. I had been told by almost everyone that we had no chance to beat a giant corporation like Walmart.
Two days later, the New York Times ran a story about Greenfield’s victory over Walmart. “The size of the store was disproportionate,” the chair of our committee, David Bete, Sr., told the Times. “It would equal the entire downtown retail district in size.” Former Selectman Peter Ruggeri, who supported the big box, explained: “It wasn’t a Walmart issue for me, it was about benefits for the town.”
Twenty-nine years and two Walmart defeats later the issue of the French King Highway is still a debate over “benefits for the town.” I am pushing for industrial use, others cling to a big box savior. The major difference now is that we are in the middle what business analysts refer to as “The Retail Apocalypse.” This apocalypse began in the financial crisis of 2008, when the rise of global e-commerce displaced sales at thousands of brick-and-mortar stores. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, as of the second quarter of 2022, e-commerce sales have reached $257.3 billion, or 14.5% of all retail sales. By comparison, the percentage of e-commerce retail sales was only 5.5% at the start of 2013. This trend alarmed Walmart enough that it began imitating Amazon’s business model: building a network of huge “fulfillment center” warehouses; launching its own online selling platform and selling ads online; creating the Walmart+ membership service (with Paramount+ movies) to compete with Amazon Prime. One thing Walmart has stopped doing is building big box stores. But any low-income person today on Medicaid or SNAP with a smart phone can join Amazon Prime for 23 cents/day or Walmart+ for 27 cents/day, and get almost any product they want delivered free to their door, at below retail store prices.
Less than three weeks ago, NUPRO in Deerfield announced plans to build a 124,680-square-foot factory in Deerfield. “We’re committed to staying in Franklin County,” co-founder Jeff Ethier said. “We did a 15-mile radius from basically Deerfield, and our search came up pretty empty. It’s hard to find good industrial space in Franklin County.”
Steve Capshaw, the president of Valley Steel Stamp, came before the Greenfield Planning Board recently with the same message. VSS began in Greenfield 51 years ago as a 2-man shop making steel stamping tools. VSS today makes “complex, close tolerance parts” that are used in the aerospace and defense industries. The company now has over 180 skilled engineers and machinists. Capshaw explained in 2018: “We’ve just grown for a long time so we need more space. And we anticipate more growth. The 20-year forecast for aerospace is off the charts.”
Capshaw said his company is interesting in buying the Greenfield Investors Property on the French King Highway. That means jobs that pay twice what any big retailer will pay, and property taxes on a $15 million factory. Using any measurement for “benefits for the town,” VSS offers more value to the city, to people looking for a living wage, and to local commercial businesses who need shoppers with discretionary income to spend. VSS is the bird-in-the-hand, big box is not even a bird-in-the-bush. After 29 years of promoting good-paying jobs, I feel we are closer than ever to that goal.
I don’t want to read a headline in this newspaper that says: “Hometown industry moving out of Greenfield.”
Al Norman lives in Greenfield. His column appears every third Wednesday of the month. His account of what happened in Greenfield 29 years ago is the book “Slam Dunking Wal-Mart.” He can be reached at: info@sprawl-busters.com.