Editor, High Country News
PO Box 152
Boone, NC 28607

Dear Sir,

Recently the Boone Town Council enacted an ordinance that restricts the size of retail outlets to 150,000 square feet.  Lest anyone miss the intent of the ordinance, that is smaller than the square footage of a Wal-Mart Super Center or of some recent Home Depot outlets.  In effect, the ordinance would ban future “big-box” stores from Boone and prohibit the expansion of existing stores of this type.  Several justifications were offered by the three council members (Brantz, Mason and Pepin) who voted in favor of this ordinance.  According to these our representatives, some large chain retailers are known to lower wages wherever they establish stores and, moreover, when companies move on to build even bigger boxes the vacant property leads to unsightly derelicts that attract crime and destroy property values.

These claims are doubtful, especially in the actual conditions of Boone.  But even if the claims are true, they describe only the benefits of this restrictive ordinance.  The costs arrive in the form of higher grocery bills, and unlike the extravagant and untestable benefit claims, those are observable.  To get some information on this, I selected a list of what I hope are representative products that a family with children at home might purchase in a normal week, everything from disposable diapers to beer to dog food to peanut butter, altogether a list of sixty items.  I then priced those items at a chain supermarket in Boone and at a “big-box” retailer in a nearby town, recording the prices for both national brands and store brands.  The dollar costs of this “market basket” under four different possibilities were:

I have attached a list of the items priced with notes showing which national brands were priced.  I have tried to make careful adjustments where the stores carried different brands or no house brand was available.  These totals assume purchase of one unit of each item; a completely accurate procedure would assume purchases of different quantities depending on actual average-family use.  But I do not have reliable estimates of those use rates, and my attempt to guess at them showed almost no difference.  Also, I recorded only the regular price of each item, ignoring special sale prices.  While this might change the calculation in any given week, over time these sale prices should cancel one another. 

This is not of course the price of every item in each store, and strategically shopping at different stores and finding weekly specials might lower the cost of groceries in Boone.  If anyone thinks this sample of items is unrepresentative, that the store chosen matters much, or that allowing sale prices into the calculation will change the results, let them perform the exercise for themselves.  I am satisfied that my sample strongly supports the claim of lower prices at the sort of store that the Boone Town Council has decided not to allow in Boone.

On average, prices are about twenty per cent lower at the big-box alternative than at a traditional supermarket, so bringing a big-box grocer to Boone could save the average family around twenty per cent on its groceries.  The exact savings and their significance would vary from family to family, but it would be reasonable to suppose that a family of four spends at least $100 a week in grocery stores, so would save $20 a week or about $1040 year.  Denying us the right to shop at a big-box store (unless we want to incur the costs of a twenty-odd mile drive each way) costs the average family of four somewhere around $1040 a year.  If there are 5,000 families in Watauga County, bringing a cheaper grocery operation to Boone could save Watauga families collectively over $5,000,000 a year.  In contrast to the nebulous and perhaps fantastical benefits claimed by the exponents of this restrictive ordinance, that is a real cost to the citizens of Boone and Watauga County.

Of course some people will prefer to shop at a traditional supermarket anyway, feeling that it offers a wider selection, better quality or better service.  That’s called choice, and it’s unfortunate but true that one’s range of choices is greater at higher incomes.  If our town council members so dislike big-box retailers, they have the right not to shop in such places.  But their mere election as town council members does not confer on them the right to deny that choice to the citizens nor to impose their elitist tastes on people to whom $20 or $30 a week matters.

Yours,

Larry T. McRae
625 Dogwood Road
Boone, NC 28607