- Joined
- Sep 29, 2022
I wonder how close he was to writing something like "YES YOU DO WANT TO HURT US" and realized that was too stupid even for him.
Not Just Bikes / r/fuckcars / Urbanists / New Urbanism / Car-Free / Anti-Car - People and grifters who hate personal transport, freedom, cars, roads, suburbs, and are obsessed with city planning and urban design
- Thread starter Markass the Worst
- Start date
I wonder how close he was to writing something like "YES YOU DO WANT TO HURT US" and realized that was too stupid even for him.
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2020
As faggy as anti-car retards are, I will concede this point in that I could be lit up brighter than the sun and some slack-jaw retard behind the wheel will still deign to run me over.
That being said, when you are surrounded by machinery, there is an inherent onus on yourself as a pedestrian to remain aware of your surroundings. I’m aware that a good deal of the users of this subreddit are sedentary shut-ins, but the objectively best way to handle being on the road is to pay attention to as much of the road as possible whether or not you are behind the wheel.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
You know what they say, there's something women like about a Pickup Man.
Apple Porcupine
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2024
So I saw this post going around the other day. (Source, archive)
It's gotten rightfully clowned on by just about everyone for being a ludicrous idea that won't fix anything.
Now this post wasn't really related to this thread, until today where Jason's new video made that exact same argument lol. It also makes the fact that the post above was made by someone claiming to be a hardline Republican all the funnier.
Won't go into the whole vid, @quaawaa does a better job of that than me. But I will say he also is now going out of his way to clarify that he doesn't use generative AI, which I think he might feel a level of guilt for using in the past to make a strawman with his "lane man" character that he used in a video, can't remember which.
It's gotten rightfully clowned on by just about everyone for being a ludicrous idea that won't fix anything.
Now this post wasn't really related to this thread, until today where Jason's new video made that exact same argument lol. It also makes the fact that the post above was made by someone claiming to be a hardline Republican all the funnier.
Won't go into the whole vid, @quaawaa does a better job of that than me. But I will say he also is now going out of his way to clarify that he doesn't use generative AI, which I think he might feel a level of guilt for using in the past to make a strawman with his "lane man" character that he used in a video, can't remember which.
Last edited by a moderator:
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2021
Jason is mad about American big box stores:
But he loves Dutch big box stores:
Source (Archive)
Source (Archive)
The store the tweets refer to is the Dutch version of Home Depot (Google Maps). Lots of parking (the building is built above a parking lot) and a painted bike lane (which Jason assurred me do not exist in the Netherlands):
The thesis of his video is that Walmart's prices are only low because they don't pay enough property taxes. Seriously.
For evidence, he uses the Urban3 maps that show that office towers pay more property tax per acre than houses. He completely forgets to mention the massive amount of sales tax that big box stores collect for local governments.
He also complains that cities give out development incentives for big box stores but neglects to mention that they also gives these out for his beloved "mixed-use walkable neighborhoods".
He then says that Europeans have hypermarkets instead which are better than American "hypermarkets" because Europe bans manufacturers from giving bulk discounts to large clients.
He follows that up by saying Germans prefer to shop at many different stores than one big store:
He then does the "I just want other options...actually I want to ban everything I don't like":
His videos are pure schitzo-tier now and this may as well have been a video about how the earth is flat as it's that disconnected from reality.
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----
Relevant Videos
Strong Towns Playlist
The Strong Towns Growth Ponzi Scheme
Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math (Urban3)
---
References & Further Reading
Strong Towns
Urban3
Big box stores are costing our cities far more than we ever imagined
Big Box Urbanism
Rolling Back the Property Tax Payments
Dark Store Theory of Value
Walmart Tax Evasion
The Walmart Effect
Walmart Supercenters and Monopsony Power: How a Large, Low-Wage Employer Impacts Local Labor Markets
Old Penny's Building, Asheville - John Warner
McAllen Library
Abandoned Walmart photos (CC BY 2.0 or Public Domain)
By Kirjtc2 at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Liftarn using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11911811
By Brave New Films from United States - Hamilton County, Tennessee abandoned store Uploaded by xnatedawgx, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7628471
By Brave New Films from United States - Abandoned La Junta Wal-Mart, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7628260
By Brave New Films from United States - Laramie, WY Formerly store #142 Uploaded by xnatedawgx, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7628808
By Brave New Films from United States - former Wal-Mart store #395, abandoned 1/05 Uploaded by xnatedawgx, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7628011
By Brave New Films - originally posted to Flickr as IMG_0858, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8250486
By Allison Chase from Pontiac, Michigan, USA - Old Wal-Mart Uploaded by xnatedawgx, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7628221
By Brave New Films from United States - Beaver Dam, Wisconsin abandoned Wal-Mart Uploaded by xnatedawgx, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7628301
By Brave New Films - originally posted to Flickr as IMG_0860, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8250420
Oriental, NC without a Grocery Store
Policing costs of Big Box stores
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
Big-Box Retailers and Political Spending
Walmart Chants
Watch this video ad-free and sponsor free on Nebula:
Buy a Nebula gift card (now with iDEAL!): https://gift.nebula.tv/notjustbikes
Patreon: https://patreon.com/notjustbikes
Mastodon: @notjustbikes@notjustbikes.com
NJB Live (my live-streaming channel): https://youtube.com/@njblive
----
Relevant Videos
Strong Towns Playlist
The Strong Towns Growth Ponzi Scheme
Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math (Urban3)
---
References & Further Reading
Strong Towns
Urban3
Big box stores are costing our cities far more than we ever imagined
Big Box Urbanism
Rolling Back the Property Tax Payments
Dark Store Theory of Value
Walmart Tax Evasion
The Walmart Effect
Walmart Supercenters and Monopsony Power: How a Large, Low-Wage Employer Impacts Local Labor Markets
Old Penny's Building, Asheville - John Warner
McAllen Library
Abandoned Walmart photos (CC BY 2.0 or Public Domain)
By Kirjtc2 at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Liftarn using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11911811
By Brave New Films from United States - Hamilton County, Tennessee abandoned store Uploaded by xnatedawgx, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7628471
By Brave New Films from United States - Abandoned La Junta Wal-Mart, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7628260
By Brave New Films from United States - Laramie, WY Formerly store #142 Uploaded by xnatedawgx, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7628808
By Brave New Films from United States - former Wal-Mart store #395, abandoned 1/05 Uploaded by xnatedawgx, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7628011
By Brave New Films - originally posted to Flickr as IMG_0858, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8250486
By Allison Chase from Pontiac, Michigan, USA - Old Wal-Mart Uploaded by xnatedawgx, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7628221
By Brave New Films from United States - Beaver Dam, Wisconsin abandoned Wal-Mart Uploaded by xnatedawgx, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7628301
By Brave New Films - originally posted to Flickr as IMG_0860, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8250420
Oriental, NC without a Grocery Store
Policing costs of Big Box stores
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
Big-Box Retailers and Political Spending
Walmart Chants
There are a lot of things that make a city great. Like human-sized design, and a variety of buildings, lots of different businesses that support a vibrant community, a unique cultural identity, a distinct sense of place … having places where it’s just nice to sit. But y’wanna know what the opposite of all that is? A Big Box store.
Big Box stores are named that because they look like big boxes. They’re single-story, windowless, boring, ugly-ass buildings, made from the cheapest possible materials. Even the smallest Big Box stores are enormous, usually more than 50,000 square feet, and they’re surrounded by even bigger parking lots. And when a Big Box store gobbles up a bunch of land, it also ruins the land around it – encouraging sprawl, stroads, and car-centric infrastructure that makes it dangerous or impossible to walk anywhere. You know, the opposite of the stuff that makes a city great. These eyesores are littered all over North American suburbs. People like them in part because they’re easy to drive to, but also because they sell a lot of stuff at pretty cheap prices. Which sounds great until you realize the way they achieve their everyday low prices is by literally bankrupting cities.
[NJB INTRO]
While Big Box retail is ubiquitous today across the US and Canada, it wasn’t always like this, and the dominance of the Big Boxes was not a foregone conclusion. Before the 20th Century, if you needed something from the store, you would walk to your local shop and ask a clerk behind a counter for what you needed. Then in the 1900s, this model shifted to “self-service,” and people were allowed to get items off the shelf themselves, which led to the rise of large department stores like Woolworths, but they existed alongside a wide variety of stores in traditional walkable neighbourhoods.
One of the regulations that kept the large stores in check was the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, that prevented retailers from getting volume discounts on their stock. Meaning that small mom and pop stores were generally making the same margins on each item as the larger corporations. But in the 19 50s and 60s, those regulations stopped being enforced, which meant that stores like Walmart, Target, and K-Mart could buy large quantities of items from manufacturers at discounted prices, and then sell them cheaply, or worse, sell them below cost as “loss leaders.” Bulk discounting is of course essential to the Big Box business model.
Big Box stores make their money through huge sales volumes as opposed to higher margins on each item. But in order to profit off volume, they have to have space for a lot of inventory. And that’s why the box has to be so big – they need room for all that stuff. Around the same time, America was rapidly suburbanizing.
And it turned out that those new homeowners loved having property, but didn't really enjoy paying property taxes. So politicians, afraid of losing those sweet suburban votes, resisted increasing residential property taxes. The most infamous example is California's Prop 13, which put strict limits on residential property tax increases. Prop 13 and laws like it have had a lot of disastrous impacts on cities, but what's important here is that it forced cities to rely more on sales tax revenue and commercial property tax. So in an effort to juice those tax numbers, cities started incentivizing big stores that would have big tax bills, and sell in high volumes. But what’s crazy is that while a single Big Box store may pay an impressive-looking tax bill each year, they actually pay less per acre than even a rundown, neglected downtown.
I’ve talked about this before in my video about the research of Urban3, link in the description. Their study of Asheville, North Carolina found that the per-acre property tax of a mixed-use downtown building was nearly a hundred times that of a suburban Walmart store. And per-acre is the measurement that matters here, because the more acreage your store takes up, the more stuff the city has to pay for – miles of roads to get there, water and sewage pipes, electrical infrastructure, signage, traffic signals, flood prevention infrastructure, etc.
Urban3 makes these maps that show the per-acre property tax revenue of various cities, and the old downtown, as well as any traditional walkable neighbourhoods, are immediately visible as giant spikes. The costs to the city scale per acre, so unless the taxes also scale per acre, the city loses money. Suburban big box stores generate very little property tax revenue compared to the amount of infrastructure needed to support them, so cities end up effectively subsidizing Big Box retailers from other sources of revenue. Usually the tax revenue from traditional small businesses. And there’s more to a Big Box footprint than just the building itself.
North American zoning laws require a minimum number of parking spaces based on the square footage of a building. And since Big Box stores are gigantic, they are legally required to have gigantic parking lots. Big Box stores and their parking moats require a lot of land, so they usually only make financial sense in greenfield locations, on the edge of cities. Which means that unlike shops in traditional neighbourhoods and downtowns, where some people could walk, cycle, or take public transit to get there, pretty much everybody who works or shops at a Big Box store needs to drive, which creates a lot of car trips. But ultimately it’s the city that has to pay for all that traffic, by widening lanes or building new highways downstream of those Big Box developments.
What’s worse is that Big Box stores don’t just generate less per-acre property tax revenue, they also destroy businesses in those denser, local shopping districts. That’s because the literal business model of these discount Big Box stores is to run local stores out of business. Walmart’s corporate goal is a 30% market share for every new market that it enters – and they can’t do that without driving smaller shops out of business. And then that’s more local businesses that aren’t paying property tax. So the city is trading the tax revenue from businesses in traditional neighbourhoods and downtowns, places that have been around for decades and require very little in the way of maintenance costs, for much smaller per-acre tax revenues in car-dependent suburbs, where there are massive maintenance liabilities for all the new infrastructure that was built to support them.
And Big Box retailers use every trick possible to pay even less in property taxes, and they employ people whose job it is to fight property valuations, to argue that their buildings are worth less than they really are. One of the shadiest ways they do this is something called the “Dark Store” theory of value, a name that you’d think would make an accountant stop and say to themselves, "are we the baddies?” The Dark Store theory of value says that Big Box properties should be assessed as vacant buildings, and not as, you know, operating businesses that are making money right now. The actual argument they’re making is that their buildings are so big, so ugly, and so cheaply-made that they are actually not usable at all, once the Big Box store moves out, and so they should be assessed as functionally worthless. This sounds crazy, but it’s real.
In Marquette, Michigan, the hardware store Lowe’s went to court over the assessed property values of one of their stores. They argued, “Unlike many other commercial properties, free standing ‘big-box’ stores … are not constructed for the purpose of thereafter selling or leasing the property in the marketplace.” And therefore, they should pay less property taxes. That means Big Box stores can make a plot of land worth less than if they had just built nothing there at all. And this is a commonly-used tactic for all major Big Box retailers including Home Depot, Target, and Costco. These Big Box buildings are only built to last about 15 years, which is why it’s common to see an older building shut down while there’s a new location farther down the road. If you liked planned obsolescence in your technology, you’re going to LOVE it in your buildings.
A small business will proudly state that they've been in the same location for years, or even generations. They'll put historic photos on the wall showing how the neighbourhood has changed around them, Because being a part of the local community is an important aspect of many small businesses. But Big Box retailers don't care at all about the local community. They just want to go wherever they can make the most money And if that means packing up and leaving their garbage buildings behind, then that's fine by them, as long as their competitors can't use them. If they own the building, they make sure this happens with “deed restrictions” that state that when they abandon one of their crappy buildings, whatever business moves in after them legally can’t be one of their competitors. But since Big Box stores sell pretty much everything, almost all retail is technically “competitive” and so they can't open up on those sites. However it’s been more common lately for retailers like Walmart to lease their buildings, instead of buying them. When they decide to move to their next location they won’t break their lease. They’ll just leave it there, vacant. Better to pay a lease on a building with zero value than to allow a competitor to move in.
But even when they do allow the lease to lapse, there’s very little that can be done with the building. There’s only so much self-storage and laser tag that can move in to prop up a city’s budget. As a side note, Spirit Halloween is a business that takes advantage of these big box vacancies by subletting disused retail space at insanely low rents for about six weeks per year. They’re like the vultures of retail that feed off of the dead carcasses of fallen Walmarts. And when the store packs up and leaves to build a newer location down the road on even cheaper land, the city is stuck paying for the roads, pipes, signage, and other infrastructure that used to support that building … forever.
So since nobody else can use the building, it's becoming increasingly common for municipalities to renovate these Big Boxes into municipal spaces, like libraries. This is always reported as a good thing, because the city turned an old building into something more valuable for the community. Isn’t this great? But these Big Boxes aren’t meant for these kinds of uses, and it costs the city millions to renovate them. In the end the city loses out on property tax, loses out on infrastructure maintenance, loses out on renovation costs, and ends up with an oversized library building in a commercial area that’s totally inaccessible to anybody who can’t drive. Y'know, like all the children and teenagers who might want to use a library. It would be better if cities just built the libraries within the city, near public transit, and close to where people live, instead of throwing more money into subsidizing the toxic business model of Big Box stores in the suburbs and trying to clean up the mess after they leave.
This is even worse in small towns because that business model of market domination and destroying competition means that when the Big Box store skips town, there’s nowhere to buy food. This grocery store had been serving the town of Oriental, North Carolina for 40 years, but when Walmart opened nearby, they drove them out of business. Then less than two years later, Walmart decided their store wasn’t profitable enough so they closed it down. So the town had no grocery store and no pharmacy. One resident was quoted, “If you take into account what no longer having a grocery store does to property values here, it is a significant impact for us.” That’s right! When Walmart arrives, your city gets less property taxes. And when they leave … they take your property values with it.
In fact, when you take into account all of the costs associated with maintaining a Big Box store, they actually cost cities more than they bring in. A study in Ohio estimated that a store like Walmart produced a net annual loss of 44¢ per square foot. For the smallest Big Box stores, which take up about 50,000 square feet, that’s over $20,000 a year. Per store. And it gets even worse when you factor in secondary costs. In Port Richey, Florida, the Walmart store was responsible for almost half of all arrests. This required the police to hire more officers, which ended up costing the city more than the amount that Walmart paid in property tax. And this is only one of many examples, I’ll leave some links in the description. All of this is making North American cities worse. Funds that should go towards maintaining roads and city services, and a vibrant downtown are now spent supporting a big soulless box on the outskirts of the city that’s built to crumble within the next 15 years.
So given all of this, why would any city allow a Walmart or other Big Box retailer to open at all? Some of this is delusional, politicians thinking that their situation will be different, some of it is due to active lobbying from Big Box retailers, but a lot of it is just very short-term financial thinking. Fundamentally, American cities are broke, due to decades of car-centric suburbanization. See my Strong Towns video about the Growth Ponzi Scheme for details, but in short, car-dependent places like this are not financially solvent.
The amount of money required to maintain these places, is more than the city can charge in property taxes. So in order to pay for the debts incurred by the previous decades of car-centric development, the city needs to bring in as much new growth as possible, even if it just kicks the can down the road. A Big Box store will bring in more sales tax revenue, there’s no denying that. So the city pays to build new roads and water pipes, and whatever incentives the Big Boxes retailers are asking for, but they also get a big bump in new tax revenue as soon as the stores are open, which looks like a win. A Big Box retailer could also be an “anchor tenant” in a new shopping development. People may drive there for the Walmart, but they’ll also shop at other stores while they’re in the area. And this does happen, which makes it look like the city is improving. The problems with these suburban development projects, such as the lost jobs at small businesses and the degradation of the traditional neighbourhoods, comes much later, and it’s not always obvious that the Big Box stores are to blame. And since the infrastructure maintenance costs, and the higher costs of services, also come much later, for several years, a new Big Box development seems like a win.
Strong Towns has shown, across many different cities that they’ve worked with, that improving traditional neighbourhoods, like Main Street downtown, always results in a better long-term payback for the city than car-centric Big Box developments in the suburbs. But fixing the cracked sidewalks and broken lighting downtown doesn’t have the same political cachet as bringing Walmart to town. Politicians like announcing the opening of a Big Box store, because they can use the big numbers to make it look like they’ve created lots of new jobs and brought lower prices to residents. And the voters love it. Plus, they get to cut a ribbon with those big scissors, which is why most of them got into politics in the first place. Well, that and the bribes of course. And in 15 years, when the Big Box closes down, most of those elected officials will be gone anyway, so they don’t need to worry about the long-term impacts of any of these projects. So cities don’t just allow Big Box stores to open, they actively encourage it.
Every year, US cities give out an estimated $65 billion in subsidies to attract Big Box stores, and the major retailers will play cities off of one another to see who will offer the biggest benefits. Subsidies for Big Box stores could be deeply discounted property taxes, lifting of expensive regulations, city-sponsored site preparation, job-creation tax credits ... They’ll sometimes be called investment subsidies, sometimes called development incentives, but no matter what you call them, they mean the mega corporations that own Big Box stores don’t have to play by the same rules as local businesses. The U.S. Small Business Association says that for every $100 spent at a small business, $48 stays in the community. But with Big Box mega-chains, that number is only $14.
That’s because local businesses use local services. When you buy from a local retailer, they’ll use that money to pay their employees and other expenses of course, but they’ll also employ other local businesses. A local retailer will use a local accountant to do their taxes. They’ll use a local marketing firm to print their signs and flyers. When the owner decides to buy a douchey sports car, he’ll buy it from a local car dealership. And local businesses are more likely to source their products locally as well. A local coffee shop is more likely to get their coffee from a local roaster. Their milk from a local dairy farm. Their pastries from a local bakery. Their weird knick knacks from a local retired grandma. And all of those local businesses will also use other local businesses themselves, meaning that more money stays in the local community. But when you shop at a Big Box store, most of the money you pay immediately leaves your city, your state, and possibly even your country.
These are massive stores with huge amounts of inventory. So they have to source their products in huge volumes and that can’t be done locally to every store. Heck, about 60% of Walmart products are made in China, so that money immediately leaves the country. And other than their employees at that store, they don’t pay anyone local. They don’t use local marketing firms or local accountants. These are huge corporations so they have a whole team of accountants that all of their stores use. Walmart’s accountants are in Bentonville, Arkansas. So unless you’re in Bentonville, that money has also left your community. And what’s worse is that those accountants are paid to find every tax loophole available, which is why they decided that the best place for Walmart’s profits is 22 shell companies in Luxembourg. And there aren't even any Walmart stores in Luxembourg. Did you know that public transit is free in Luxembourg? All trams, trains, and buses across the country are completely free to use, even for tourists. It’s really nice, and I’ll make a video about it someday. Wouldn’t it be nice if your city had free public transit, instead of a Walmart?
This kind of tax avoidance isn't possible for local businesses. Even if they could employ the tax experts who know how to do this stuff, they couldn’t take advantage of it anyway, because a company needs to have massive profits and a worldwide presence in order to make these tax loopholes worth using. It’s just another way that megacorps can undercut the prices of local businesses, while starving cities and governments of any tax revenue. And you might be thinking, well, at least they create a bunch of local jobs by employing so many people. But here’s the thing. They also don’t do that. A recent study found that five years after Walmart enters a given county, total employment falls by about 3 percent. So they create fewer jobs than they destroy. And the jobs that they do create are very low-paid and often part-time. So these employees pay little or nothing in the way of income tax. But here’s the really messed up part. In small towns and suburbs, Walmart strategically drives local shops out of business with targeted low prices and loss leaders, to the point where they become one of the only employers in town. And then, they pay their employees such low wages, for so few hours, that those employees qualify for food stamps, or what’s now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP.
This is a US government program that provides a payment card that can be used to buy essential food for low-income individuals and families. Only certain retailers, approved by SNAP, can accept this card as a payment. And guess which businesses are always approved retailers? Yeah, it’s the Big Box stores. Walmart alone takes more than a quarter of all SNAP dollars. So Walmart pays their employees so little that they need the government to buy their groceries, and then Walmart sells those groceries to their own employees, profiting off of those government programs. When you dig into it, it’s absolutely insane how many direct and indirect government subsidies these giant retailers manage to get, while they contribute so little back to governments and local communities. It would be beautiful if it wasn’t so cartoonishly evil.
Big Box stores crush their competitors with low prices and loss-leaders, but they achieve their “everyday low prices” by avoiding property tax and offloading externalities on cities, creating a deficit that the downtown businesses ultimately end up paying. And you are paying for this, too. These Big Box retailers are able to exist because your taxes subsidize them, even if you don't shop there. When they take money from your city, they are ultimately taking money from you. Big Box stores make everyone poorer. Well, except their shareholders of course. And there are also some politicians who are very happy that Big Box retailers have significantly increased the amount they’ve spent on lobbying and campaign contributions over the past two decades.
So what’s the alternative to this garbage? Well, it’s interesting to look at the European equivalent of a Big Box store, the hypermarket. Hypermarkets can be found in the suburbs of many European cities, but they're not nearly as destructive as American Big Box stores, and they've never become as pervasive as Big Box stores are in America. European countries have regulations in place that make it harder to use the bulk discounts to run small retailers out of business, and “loss-leaders”, those products sold below cost, are totally illegal. And with respect to urban planning, there are just generally sane laws in European cities about where hypermarkets can be built, how the infrastructure is paid for, how many parking spaces are required, how they are connected to existing public transit, and how property taxes are calculated.
Walmart tried to enter the German market in the late 90s, but failed and left a few years later, after losing out to local retailers like Aldi and Lidl. Because fundamentally, Walmart can’t compete without its ability to build on dirt-cheap land and leach money from the city, which is a big reason as to why they failed in Europe.
Although the funniest reason for their failure is that Walmart requires its employees to smile at customers, which German customers found to be kinda creepy. And German employees thought that the corporate chants that all Walmart employees are required to do each morning was weird and cultish. Because it is! We should not be normalizing mandatory corporate chants. But a bigger issue for German employees was that Walmart hates labor unions and actively fights unionization at every turn. But unions are very strong in Germany and other parts of Europe, and those countries refused to enable Walmart’s union-busting tactics.
And the craziest part is that, despite all this, groceries are still typically cheaper in Germany than they are in the US. Though the Germans don’t have over 9000 different flavours of Oreos so, checkmate Europe. And finally, researchers who analysed Walmart’s failure also concluded that Germans weren’t as interested in the one-stop-shopping experience of a Big Box store. And why would they? They have vibrant city centres which are more pleasant to be in, with a wide variety of specialty retailers, and it's often more enjoyable and more convenient to walk from shop to shop to buy different things, instead of having to drive to the outskirts of the city, where a Big Box store would need to be.
This used to be the culture in North America as well, and while it will be difficult, cultures can and do change. North American cities need to emphasize keeping money in their own communities. And yes, individually choosing to shop small whenever you can is part of that, but relying on people’s personal choices to fight Big Box stores is going to work about as well as asking everyone to please drive less to fight climate change.
Of course the most important thing cities can do is to stop offering huge incentives for Big Box stores that have proven time and time again to cost cities money in the long run. And instead, offer development incentives and protections to the kinds of businesses that do the opposite.
North American cities need something that our friends at Strong Towns refer to as an “Import Replacement Strategies,” which is basically a plan for prioritizing new businesses that are going to keep as many dollars circulating in the local economy as possible. Cities also need to refocus their spending into the downtown areas they abandoned. Make it easy to walk from store to store, make it a place people actually want to spend time. And make it legal to build housing there again. A cluster of smaller, locally-owned stores serves largely the same purpose as one gigantic store that sells everything, but it generates way more revenue for the city, costs taxpayers less, and plus it looks a lot nicer than this.
Governments also need to review the legislation and the tax codes that allow Big Box stores to discount pricing so much that local stores can’t compete. It will be hard to put the genie back in the bottle, but the way to help people shop at smaller stores again is by making pricing competitive. And you can’t do that when mega-conglomerates can benefit from economies of scale in a way local stores can’t
Cities might have to re-acclimate their citizens to shopping downtown instead of at a Big Box store. If someone has spent 20 years shopping at Target, they might be resistant to doing it any other way. But that’s not an inherent preference. Cultures change. Younger people in America are already rejecting driving, and doing it much less than older generations. There are people out there who don't want to shop at a Big Box store, it’s just their only option, so we should make it easier for those people to shop somewhere else.
I really wish we could completely abolish Big Box stores. Is there something you hate so much that you wish it could be abolished forever? Then you might enjoy Abolish Everything!, the hilarious new comedy show where comedians argue to remove something they hate from existence, whether it’s slow walkers, office jargon, or pineapple on pizza. Abolish Everything! is a genuinely entertaining mix of comedy, debate, and audience participation, and it’s only available on Nebula, the subscription streaming service built by and for creators and their fans. Nebula has thousands of creative, thought-provoking, and just plain fun videos you won’t find anywhere else. And many of your favourite YouTubers are probably already on Nebula. Nebula has no ads, early access, and a growing library of exclusive Nebula Originals, produced just for Nebula. In fact Nebula is helping me to produce my new comedy urbanism channel, I Love the City. Every I Love the City video is available two weeks early on Nebula, before it’s available on YouTube. And every Not Just Bikes video is also available on Nebula First, without any ads or sponsorships. And by signing up to Nebula, you directly support this channel and the production of my videos. So if you’d like to support this channel, get early access, and watch great new shows like Abolish Everything! then sign up to Nebula. Use the link go.nebula.tv/notjustbikes to get 40% an annual subscription. Thanks for watching, and thanks to all of the people who support this channel on Nebula. I appreciate it.
Big Box stores are named that because they look like big boxes. They’re single-story, windowless, boring, ugly-ass buildings, made from the cheapest possible materials. Even the smallest Big Box stores are enormous, usually more than 50,000 square feet, and they’re surrounded by even bigger parking lots. And when a Big Box store gobbles up a bunch of land, it also ruins the land around it – encouraging sprawl, stroads, and car-centric infrastructure that makes it dangerous or impossible to walk anywhere. You know, the opposite of the stuff that makes a city great. These eyesores are littered all over North American suburbs. People like them in part because they’re easy to drive to, but also because they sell a lot of stuff at pretty cheap prices. Which sounds great until you realize the way they achieve their everyday low prices is by literally bankrupting cities.
[NJB INTRO]
While Big Box retail is ubiquitous today across the US and Canada, it wasn’t always like this, and the dominance of the Big Boxes was not a foregone conclusion. Before the 20th Century, if you needed something from the store, you would walk to your local shop and ask a clerk behind a counter for what you needed. Then in the 1900s, this model shifted to “self-service,” and people were allowed to get items off the shelf themselves, which led to the rise of large department stores like Woolworths, but they existed alongside a wide variety of stores in traditional walkable neighbourhoods.
One of the regulations that kept the large stores in check was the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, that prevented retailers from getting volume discounts on their stock. Meaning that small mom and pop stores were generally making the same margins on each item as the larger corporations. But in the 19 50s and 60s, those regulations stopped being enforced, which meant that stores like Walmart, Target, and K-Mart could buy large quantities of items from manufacturers at discounted prices, and then sell them cheaply, or worse, sell them below cost as “loss leaders.” Bulk discounting is of course essential to the Big Box business model.
Big Box stores make their money through huge sales volumes as opposed to higher margins on each item. But in order to profit off volume, they have to have space for a lot of inventory. And that’s why the box has to be so big – they need room for all that stuff. Around the same time, America was rapidly suburbanizing.
And it turned out that those new homeowners loved having property, but didn't really enjoy paying property taxes. So politicians, afraid of losing those sweet suburban votes, resisted increasing residential property taxes. The most infamous example is California's Prop 13, which put strict limits on residential property tax increases. Prop 13 and laws like it have had a lot of disastrous impacts on cities, but what's important here is that it forced cities to rely more on sales tax revenue and commercial property tax. So in an effort to juice those tax numbers, cities started incentivizing big stores that would have big tax bills, and sell in high volumes. But what’s crazy is that while a single Big Box store may pay an impressive-looking tax bill each year, they actually pay less per acre than even a rundown, neglected downtown.
I’ve talked about this before in my video about the research of Urban3, link in the description. Their study of Asheville, North Carolina found that the per-acre property tax of a mixed-use downtown building was nearly a hundred times that of a suburban Walmart store. And per-acre is the measurement that matters here, because the more acreage your store takes up, the more stuff the city has to pay for – miles of roads to get there, water and sewage pipes, electrical infrastructure, signage, traffic signals, flood prevention infrastructure, etc.
Urban3 makes these maps that show the per-acre property tax revenue of various cities, and the old downtown, as well as any traditional walkable neighbourhoods, are immediately visible as giant spikes. The costs to the city scale per acre, so unless the taxes also scale per acre, the city loses money. Suburban big box stores generate very little property tax revenue compared to the amount of infrastructure needed to support them, so cities end up effectively subsidizing Big Box retailers from other sources of revenue. Usually the tax revenue from traditional small businesses. And there’s more to a Big Box footprint than just the building itself.
North American zoning laws require a minimum number of parking spaces based on the square footage of a building. And since Big Box stores are gigantic, they are legally required to have gigantic parking lots. Big Box stores and their parking moats require a lot of land, so they usually only make financial sense in greenfield locations, on the edge of cities. Which means that unlike shops in traditional neighbourhoods and downtowns, where some people could walk, cycle, or take public transit to get there, pretty much everybody who works or shops at a Big Box store needs to drive, which creates a lot of car trips. But ultimately it’s the city that has to pay for all that traffic, by widening lanes or building new highways downstream of those Big Box developments.
What’s worse is that Big Box stores don’t just generate less per-acre property tax revenue, they also destroy businesses in those denser, local shopping districts. That’s because the literal business model of these discount Big Box stores is to run local stores out of business. Walmart’s corporate goal is a 30% market share for every new market that it enters – and they can’t do that without driving smaller shops out of business. And then that’s more local businesses that aren’t paying property tax. So the city is trading the tax revenue from businesses in traditional neighbourhoods and downtowns, places that have been around for decades and require very little in the way of maintenance costs, for much smaller per-acre tax revenues in car-dependent suburbs, where there are massive maintenance liabilities for all the new infrastructure that was built to support them.
And Big Box retailers use every trick possible to pay even less in property taxes, and they employ people whose job it is to fight property valuations, to argue that their buildings are worth less than they really are. One of the shadiest ways they do this is something called the “Dark Store” theory of value, a name that you’d think would make an accountant stop and say to themselves, "are we the baddies?” The Dark Store theory of value says that Big Box properties should be assessed as vacant buildings, and not as, you know, operating businesses that are making money right now. The actual argument they’re making is that their buildings are so big, so ugly, and so cheaply-made that they are actually not usable at all, once the Big Box store moves out, and so they should be assessed as functionally worthless. This sounds crazy, but it’s real.
In Marquette, Michigan, the hardware store Lowe’s went to court over the assessed property values of one of their stores. They argued, “Unlike many other commercial properties, free standing ‘big-box’ stores … are not constructed for the purpose of thereafter selling or leasing the property in the marketplace.” And therefore, they should pay less property taxes. That means Big Box stores can make a plot of land worth less than if they had just built nothing there at all. And this is a commonly-used tactic for all major Big Box retailers including Home Depot, Target, and Costco. These Big Box buildings are only built to last about 15 years, which is why it’s common to see an older building shut down while there’s a new location farther down the road. If you liked planned obsolescence in your technology, you’re going to LOVE it in your buildings.
A small business will proudly state that they've been in the same location for years, or even generations. They'll put historic photos on the wall showing how the neighbourhood has changed around them, Because being a part of the local community is an important aspect of many small businesses. But Big Box retailers don't care at all about the local community. They just want to go wherever they can make the most money And if that means packing up and leaving their garbage buildings behind, then that's fine by them, as long as their competitors can't use them. If they own the building, they make sure this happens with “deed restrictions” that state that when they abandon one of their crappy buildings, whatever business moves in after them legally can’t be one of their competitors. But since Big Box stores sell pretty much everything, almost all retail is technically “competitive” and so they can't open up on those sites. However it’s been more common lately for retailers like Walmart to lease their buildings, instead of buying them. When they decide to move to their next location they won’t break their lease. They’ll just leave it there, vacant. Better to pay a lease on a building with zero value than to allow a competitor to move in.
But even when they do allow the lease to lapse, there’s very little that can be done with the building. There’s only so much self-storage and laser tag that can move in to prop up a city’s budget. As a side note, Spirit Halloween is a business that takes advantage of these big box vacancies by subletting disused retail space at insanely low rents for about six weeks per year. They’re like the vultures of retail that feed off of the dead carcasses of fallen Walmarts. And when the store packs up and leaves to build a newer location down the road on even cheaper land, the city is stuck paying for the roads, pipes, signage, and other infrastructure that used to support that building … forever.
So since nobody else can use the building, it's becoming increasingly common for municipalities to renovate these Big Boxes into municipal spaces, like libraries. This is always reported as a good thing, because the city turned an old building into something more valuable for the community. Isn’t this great? But these Big Boxes aren’t meant for these kinds of uses, and it costs the city millions to renovate them. In the end the city loses out on property tax, loses out on infrastructure maintenance, loses out on renovation costs, and ends up with an oversized library building in a commercial area that’s totally inaccessible to anybody who can’t drive. Y'know, like all the children and teenagers who might want to use a library. It would be better if cities just built the libraries within the city, near public transit, and close to where people live, instead of throwing more money into subsidizing the toxic business model of Big Box stores in the suburbs and trying to clean up the mess after they leave.
This is even worse in small towns because that business model of market domination and destroying competition means that when the Big Box store skips town, there’s nowhere to buy food. This grocery store had been serving the town of Oriental, North Carolina for 40 years, but when Walmart opened nearby, they drove them out of business. Then less than two years later, Walmart decided their store wasn’t profitable enough so they closed it down. So the town had no grocery store and no pharmacy. One resident was quoted, “If you take into account what no longer having a grocery store does to property values here, it is a significant impact for us.” That’s right! When Walmart arrives, your city gets less property taxes. And when they leave … they take your property values with it.
In fact, when you take into account all of the costs associated with maintaining a Big Box store, they actually cost cities more than they bring in. A study in Ohio estimated that a store like Walmart produced a net annual loss of 44¢ per square foot. For the smallest Big Box stores, which take up about 50,000 square feet, that’s over $20,000 a year. Per store. And it gets even worse when you factor in secondary costs. In Port Richey, Florida, the Walmart store was responsible for almost half of all arrests. This required the police to hire more officers, which ended up costing the city more than the amount that Walmart paid in property tax. And this is only one of many examples, I’ll leave some links in the description. All of this is making North American cities worse. Funds that should go towards maintaining roads and city services, and a vibrant downtown are now spent supporting a big soulless box on the outskirts of the city that’s built to crumble within the next 15 years.
So given all of this, why would any city allow a Walmart or other Big Box retailer to open at all? Some of this is delusional, politicians thinking that their situation will be different, some of it is due to active lobbying from Big Box retailers, but a lot of it is just very short-term financial thinking. Fundamentally, American cities are broke, due to decades of car-centric suburbanization. See my Strong Towns video about the Growth Ponzi Scheme for details, but in short, car-dependent places like this are not financially solvent.
The amount of money required to maintain these places, is more than the city can charge in property taxes. So in order to pay for the debts incurred by the previous decades of car-centric development, the city needs to bring in as much new growth as possible, even if it just kicks the can down the road. A Big Box store will bring in more sales tax revenue, there’s no denying that. So the city pays to build new roads and water pipes, and whatever incentives the Big Boxes retailers are asking for, but they also get a big bump in new tax revenue as soon as the stores are open, which looks like a win. A Big Box retailer could also be an “anchor tenant” in a new shopping development. People may drive there for the Walmart, but they’ll also shop at other stores while they’re in the area. And this does happen, which makes it look like the city is improving. The problems with these suburban development projects, such as the lost jobs at small businesses and the degradation of the traditional neighbourhoods, comes much later, and it’s not always obvious that the Big Box stores are to blame. And since the infrastructure maintenance costs, and the higher costs of services, also come much later, for several years, a new Big Box development seems like a win.
Strong Towns has shown, across many different cities that they’ve worked with, that improving traditional neighbourhoods, like Main Street downtown, always results in a better long-term payback for the city than car-centric Big Box developments in the suburbs. But fixing the cracked sidewalks and broken lighting downtown doesn’t have the same political cachet as bringing Walmart to town. Politicians like announcing the opening of a Big Box store, because they can use the big numbers to make it look like they’ve created lots of new jobs and brought lower prices to residents. And the voters love it. Plus, they get to cut a ribbon with those big scissors, which is why most of them got into politics in the first place. Well, that and the bribes of course. And in 15 years, when the Big Box closes down, most of those elected officials will be gone anyway, so they don’t need to worry about the long-term impacts of any of these projects. So cities don’t just allow Big Box stores to open, they actively encourage it.
Every year, US cities give out an estimated $65 billion in subsidies to attract Big Box stores, and the major retailers will play cities off of one another to see who will offer the biggest benefits. Subsidies for Big Box stores could be deeply discounted property taxes, lifting of expensive regulations, city-sponsored site preparation, job-creation tax credits ... They’ll sometimes be called investment subsidies, sometimes called development incentives, but no matter what you call them, they mean the mega corporations that own Big Box stores don’t have to play by the same rules as local businesses. The U.S. Small Business Association says that for every $100 spent at a small business, $48 stays in the community. But with Big Box mega-chains, that number is only $14.
That’s because local businesses use local services. When you buy from a local retailer, they’ll use that money to pay their employees and other expenses of course, but they’ll also employ other local businesses. A local retailer will use a local accountant to do their taxes. They’ll use a local marketing firm to print their signs and flyers. When the owner decides to buy a douchey sports car, he’ll buy it from a local car dealership. And local businesses are more likely to source their products locally as well. A local coffee shop is more likely to get their coffee from a local roaster. Their milk from a local dairy farm. Their pastries from a local bakery. Their weird knick knacks from a local retired grandma. And all of those local businesses will also use other local businesses themselves, meaning that more money stays in the local community. But when you shop at a Big Box store, most of the money you pay immediately leaves your city, your state, and possibly even your country.
These are massive stores with huge amounts of inventory. So they have to source their products in huge volumes and that can’t be done locally to every store. Heck, about 60% of Walmart products are made in China, so that money immediately leaves the country. And other than their employees at that store, they don’t pay anyone local. They don’t use local marketing firms or local accountants. These are huge corporations so they have a whole team of accountants that all of their stores use. Walmart’s accountants are in Bentonville, Arkansas. So unless you’re in Bentonville, that money has also left your community. And what’s worse is that those accountants are paid to find every tax loophole available, which is why they decided that the best place for Walmart’s profits is 22 shell companies in Luxembourg. And there aren't even any Walmart stores in Luxembourg. Did you know that public transit is free in Luxembourg? All trams, trains, and buses across the country are completely free to use, even for tourists. It’s really nice, and I’ll make a video about it someday. Wouldn’t it be nice if your city had free public transit, instead of a Walmart?
This kind of tax avoidance isn't possible for local businesses. Even if they could employ the tax experts who know how to do this stuff, they couldn’t take advantage of it anyway, because a company needs to have massive profits and a worldwide presence in order to make these tax loopholes worth using. It’s just another way that megacorps can undercut the prices of local businesses, while starving cities and governments of any tax revenue. And you might be thinking, well, at least they create a bunch of local jobs by employing so many people. But here’s the thing. They also don’t do that. A recent study found that five years after Walmart enters a given county, total employment falls by about 3 percent. So they create fewer jobs than they destroy. And the jobs that they do create are very low-paid and often part-time. So these employees pay little or nothing in the way of income tax. But here’s the really messed up part. In small towns and suburbs, Walmart strategically drives local shops out of business with targeted low prices and loss leaders, to the point where they become one of the only employers in town. And then, they pay their employees such low wages, for so few hours, that those employees qualify for food stamps, or what’s now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP.
This is a US government program that provides a payment card that can be used to buy essential food for low-income individuals and families. Only certain retailers, approved by SNAP, can accept this card as a payment. And guess which businesses are always approved retailers? Yeah, it’s the Big Box stores. Walmart alone takes more than a quarter of all SNAP dollars. So Walmart pays their employees so little that they need the government to buy their groceries, and then Walmart sells those groceries to their own employees, profiting off of those government programs. When you dig into it, it’s absolutely insane how many direct and indirect government subsidies these giant retailers manage to get, while they contribute so little back to governments and local communities. It would be beautiful if it wasn’t so cartoonishly evil.
Big Box stores crush their competitors with low prices and loss-leaders, but they achieve their “everyday low prices” by avoiding property tax and offloading externalities on cities, creating a deficit that the downtown businesses ultimately end up paying. And you are paying for this, too. These Big Box retailers are able to exist because your taxes subsidize them, even if you don't shop there. When they take money from your city, they are ultimately taking money from you. Big Box stores make everyone poorer. Well, except their shareholders of course. And there are also some politicians who are very happy that Big Box retailers have significantly increased the amount they’ve spent on lobbying and campaign contributions over the past two decades.
So what’s the alternative to this garbage? Well, it’s interesting to look at the European equivalent of a Big Box store, the hypermarket. Hypermarkets can be found in the suburbs of many European cities, but they're not nearly as destructive as American Big Box stores, and they've never become as pervasive as Big Box stores are in America. European countries have regulations in place that make it harder to use the bulk discounts to run small retailers out of business, and “loss-leaders”, those products sold below cost, are totally illegal. And with respect to urban planning, there are just generally sane laws in European cities about where hypermarkets can be built, how the infrastructure is paid for, how many parking spaces are required, how they are connected to existing public transit, and how property taxes are calculated.
Walmart tried to enter the German market in the late 90s, but failed and left a few years later, after losing out to local retailers like Aldi and Lidl. Because fundamentally, Walmart can’t compete without its ability to build on dirt-cheap land and leach money from the city, which is a big reason as to why they failed in Europe.
Although the funniest reason for their failure is that Walmart requires its employees to smile at customers, which German customers found to be kinda creepy. And German employees thought that the corporate chants that all Walmart employees are required to do each morning was weird and cultish. Because it is! We should not be normalizing mandatory corporate chants. But a bigger issue for German employees was that Walmart hates labor unions and actively fights unionization at every turn. But unions are very strong in Germany and other parts of Europe, and those countries refused to enable Walmart’s union-busting tactics.
And the craziest part is that, despite all this, groceries are still typically cheaper in Germany than they are in the US. Though the Germans don’t have over 9000 different flavours of Oreos so, checkmate Europe. And finally, researchers who analysed Walmart’s failure also concluded that Germans weren’t as interested in the one-stop-shopping experience of a Big Box store. And why would they? They have vibrant city centres which are more pleasant to be in, with a wide variety of specialty retailers, and it's often more enjoyable and more convenient to walk from shop to shop to buy different things, instead of having to drive to the outskirts of the city, where a Big Box store would need to be.
This used to be the culture in North America as well, and while it will be difficult, cultures can and do change. North American cities need to emphasize keeping money in their own communities. And yes, individually choosing to shop small whenever you can is part of that, but relying on people’s personal choices to fight Big Box stores is going to work about as well as asking everyone to please drive less to fight climate change.
Of course the most important thing cities can do is to stop offering huge incentives for Big Box stores that have proven time and time again to cost cities money in the long run. And instead, offer development incentives and protections to the kinds of businesses that do the opposite.
North American cities need something that our friends at Strong Towns refer to as an “Import Replacement Strategies,” which is basically a plan for prioritizing new businesses that are going to keep as many dollars circulating in the local economy as possible. Cities also need to refocus their spending into the downtown areas they abandoned. Make it easy to walk from store to store, make it a place people actually want to spend time. And make it legal to build housing there again. A cluster of smaller, locally-owned stores serves largely the same purpose as one gigantic store that sells everything, but it generates way more revenue for the city, costs taxpayers less, and plus it looks a lot nicer than this.
Governments also need to review the legislation and the tax codes that allow Big Box stores to discount pricing so much that local stores can’t compete. It will be hard to put the genie back in the bottle, but the way to help people shop at smaller stores again is by making pricing competitive. And you can’t do that when mega-conglomerates can benefit from economies of scale in a way local stores can’t
Cities might have to re-acclimate their citizens to shopping downtown instead of at a Big Box store. If someone has spent 20 years shopping at Target, they might be resistant to doing it any other way. But that’s not an inherent preference. Cultures change. Younger people in America are already rejecting driving, and doing it much less than older generations. There are people out there who don't want to shop at a Big Box store, it’s just their only option, so we should make it easier for those people to shop somewhere else.
I really wish we could completely abolish Big Box stores. Is there something you hate so much that you wish it could be abolished forever? Then you might enjoy Abolish Everything!, the hilarious new comedy show where comedians argue to remove something they hate from existence, whether it’s slow walkers, office jargon, or pineapple on pizza. Abolish Everything! is a genuinely entertaining mix of comedy, debate, and audience participation, and it’s only available on Nebula, the subscription streaming service built by and for creators and their fans. Nebula has thousands of creative, thought-provoking, and just plain fun videos you won’t find anywhere else. And many of your favourite YouTubers are probably already on Nebula. Nebula has no ads, early access, and a growing library of exclusive Nebula Originals, produced just for Nebula. In fact Nebula is helping me to produce my new comedy urbanism channel, I Love the City. Every I Love the City video is available two weeks early on Nebula, before it’s available on YouTube. And every Not Just Bikes video is also available on Nebula First, without any ads or sponsorships. And by signing up to Nebula, you directly support this channel and the production of my videos. So if you’d like to support this channel, get early access, and watch great new shows like Abolish Everything! then sign up to Nebula. Use the link go.nebula.tv/notjustbikes to get 40% an annual subscription. Thanks for watching, and thanks to all of the people who support this channel on Nebula. I appreciate it.
But he loves Dutch big box stores:
Source (Archive)
Source (Archive)
The store the tweets refer to is the Dutch version of Home Depot (Google Maps). Lots of parking (the building is built above a parking lot) and a painted bike lane (which Jason assurred me do not exist in the Netherlands):
The thesis of his video is that Walmart's prices are only low because they don't pay enough property taxes. Seriously.
For evidence, he uses the Urban3 maps that show that office towers pay more property tax per acre than houses. He completely forgets to mention the massive amount of sales tax that big box stores collect for local governments.
He also complains that cities give out development incentives for big box stores but neglects to mention that they also gives these out for his beloved "mixed-use walkable neighborhoods".
He then says that Europeans have hypermarkets instead which are better than American "hypermarkets" because Europe bans manufacturers from giving bulk discounts to large clients.
He follows that up by saying Germans prefer to shop at many different stores than one big store:
He then does the "I just want other options...actually I want to ban everything I don't like":
His videos are pure schitzo-tier now and this may as well have been a video about how the earth is flat as it's that disconnected from reality.
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2023
It's literally the same thing as telling a woman not to dress slutty so she won't get raped, sweaty
Ayo hol' up JaMarcus, dis be sayin' we's shouldn't be rapin' and killin' an' sheit, did you knows dat?
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- Joined
- Feb 12, 2024
People who live in high crime neighborhoods and are raised in the associated culture do not value what libraries have to offer, generally speaking. Which is where this type of charity fails every single time.
Ghetto ass bitches do not get out of nice, public places like libraries what those with a more comfortable station do.
People have given more and more free shit to people in crime ridden areas. The problem isn't that they don't have free shit (it isn't free ofc). It's them. They're the problem. They do crime and they do not value aspects of more civilized ways.
Ghetto ass bitches do not get out of nice, public places like libraries what those with a more comfortable station do.
People have given more and more free shit to people in crime ridden areas. The problem isn't that they don't have free shit (it isn't free ofc). It's them. They're the problem. They do crime and they do not value aspects of more civilized ways.
- Joined
- Sep 29, 2022
I wanted to check in Culdesac again. Seems like if it was a huge success, the concept would be replicated across the country.
The Mexican restaurant is still there, but "Street Corner", the much-vaunted grocery option is gone, replaced by Busan Mart, an "Asian-inspired" convenience store with imported foods and gifts. (it has other locations in the Phoenix area). I don't see any people in some of those shots, the thing about Asian convenience stores is that they're very high-volume, clean, and stock a selection of products are looking for in a convenience store. In the United States, Buc-ee's, QuikTrip, Sheetz, Wawa, and others are taking off because they've found that clean, large convenience stores with fresh food options are stuff people are looking for. (7-Eleven in the United States hasn't done nearly as well in this aspect because despite some new, modern stores it's still pushing around a bunch of crappy stores with coffee that still comes in a carafe, and some of the newer stores it opened in the last five years in my part of the country have mysteriously closed).
The Micro-Retailers that Culdesac talked about I had predicted would be out in six months. Sew Used is still around though I suspect most of their sales are online. Dose of Youth is still open but I suspect most of its clientele is from outside of the development. Complete Comforts, the most "neighborhood" of the three, went under. The other three retailers from a year ago, Kinkan Gifts (Japanese gifts and specialty), ITO Brand (clothing with "quality, sustainability, and ethical sourcing practices"), and Brite Candle Co. (candles from "all-natural" vegan ingredients) are still there. With limited information, I had predicted that they'd vanish but all of them come off as extremely manicured and extremely specialized, all run by non-whites and women, so I suspected they're subsidized by the development in some way. They also survive, along with the Mexican restaurant and Busan Mart, by the fact that the parking lot at Culdesac is actually free during daytime.
There's no actual useful stores or services that one would want in a walkable area. No barbershops/salons, a bank, cleaners, pharmacy, hardware, that neighborhood bar the soy people always talk about, a post office/ship & print store—essential as the typical urbanite does not own a printer and gets deliveries regularly, stores that sell the everyday non-food items Walmart will sell (household cleaners, "commodity" clothing like socks, underwear, pants, shirts, etc., basic housewares and small appliances), carry-out pizza, or a good sandwich shop.
None of those examples exist because the Culdesac bughive will not offset the accessibility issues that it faces. It might also be temporary but the most recent Google Maps shot of the area (in Earth) shows an 80-space parking lot on the Culdesac grounds just east of the current apartments. Furthermore, there's a rather telling review on Google that indicates that it's not all sunshine and smiles.
I can't archive the review page unfortunately, but here's the text:
In short:
- The lease had included a free e-bike, but they ran out, lied to him and told him it was "while supplies last", and finally gave it six months late.
- The Internet provider is mandated by the apartment and it's particularly shitty and slow. FWIW in the places I've lived in Houston, Austin, and others the Internet was my own responsibly, and while there is generally a monopoly the mainstream choice (Xfinity, Suddenlink, and Spectrum) were competent for what they were.
- The apartments are in a shitty area and "flanked on both sides by two transient housing shelters". (There's another apartment complex just to the west of Culdesac which is a shithole but at least parking is free.) Specifically, our honest reviewer explains how poorly the package delivery system is run, they operate a Ring camera allegedly until 9 pm, but despite this piss-easy job, knock off past 7, so if a driver shows up late (they often do--USPS is generally incompetent, and both UPS/FedEx prioritize businesses because residences don't close early) they leave it outside, and if they do, it's gone. (Plus, it implies that you can't even pick up your packages after dark!)
- Management basically blamed others for this.
The aforementioned parking lot also has paid parking after dark, meaning that probably the cars parking there are residents who probably simply eat the cost in parking ($150/month).
I was wondering what the spin on this was going to be...if it was literally "libraries becoming a homeless shelters are a Good Thing™ and here's why", if it was making excuses like "we're not doing enough for transit/density/laundering tax money", or what have you--he just sidestepped the issue altogether!
European-style hypermarkets used to exist in the United States. There were straight-up copies of Auchan and Carrefour, adaptations made by Wal-Mart and Kmart (Hypermart USA and American Fare, which looked and operated wildly differently from their later "supercenter" models), and a few other one-offs. Part of the issue was that they expected people to come from a wider trade area for the discounts, but the truth is they needed to expand more throughout the metro area, not just have one or two. Almost all of these lost money until they adapted or converted into other formats.
He also talks about how people should shop at downtowns again instead of Target/Wal-Mart, but when it came to non-consumables, there usually was a one-stop option--the classic American department store.
For Jason's own London, Ontario, let's see what the local Eaton's had. A coffee bar...heavy appliances...clothing for men and women...a pharmacy/drug store...books and records...toys....hardware...pet supplies...automotive accessories...housewares....shoes...wow, basically the same sort of thing Walmart and Target sell now, removed several decades.
The Mexican restaurant is still there, but "Street Corner", the much-vaunted grocery option is gone, replaced by Busan Mart, an "Asian-inspired" convenience store with imported foods and gifts. (it has other locations in the Phoenix area). I don't see any people in some of those shots, the thing about Asian convenience stores is that they're very high-volume, clean, and stock a selection of products are looking for in a convenience store. In the United States, Buc-ee's, QuikTrip, Sheetz, Wawa, and others are taking off because they've found that clean, large convenience stores with fresh food options are stuff people are looking for. (7-Eleven in the United States hasn't done nearly as well in this aspect because despite some new, modern stores it's still pushing around a bunch of crappy stores with coffee that still comes in a carafe, and some of the newer stores it opened in the last five years in my part of the country have mysteriously closed).
The Micro-Retailers that Culdesac talked about I had predicted would be out in six months. Sew Used is still around though I suspect most of their sales are online. Dose of Youth is still open but I suspect most of its clientele is from outside of the development. Complete Comforts, the most "neighborhood" of the three, went under. The other three retailers from a year ago, Kinkan Gifts (Japanese gifts and specialty), ITO Brand (clothing with "quality, sustainability, and ethical sourcing practices"), and Brite Candle Co. (candles from "all-natural" vegan ingredients) are still there. With limited information, I had predicted that they'd vanish but all of them come off as extremely manicured and extremely specialized, all run by non-whites and women, so I suspected they're subsidized by the development in some way. They also survive, along with the Mexican restaurant and Busan Mart, by the fact that the parking lot at Culdesac is actually free during daytime.
There's no actual useful stores or services that one would want in a walkable area. No barbershops/salons, a bank, cleaners, pharmacy, hardware, that neighborhood bar the soy people always talk about, a post office/ship & print store—essential as the typical urbanite does not own a printer and gets deliveries regularly, stores that sell the everyday non-food items Walmart will sell (household cleaners, "commodity" clothing like socks, underwear, pants, shirts, etc., basic housewares and small appliances), carry-out pizza, or a good sandwich shop.
None of those examples exist because the Culdesac bughive will not offset the accessibility issues that it faces. It might also be temporary but the most recent Google Maps shot of the area (in Earth) shows an 80-space parking lot on the Culdesac grounds just east of the current apartments. Furthermore, there's a rather telling review on Google that indicates that it's not all sunshine and smiles.
I can't archive the review page unfortunately, but here's the text:
In short:
- The lease had included a free e-bike, but they ran out, lied to him and told him it was "while supplies last", and finally gave it six months late.
- The Internet provider is mandated by the apartment and it's particularly shitty and slow. FWIW in the places I've lived in Houston, Austin, and others the Internet was my own responsibly, and while there is generally a monopoly the mainstream choice (Xfinity, Suddenlink, and Spectrum) were competent for what they were.
- The apartments are in a shitty area and "flanked on both sides by two transient housing shelters". (There's another apartment complex just to the west of Culdesac which is a shithole but at least parking is free.) Specifically, our honest reviewer explains how poorly the package delivery system is run, they operate a Ring camera allegedly until 9 pm, but despite this piss-easy job, knock off past 7, so if a driver shows up late (they often do--USPS is generally incompetent, and both UPS/FedEx prioritize businesses because residences don't close early) they leave it outside, and if they do, it's gone. (Plus, it implies that you can't even pick up your packages after dark!)
- Management basically blamed others for this.
The aforementioned parking lot also has paid parking after dark, meaning that probably the cars parking there are residents who probably simply eat the cost in parking ($150/month).
I was wondering what the spin on this was going to be...if it was literally "libraries becoming a homeless shelters are a Good Thing™ and here's why", if it was making excuses like "we're not doing enough for transit/density/laundering tax money", or what have you--he just sidestepped the issue altogether!
European-style hypermarkets used to exist in the United States. There were straight-up copies of Auchan and Carrefour, adaptations made by Wal-Mart and Kmart (Hypermart USA and American Fare, which looked and operated wildly differently from their later "supercenter" models), and a few other one-offs. Part of the issue was that they expected people to come from a wider trade area for the discounts, but the truth is they needed to expand more throughout the metro area, not just have one or two. Almost all of these lost money until they adapted or converted into other formats.
He also talks about how people should shop at downtowns again instead of Target/Wal-Mart, but when it came to non-consumables, there usually was a one-stop option--the classic American department store.
For Jason's own London, Ontario, let's see what the local Eaton's had. A coffee bar...heavy appliances...clothing for men and women...a pharmacy/drug store...books and records...toys....hardware...pet supplies...automotive accessories...housewares....shoes...wow, basically the same sort of thing Walmart and Target sell now, removed several decades.
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2020
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2021
You missed that as of May 2024, most of Culdesac is an empty lot:
They haven't built the rest of the complex.
- Joined
- Jan 19, 2020
Not the worst design for modern apartments. I've seen buildings go up close to downtown Cleveland that look like they were deliberately designed to look like they were built from shipping containers. Looking at the satellite, I didn't think "walkable neighborhood" meant trying to replicate Kowloon Walled City or Hashima island.
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2020
This is literally economies of scale.
If a company orders 100,000 widgets a year and that not only provides a regular source of business and income but allows for more stable employment or even discounts for raw materials, I am damn sure to give a discount.
Why does Europe want to hinder economic growth?
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2021
You're assuming that Jason didn't pull that out of his ass. I'm pretty sure European retailers negotiate prices with their suppliers.
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2021
I was kind of lazy with my review of his latest video. He's just getting so boring and predictable. He's a rage channel now, not an analytical one. Also, he no longer visits the places he's talking about, so his videos are now nothing but stock footage that's not worth taking screenshots of.
Lobster Cult High Priest
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2021
Stations video about big box department stores bankrupting city couldn't have better timing to disprove his point with the recent creditor protection / bankruptcy filing of The Hudson's Bay Company.
- Joined
- Sep 29, 2022
I mean, there's nothing wrong with building themed apartments like that. Voting habits aside (as that actually does tend to make a difference), I really don't have a problem with urban bugmen, and it can be fun to live like that if you're making decent money in your 20s. (Apartment buildings were arguably their best when they had some sort of theme; there's still some apartment buildings that clearly are inspired by 19th century European architecture out there).
The problem always starts when they demand other people are forced to change to accommodate that, or believing that's the way people should live. When it comes to bike lane design, there's more intrusive and less intrusive ways of handling it. Merging onto the sidewalk approaching intersections (as seen here) is actually a good idea especially as most cyclists will try to use sidewalks to cross roads or turn left anyway. A bonus is that in that particular instance since the bike lane was combined into the sidewalk at that point, the road was "recycled" into a new turn lane. In theory, this should work for everyone.
Ideally, there should be a neighborhood for everyone and how they want to live their lifestyle, dictated by the people who live there, not decided by others. There would be areas for white people and non-whites, tourists and locals, all-night areas and quiet hamlets, places that favor mass transit and places that don't, with all these co-existing as a functional city.
Instead, Jason, Reddit, American Footslave, and the rest of the gang view low-density areas as a "problem" to be "fixed". You can not have wide roads, free parking, or streets with nothing but single-family homes on large lots. They'll either explicitly say this or weasel their way around it (like "if you want your single-family home, you should pay for it" which is stupid--it's like "hell yes I'm pro-choice, but all abortions should cost $10k out of pocket").
When you find unhinged people like that there's usually some unintentional comedy when you dig into it, like that guy from Philadelphia I dug into recently...and even if you find his being a complete loser a pitiable situation, he's absolutely not the person who people should be marveling at for overloading his crappy bicycle with eggs and soda.
Yeah. I don't know if he's willingly lying or he just misread something about how European supplier laws work. Probably both; besides, I'm pretty sure a Twitter post revealed he does in fact shop at Netherlands' biggest hypermarket for groceries (and presumably other goods like clothing) after pretending he goes to small, local shops.
Apple Porcupine
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2024
Bonesjones
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2021
Walmart had a hard strategy of playing small cities/counties against each other for tax breaks when they spread out. So they aren't completely wrong. Walmart came to prominence because originally they had more modern and efficient logistics which lead to them running a lot of competition out of business in the 90s. The problem was as they grew they had the financial ability and antisocial behavior of strong arming anyone who couldn't stand up to them into disadvantagous positions. A famous one being almost running pickle suppliers, as they couldn't keep up with the demand unless they completely restructured their business, because Walmart was all or nothing contractually.
The problem isn't economic growth it's perverse incentives. The flaw of any monopoly isn't being the soul provider, it's that once you are the only game in town you have no rational reason to be fair.
They've been the Uber of scooters, you use an app to unlock it and ride around. They've had issues with illegally dropping them off in cities in the hope of saturating the market the complaints will outweigh the initial fines. But being a small light weight form of transportation, end up being scrapped or thrown in bodies of waters for fun.
- Joined
- Feb 8, 2021
Oh Jason, Jason my son... do not ask questions like that to me.
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2024
I filled up the car with the wife and I's wedding gifts to get ready for a move from her parents' to my parents'. Here's what the car looked like:
Informational edit: The car is a 2019 Toyota Corolla.
We even managed a side trip to see a relative at the hospital and crammed her sister in the back seat by shoving everything on top of the box or into the trunk. Side-by-side comparison of by car vs. by public transit of the trip to the permanent home below (approximate landmarks used to avoid dox):
I don't even want to know how much they'd charge to ship this stuff by courier, because they're definitely not letting me take all that on the bus, if I could even walk under all that weight.
This journey made possible by cars, and not cargo bikes.
Informational edit: The car is a 2019 Toyota Corolla.
We even managed a side trip to see a relative at the hospital and crammed her sister in the back seat by shoving everything on top of the box or into the trunk. Side-by-side comparison of by car vs. by public transit of the trip to the permanent home below (approximate landmarks used to avoid dox):
I don't even want to know how much they'd charge to ship this stuff by courier, because they're definitely not letting me take all that on the bus, if I could even walk under all that weight.
This journey made possible by cars, and not cargo bikes.
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