The End of the Extraction Economy

Strong Towns has recently been reporting on the role of the modernist economy and its creation of suburbia, as well as its diminishing effect on the future of community infrastructure. Big box retailers have been a major player in this economy and built-environment. Effectively displacing the retail middle-man of the past, the big box is the modernist representation of the public’s access to wholesale warehouses. Convened as a way to bring warehouse savings to the general public, big grocery stores became destination hubs for consumer demand in the 1960s. Surrounded by acres of free parking, and miles of suburban housing, they provided the space for buying and selling free market goods.

In the 1970s, these same stores initiated access fees for national consumer brands and sold shelf space in their stores through slotting fees. Later, Walmart and other retailers leveraged this activity, and soon, the big box retailer became nothing but a distribution shell for thousands of consumer brands' warehousing networks. Subsequently, the trained, experienced and unionized staff of the former middle-men stores were replaced by un-skilled low-cost minders who simply opened doors, swept floors, returned items to shelves, and operated checkout registers. And once self-checkouts arrived, that workforce was further reduced in size.

Our modernist economy needs big box retailers as a centralized resource hub, where mono-cultured activities are zoned and streamlined—clothes, produce, dairy, and electronics all in one place. In this economy, the supporting architectural infrastructure is suburbia, and zoned and streamlined as well. This zoning increases efficiency and minimizes the friction of transactions with large providers. The enormous quantities of pistachios and toilet paper purchased at Costco feed this efficiency. And the quest for continued frictionless purchasing drives online retail, whose end deliverable is the Amazon Dash button.

However, this efficiency is just a continuation of our extraction economy. We treat Big Boxes as mines to be filled up and exhausted. Once depleted, we move on to design and build the next bigger mine, abandoning the former as if were a superfund site for public cleanup. The economics of Big Boxes and Suburbia match the extraction industry as well. Enticed by taxes and jobs, communities spend public money to build a supporting infrastructure providing access for the mine’s owners, with the hope that the promised benefits will outweigh the initial and ongoing continuous costs to the community; only to be disappointed as the owner moves on, leaving abandoned single-use buildings and acres of surface parking behind.