big-box store

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Stacy Mitchell by Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers, the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (2006)

accelerated depreciation, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, drop ship, European colonialism, Haight Ashbury, income inequality, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, new economy, New Urbanism, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, RFID, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the long tail, union organizing, urban planning, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

“This study shatters the common misperception that any sort of growth creates revenue,” said Christopher Cullinan of TischlerBise.66 These findings are specific to Barnstable. Whether a big-box store will be a net loss or gain for a particular city depends on its tax structure and what services it has to provide. In areas where roads are maintained by the state, a big-box store might be a financial gain for a town, but only because FADING PROSPERITY 69 the additional road costs are borne by all of the state’s taxpayers. Cities that rely on local sales taxes, like those in California and Arizona, are more likely to find big-box stores a financial plus, at least in the short-term, but only if the costs to neighboring jurisdictions and the region as a whole are ignored.

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As they reorganize the economy for their own ends, mega-retailers are remaking the American landscape. While a one-hundred-thousandsquare-foot store once required an acre of land, because it was two stories and located downtown, today a big-box store of that size, with its moat of INTRODUCTION xv parking, consumes at least a dozen acres. The aggregate eƒect of this is staggering. In the Cleveland metro alone, some nine thousand acres of forest, wetlands, and rich farm fields have fallen to big-box stores and shopping centers, even as the metro’s population has declined. A similar land binge is under way nationwide. Between 1990 and 2005 the amount of retail space per person in the United States doubled, from nineteen to thirty-eight square feet.

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It certainly is not an economic model designed to foster broad prosperity. THE JOBS MIRAGE New big-box stores and shopping centers are almost invariably sold to communities as job creators. Developers, supportive local o‰cials, and even newspapers routinely refer to the number of new jobs a particular project will bring. The Dayton Daily News reported that a new Target in Sugarcreek, Ohio, “will create 150 to 200 new jobs.” Wal-Mart is “expected to create 250 jobs,” Crain’s Chicago Business reported during the debate leading up to the approval of a superstore on the city’s west side. In Salem, Oregon, “the big-box store the Home Depot envisions could create nearly 200 jobs,” according to the Statesman Journal.

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

Even where it is argued that the tax value should be based off the level of investment, a big box store – despite the size – is a marginal investment. Construction costs for big boxes are generally less than $50 per square foot.4 For comparison, the National Association of Home Builders reports average construction costs of $85 per square foot for new, single-family homes.5 An office or retail building can be expected to cost between $100 and $150 per square foot.6 Corporations build big box stores because they are cheap, and that makes them easy to amortize in a short time frame and ultimately easy to abandon. Where big box stores are reused instead of abandoned, the iteration after the big box tenant will generally be of lower intensity and lesser value.

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Downtown versus the Edge In my home region, the most valuable properties are along the highway corridor, a state highway that provides a bypass around the core of the city. The frontage roads along the highway provide access to the standard collection of big box stores, strip malls, and franchise restaurants. The most valuable of these is the 22.8-acre Mills Fleet Farm complex, a site that includes a double-sized big box store, an auto dealership, and a gas station. Mills Fleet Farm was founded as a general store in downtown Brainerd. Their relocation to the highway corridor, and their expansion to big box locations across the Midwest, is a source of local pride.

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The way we now build cities in North America would be unrecognizable to an American who lived even a century ago. It would be difficult for them to comprehend a highway, a parking lot, a shopping mall, or a middle-class family in a single-family home with a three-car garage. They would be lost in the world of big box stores, office parks, and cul-de-sacs. Get beyond whether the changes have been positive or not; there is one important aspect of this shift that is critical to acknowledge: It was abrupt. Humans had been living one way for thousands of years, yet within just a couple of decades, Americans transformed an entire continent around a new set of ideas.

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities by Witold Rybczynski

benefit corporation, big-box store, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, fixed income, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Seaside, Florida, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

There are no enclosed common areas—shoppers are not directed, or even encouraged, to visit more than one store; if you want a flat-screen television, you drive to one box; if it’s toilet paper you’re after, you drive to another. The economic rationale for a power center is nearby highway access and a shared parking lot; sociability, that staple of traditional shopping places—even malls—is entirely absent. Big-box stores appeared first in suburban locations, but as retailers sought new markets, the concept migrated to the city. The big-box store has adapted to urban conditions more successfully than the shopping mall, although urban big boxes tend to be smaller than their suburban counterparts (apartment dwellers have less storage space, so they tend not to buy in bulk). Urban big boxes are often organized on several floors and, at least in Manhattan, dispense with parking lots.

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Despite such logistical challenges, urban density makes big-box stores extremely profitable. In 2008, Home Depot opened its third Manhattan store, in the Bloomberg Tower on Fifty-ninth Street and Third Avenue; Costco, the largest membership warehouse-club chain in the world, has built a 147,000-square-foot store in a new residential development in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia; and IKEA, the Swedish furniture retailer, has opened a 346,000-square-foot store in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. I always feel a little depressed when I visit a big-box store. The experience is a considerable step down from even a shopping mall, whose interior at least has natural light, fountains, and trees.

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Shopping mall developers did not set their architectural sights high compared to the builders of the elegant arcades and palatial department stores, but the design of a big-box store is governed entirely by economy. Basically, a one-story warehouse is built in the least expensive manner: plain exteriors, painted steel columns, utilitarian lighting, no attempt at decoration. The impression given to the shopper, confirmed by the low prices, is that everything possible is done to keep overhead to a minimum and to pass the savings on to the consumer. This is the opposite of the department store’s shopping-as-glamour, or the mall’s shopping-as-fun; this is shopping-as-utility. Although the big-box store signals the triumph of a lifestyle that values convenience, price, and anonymity, it does not signal the end of leisurely shopping.

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson

accelerated depreciation, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, Donald Shoup, edge city, gentrification, global village, index fund, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, knowledge worker, land bank, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, megaproject, megastructure, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, postindustrial economy, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

As our suburbs become more clustered, they’ll become more economically energetic—with benefits for us all. While not all of suburbia will have the growth to support greater density and walkability, the examples in this book show how real workable strategies are being implemented at many scales—from making over abandoned big box stores into senior centers and schools and libraries to cutting new streets through formerly walled-off corporate campuses. Whole commercial corridors are being retrofitted into integrated communities and real neighborhoods, as you will see. True, most of these retrofits have a ways to go before they can generate the organic authenticity of older cities that have grown up over long spans of time, but they too are a work-in-progress and an important one at that, as they build community and lay the groundwork for still further development.

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Not only does adaptive reuse make sense in the framework of green building design, but it is also a winning approach in economically stretched times, either as a stop-gap measure to keep spaces leased or as a way to diversify activities in maturing suburban communities that were already oversupplied with commercial development. As vacancies increase in malls, strip centers, and big box stores—a trend in place for some time but accelerated by the recession—a range of new, highly creative re-inhabitation projects have occurred. For example, a portion of Crestwood Court, a mall in St. Louis, Missouri, has become ArtSpace, where theater groups, dance troupes, artist studios and a children’s museum are leasing vacated stores.

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The addition of sidewalks and pervious public green space figured into both Meyer, Scherer, and Rockcastle’s elegant transformation of a grocery store into a public library in Texas, and The Beck Group’s award-winning conversion of a Super Kmart into a megachurch in Georgia. Many other vacant big-box stores have been converted to call centers and office space—including the headquarters for Hormel Foods, which includes the Spam Museum in a former Kmart in Minnesota. There are countless additional examples of this kind of recycling that show welcome but minor improvements to the physical and social infrastructure. 5 However, retrofitting’s greater potential goes well beyond incremental adaptive reuse or renovation.

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

During the past few years each side has developed a claim to be an “authentic” part of Red Hook, a claim that involves capital investment, state power, the media, and consumers’ tastes, but not many longtime residents, whether they are white, brown, or black.3 Give IKEA credit. As much criticism as it has received for traffic, importing and labor practices, it appears poised to successfully open a big-box store in New York City, perhaps the environment most hostile to big-box stores in the United States, one where even Wal-Mart has thrown in the towel. —New York Times, May 16, 2008 Four weeks before the vendors’ opening day, in mid-June, IKEA opened this store, its first in New York City. The event sparked even more anticipation, fanned by IKEA’s reputation for offering well-designed furniture at modest prices and by a long trail of community protests and lawsuits and a rising crescendo of articles in the local media, from the New York Times to Brooklyn blogs.

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In 2008 alone, the year the Red Hook store opened, another nineteen IKEA clones were born in metropolitan areas from Paris to Shenzhen. All IKEA stores are big—the Red Hook store has almost 350,000 square feet—and each uses a warehouse design to cut labor costs and enhance shoppers’ feeling of getting bargains. Like WalMart and other big-box stores, IKEA depends on most customers providing their own transportation, usually by automobile, and driving their purchases home; for this reason IKEA branches, like other big-box stores, are surrounded by parking lots. The chain’s claim to show corporate social responsibility by encouraging sustainable forestry and forbidding the hiring of child labor stands in marked contrast to the environmental evils of traffic congestion and air pollution they are often accused of producing around their stores.

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Though Jacobs fought strenuously to preserve an ideal vision of the urban village, and Moses just as strenuously fought to replace it with the ideal of the corporate city, their ideas have been joined to create the hybrid city that we consider authentic today: both hipster districts and luxury housing, immigrant food vendors and big box stores, community gardens and gentrification. Though this city pays its respects to both origins and new beginnings, it does not do enough to protect the right of residents, workers, and shops—the small scale, the poor, and the middle class—to remain in place. It is this social diversity, and not just the diversity of buildings and uses, that gives the city its soul.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

Around this time the suburbs started to evolve into a new urban form entirely, sprawling self-sufficient zones that contained all the services one needed instead of being mere residential extensions of metropolitan areas. Whether called “technoburbs,” “à la carte cities,” or “boomburbs,” these areas were characterized by long corridors of mid-rise office parks, strip malls, chain restaurants, and big-box stores; no center or core; and density and populations approaching those of a small city. These areas emerged along major corridors like Route 128 in Boston, in Silicon Valley outside San Francisco, in developments alongside Aurora outside Denver, and, perhaps most notoriously, in Orange County, California, which grew to two million people in twenty-six low-density mini regions.

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Walmart, the retailer known for its enormous footprint above all else, has been fine-tuning new formats designed for more urban areas: Neighborhood Markets, which are less than a quarter the size of its supercenters, and an even smaller Walmart Express format, which measures about the size of a standard-issue CVS. Walmart has said it is planning “hundreds” of these smaller stores across the country in the coming years. By 2016 Best Buy plans to double the number of its smaller-format Best Buy Mobile stores. Even Target, which more than other big-box stores tied its strategy to the growth of the suburbs, is going in the other direction, opening a new urban format store—called, simply, City—that’s two-thirds the size of its typical store. The first opened in downtown Chicago, and stores are planned for Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco. “You have a massive rush throughout retail to get small,” Leon Nicholas of market research firm Kantar Retail told the Wall Street Journal.

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By 1981, half of office space: Rodney Jennings, “Dynamics of the Suburban Activity Center: Retrofitting for Pedestrian/Transit Use,” Portland State University, June 1989. By the end of the 1990s: Terry Christensen and Tom Hogen-Esch, Local Politics: A Practical Guide to Governing at the Grassroots, 2nd ed. (M. E. Sharpe, 2006), p. 52. dwarfed only by the size: Many big-box store parking lots are so large, they sublease sections of their asphalt to fast-food chains. Whether called “technoburbs”: The term “technoburbs” was coined by Robert Fishman in Bourgeois Utopias. “Boomburbs” was coined by the demographer Robert E. Lang in a 2001 report for the Fannie Mae Foundation that identified fifty-three boomburbs, defined as incorporated places in the top fifty metropolitan areas in the United States with more than one hundred thousand residents that are not the core cities in their metropolitan areas and that maintained double-digit population growth over consecutive censuses between 1970 and 2010.

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America by Jon C. Teaford

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, conceptual framework, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, East Village, edge city, estate planning, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Potemkin village, rent control, restrictive zoning, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, young professional

Instead, it was rich in diversity, a historical accretion of settlement patterns and lifestyles that reflected the felt needs of millions of Americans of the past and present. Metropolitan America included the remnants of traditional cities like Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco, as well as pre–World War II posh enclaves like Scarsdale, post–World War II residential behemoths such as Levittown, edge cities of the 1980s, and an array of malls, big-box stores, office complexes, and chain restaurants and hotels built at the close of the twentieth century. Traveling through a metropolitan region, one did not pass from one hub to another but instead through layers or patches of settlement, each different and catering to different residents and workers and different lifestyles.

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But a resident of a gated community in the Dallas area boomburb of Irving thought otherwise: “It seems like a secure, established neighborhood where our kids can run around without having to worry about traffic.” Claiming that in a city neighborhood “you never know what’s going to happen,” he concluded that “in a gated community you can control some of that.”13 Another emerging element of the landscape of the edgeless city was the giant windowless retail outlet known as the big-box store. By the close of the twentieth century, fewer large, enclosed malls were being built, and some were standing derelict as shoppers turned from the mall’s department store anchors and headed instead for the big-box emporiums of discounters that lined suburban highways. With low prices and huge inventories, these discount chains lured millions of bargain-hungry shoppers.

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Another well-heeled Manhattanite told of her discovery of Target in suburban Long Island: “I came out with two shopping carts full of stuff. They had to help me out the door. It’s so cheap! It’s amazing!”16 FIGURE 7.1 Early Target store in Minnesota, with the sprawling low-rise structure and expansive parking lot characteristic of big-box stores. (Norton & Peel, Minnesota Historical Society) Wal-Mart best exemplified this reversal of the traditional pattern prevailing before 1945. Founded by Arkansas’s Sam Walton, it first thrived by catering to underserved small-town customers and then expanded into suburbia. Finally, by the turn of the twenty-first century, it was entering the central cities.

Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy (Bicycle) by Elly Blue

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autism spectrum disorder, big-box store, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, congestion pricing, Donald Shoup, food desert, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, job automation, Loma Prieta earthquake, medical residency, oil shale / tar sands, parking minimums, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, ride hailing / ride sharing, science of happiness, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Just as an increase in bicycle traffic compresses distances, creating density and retail clusters that strengthen communities, businesses that rely on sprawl lengthen distance and make communities diffuse and isolated. People often cite the ability to access big box stores and their savings as a primary reason that they must own a car. The math on that can’t work out—can even the largest family truly save over $250 a month on the discount for buying peanut butter and diapers in bulk? And that is just the cost of gas. But there’s more to it. Driving a car to a large department store is a recipe for buying more than we need to. Big box stores are designed to seem cheap, but to entice us into impulse purchases. When you are on a bicycle, you are less likely to go to these stores in the first place, much less decide on the spot that you need to buy new bath towels while they are on sale.

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Cheaper bikes are available at large department stores, but more expensive bikes from local bike shops last longer, so it’s a trade off. Or you could scour the internet, thrift stores and yard sales for a much cheaper vintage bike. A tune up to scrape off the rust might cost $150—about the same as buying that big box store bike new. Helmets, locks, and lights are another expense—you could spend up to $100 for these basics, though it would be easy to spend somewhat less or quite a bit more if you were inclined. On the high end, a fancy European cargo bike might set you back as much as $4,000. If your heart is set on an electric pedal assist, that could add another $2,000.

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Any business that can be flexible has better chances to thrive—there is, for instance, a mattress shop in Portland that does booming sales by offering free bicycle delivery. But we have had many decades to grow to rely on our current diffuse, asphalt-covered ecosystem. Not everyone is going to be able to shift gears overnight. One summer, I opened my local newspaper every day to a full-page advertisement for a well-known national big box store featuring a photo of a smiling, middle-aged woman riding a bike. The ad was clearly not intended to promote the sale of bicycles but rather to associate the company with the idea of a healthy, active, green lifestyle. This company’s stores are famously located in the most un-bike friendly areas, surrounded by vast parking lots, reliant on giant fleets of trucks to ship all of its products—including its organic ones—from thousands of miles away.

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

Then, in 1954, Congress changed the tax code to make it more profitable for developers to create shopping malls, basically making a tax shelter out of shopping mall construction.89 As Stacy Mitchell writes in Big-Box Swindle, 6 million square feet of shopping centers were constructed in 1953; just three years later that figure had increased by 500 percent; and over the next twenty years, eighteen thousand shopping centers were built across the United States.90 And the owners of these shopping centers often preferred to make chain stores their tenants (considered a better bet for a landlord), some actually going so far as to bar independently owned stores.91 Today, cashing in on local municipalities’ eagerness to have one in their community, big-box stores receive local and state subsidies and tax breaks. Local municipalities hope that having a local big-box store will increase economic growth, provide new jobs, and boost tax revenues, but unfortunately that isn’t always borne out. Instead, big-boxes siphon money out of the local economy so those lucky Walton family members (and other chains’ shareholders) can acquire another private jet for their extensive fleet and build a new wing on their nuclear-disaster-ready underground fortress (it’s true).92 Big-box payroll typically accounts for less than ten cents of every dollar spent at a given store,93 and, in a domino effect, their low wages (16 percent less for Wal-Mart workers than the average retail worker in 2008, for example94) help suppress the wages of retail workers everywhere.

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And by 2007, CEOs were earning nearly 300 times as much as the average worker.100 And in a cruel turn of a self-perpetuating cycle, as ordinary people have less income, the bargains promised by big-box stores are even more inviting, and so consumers support the very entity that is sucking the life out of their local economy and communities. There’s some hope, though. Local communities have gotten hip to the deception and destruction of big-box development and have been organizing to fight new big-box stores in favor of local businesses, which provide more secure jobs and keep more of the money circulating in the local economy. The highly publicized case of Inglewood, California, going up against Wal-Mart itself was one such victory.

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Likewise, in many countries in the Global South, some communities enjoy “Northern” levels of resource consumption.) All the terms are imperfect. For simplicity’s sake, I chose to use the “developing/developed” designation. Externalized Costs (and Price versus Cost): Bargains abound: rock-bottom prices at big-box stores, discount outlets, online auction sites, even 99-cent stores. Yet there’s an unhealthy illusion at work there, a serious gap between the price you pay and the costs involved. The number on the price tag has very little to do with the costs involved in making Stuff. Sure, some of the direct costs like labor and material are included in the price, but those are dwarfed by externalized, hidden costs like the pollution of drinking water, health impacts on workers and host communities, even changes in the global climate.

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day by Craig Lambert

airline deregulation, Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, big-box store, business cycle, carbon footprint, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Galaxy Zoo, ghettoisation, gig economy, global village, helicopter parent, IKEA effect, industrial robot, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, recommendation engine, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, you are the product, zero-sum game, Zipcar

“That’s when you call your travel agent and say, ‘Get me on the next flight to Miami so I can be on my way to Rio’—and it’s done in twenty seconds. That is fun.” SHOPPING: THE HUNT FOR A HUMAN Retail merchandising and its handmaiden, customer service, are witnessing the extinction of human workers. In this age of big-box stores, try going into a Wal-Mart, Target, or Staples and finding someone to help you purchase, say, a printer. Good luck. You’re on your own, left to wander the aisles in search of an unoccupied staff person. Tracking down sales staff in a big-box store is like trekking the wilds of the Yukon Territory looking for a human settlement. Furthermore, should you be lucky enough to find someone, he or she will likely know next to nothing about the merchandise.

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Door-to-door salespeople like the Avon lady, the Fuller Brush man, or the Encyclopedia Britannica sales force were the face of home shopping—that and Tupperware parties. Salespeople who visited your home, like the ones in stores, were thoroughly trained and brimmed with knowledge about their merchandise. They could answer any question you had; it was their job to provide the “research” you now do for yourself when you shop online or even in big-box stores, where finding a salesperson can be like spotting a scarlet tanager in a city park. At the supermarket, the cashier would “ring you up” (the mechanical cash register actually made a ka-ching! sound) and take your money. You did not tip the cashier for accepting your payment. Self-service checkouts did not exist.

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Typically, the floorwalker was a man in a suit and tie who, as the title suggests, walked the floor of a retail establishment. They roamed freely, supervising sales staff and helping customers find what they wanted. Floorwalkers thrived in a bygone era when retailers hired people to help their customers shop, not only to take their money. In today’s big-box store, the customer has become the floorwalker, minus the supervisory role and the paycheck. This means shadow work. Consumers must educate themselves about the product, including its features, limitations, requirements, competitive advantages and disadvantages, and warrantees. Some do this via online research at home.

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

The standard surveys used to collect information from businesses do not cover much of the service sector. Another example is the difficulty of keeping track of changing purchasing habits. Consumers have moved progressively from purchasing in local stores to shopping in large stores, including discount “big-box” stores—where businesses may also buy some of their supplies. Now spending is shifting online. A third example is estimating the value of income received in the form of deferred stock options, once a small part of total remuneration but now quite significant. The actual number for GDP is therefore the product of a vast patchwork of statistics and a complicated set of processes carried out on the raw data to fit them to the conceptual framework.

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Software tends to have a much shorter life than a machine to be installed on a production line, perhaps two years rather than ten, so it is not obviously the same kind of durable purchase. There is no sharp line between purchases of different types of software by businesses and by consumers for personal use. For example, many small and medium businesses might go to Staples or another big-box store to buy accounting software packages, whereas a big corporation would go direct to the vendor. So collecting the correct kind of raw data is a challenge. Finally, there is an overlap between the software sitting on a computer and the performance characteristics of the computer, so there is a risk that adopting both hedonic pricing and software as an investment double-counts the quality improvements.

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It is almost impossible for the conventional survey methods, involving sending forms to certain businesses or setting researchers to collect information on prices from different outlets, to keep up to date when the structure of the economy changes. To give one obvious example, the spread of shopping either in “big-box” stores or online changes the way price data need to be gathered, as prices are likely to be lower than elsewhere in both cases. The emergence of new sectors of the economy, like digital start-ups or mobile telephony, mean the collection of statistics will lag on their levels of employment and investment.

Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, citizen journalism, cloud computing, digital map, East Village, financial innovation, Firefox, Future Shock, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the printing press, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, mirror neurons, peer-to-peer, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, WikiLeaks

The value of transactions became limited to what could be measured in dollars, and ended at the moment of sale. All of the social value of the exchange was lost—and the money itself left the community. This trend reinforced itself as people—embarrassed to have abandoned a local business for the big box store—began to spend less time on Main Street or at local functions where they might run into local merchants. Local bonds deteriorated, and formerly productive towns turned into bedroom communities of commuters. While cable television and, now, Internet marketing give smaller businesses a way to peddle their wares in the same media as their corporate counterparts, it may actually work against their real strength as real world, local companies.

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The net has turned scalability from a business option to a business requirement. Real world companies have always generally had the choice of whether they want to remain at the “mom and pop” level, or to become a chain or franchise—essentially going into the business of business. Beginning in the 1970s, shopping malls and big box stores changed the retail landscape, putting the pressure of internationally scaled competition onto local businesses. By the 1990s, migrating to the net seemed to many like a way to fight back: No website seemed to be intrinsically advantaged over another. Now the smallest players could have the same reach as the big boys.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

The warehouses are a key step in the journey from Asian factories to stores all over North America including, of course, the biggest chains like Walmart, Costco, Target, and even Amazon. Your phone might be conceived in California, but it’s put together in China and has to get into your hands somehow. We take for granted that we can drive to the big-box store—or click a button on a big-box store’s website—and get what we want when we want it. But that assumption involves a complicated process that most of us never see or think about. At Warehouse Workers United, I meet the people whose job it is to unload, unpack, reload, and repack the miracle devices of the future faster than anyone ever could before.

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They received route optimization—the fastest way to get from point A to point B as they made their way through the massive conference building searching for any particular seminar or showcase. ESRI, in exchange, received data about where every user went when. Moving forward, Hall sees this as being something you could do with malls, big-box stores, and grocery stores—opt in on your mobile device, on an “application to tell me how to move through the stores to efficiently pick up groceries.” Here Wolfgang Hall starts to visibly show his enthusiasm: “You build heat maps based on that: this area is highly frequented, this area is cold.” In doing so, you can solve two problems: the customer has a better experience, and the retailer gets real-time data about where the customer is going in their store.

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Like Walmart, Amazon has gutted local businesses and sucked money out of small towns, downtowns, and entire regions. Amazon’s unlimited selection, cheaper prices, and free shipping on books on orders of $35 or more has decimated bookstores and severely hurt publishers. First the small bookstores and now bigger bookstores like now defunct Borders Books and struggling Barnes and Noble. Next the big-box stores like Best Buy, which survived the initial gutting of retail by Walmart, are coming under pressure. All this means that Amazon, like Walmart, is more Scrooge than Santa. Again like Walmart, in order to maximize discounts to shoppers and shut down the competition, Amazon has to do a lot of work in the shadows, outside of the prying eyes of customers.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

Still, these “deals” are irresistible. Knowing that bargains are ephemeral doesn’t diminish our desire for them. It doesn’t keep us from leaving a warm bed on Black Friday morning to elbow through the post-Thanksgiving mob. It doesn’t stop us from draining gas and time to save two bucks on a case of diapers or Coke at the Big Box store. And it doesn’t prevent us from cluttering our homes, garages, and rented storage units with cheap stuff we may have forgotten we own. As a nation, we’ve come to assume that low price powers both productivity and the gross national product. Under this logic, the ebb and flow of cheap goods underlies progress and rewards us with good jobs and bright futures.

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“And when consumers have no idea as to the quality of a product, or feel neutral or negative about it, deep discounts can actually discourage them from making a buy.” It is not very surprising that preconceived ideas skew our response to price. A Rodeo Drive or Madison Avenue address predisposes us to anticipate that a shop will be expensive and to be grateful for any price break it offers. Deep discounts at Big Box stores may prompt the opposite reaction: When something is cheap, making it cheaper still might push us to question its value. But behavioral scientists are learning that consumer reactions go beyond this predictable pattern; they are rooted in something deeper than simple preconceptions. It is hard to know what customers are willing to pay for any given item at any given time, and even harder to balance that knowledge with considerations of cost and profit margins.

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Plausible estimates of the magnitude of the benefit are enormous—a total of $263 billion in 2004, or $2,329 per household.” That is quite a bonus. Among the experts Furman cites as having done the basic work leading to this assessment is Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jerry Hausman, coauthor of a highly regarded study of the impact of Wal-Mart on food prices. Hausman concluded that Big Box stores made consumers “better off by the equivalent of 25 percent of food spending.” For the poorest 20 percent of the population, this was estimated to be equivalent to an increase in income of 6.5 percent, a significant sum. I called Hausman to discuss this figure with him. He told me that Furman actually underestimated the Wal-Mart premium: The discounter not only offers low food prices to its own customers but forces other local supermarkets to drop their prices as well.

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline

big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, clean water, East Village, export processing zone, feminist movement, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megacity, messenger bag, Multi Fibre Arrangement, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Skype, special economic zone, trade liberalization, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, Veblen good

Ng says, “[The retail price] is not even enough for me to start talking to them and analyze all the details of the project, not to mention to pay the workers to sew it.” He was also approached by Babies “R” Us about producing a line of T-shirts. Ng offered the company a price of $2 or $3 per shirt, but it turned out the big-box store wanted to sell a half-dozen shirts for that price. The expectation of cheap also hurts clothing designers. A drama unfolded in the spring of 2011 on the Web site well-spent.com, a site devoted to handcrafted and locally made products that “don’t cost an arm and a leg.” Independent men’s wear company UNIS, owned by New York–based designer Eunice Lee, was criticized on the Web site’s message boards for the price of her men’s khakis, which retail for $228.

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When cheap imports started to flow into America in the 1970s, sewing machine ownership and sewing skills started to wane. In recent decades, home sewing and custom clothing have almost gone extinct. It’s generally accepted that cheap imported clothes did in home sewing and made obsolete the professions of dressmakers and tailors. Joyce Perhac, president of the Sewing & Craft Alliance, says, “You can go to a big-box store today and get a T-shirt for $2 or $3 if you want. You could buy a dress today for $10 or $15. In the past you couldn’t do that. When we started importing lesser goods from overseas, then it just changed the balance.” My mother learned how to sew from her mother and made an outfit from scratch in home economics class in high school.

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My grandmother on my father’s side didn’t make entire garments, but she was very skilled at taking her family’s clothes in and letting them out. I never learned how to sew. In a single generation the skill was lost. I asked Perhac if it really mattered that we don’t know how to sew anymore. After all, we can just go to a big-box store and buy that $2 shirt today. “Sewing is vitally important,” Perhac countered. “People can’t sew their own buttons back on, and that’s such an easy thing to do. So they either wear the garment without a button, or they throw it away and buy a new one. It really is a skill that is being lost in a dramatic way and that’s a shame.”

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

And he told investors the same thing he told his parents: the company had a 70 percent chance of failing. Though they could not have known it, investors were looking at the opportunity of a lifetime. This highly driven, articulate young man talked with conviction about the Internet’s potential to deliver a more convenient shopping experience than crowded big-box stores where the staff routinely ignored customers. He predicted the company’s eventual ability to personalize a version of the website for each shopper based on his or her previous purchases. And he prophesied what must have seemed like a radical future: that everyone would one day use the Internet at high speeds, not over screeching dial-up modems, and that the infinite shelf space of the Web would enable the fulfillment of the merchandiser’s dream of the everything store—a store with infinite selection.

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To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung. He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics giants viewed Internet sellers like Amazon as sketchy discounters. They also had big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City whispering in their ears and asking them to take a pass on Amazon. There were middlemen distributors, like Ingram Electronics, but they offered a limited selection. Bezos deployed Doerr to talk to Howard Stringer at Sony America, but he got nowhere. So Payne had to turn to the secondary distributors—jobbers that exist in an unsanctioned, though not illegal, gray market.

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But Galli was also making some important contributions. He turned category leaders like Harrison Miller and Chris Payne into general managers who had control over their own profit-and-loss statements and their costs and profit margins. He had experienced the push-and-pull of Black and Decker’s relationship with big-box stores like Home Depot, so he introduced traditional retailing concepts, like the idea of earning cooperative marketing dollars, or co-op, from suppliers in exchange for highlighting their products to customers. Covey was burning out after three years of nonstop work, and Galli helped Amazon hire a new chief financial officer, Warren Jenson from Delta.

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

Kohan, “Top Retail Trends of 2014-15,” August 26, 2014, http://retailnext.net/blog/top-retail-trends-2014/. Kohan goes on to say that stores are also considering “pop-up shops, vending machines and brand boutiques within their larger stores.” 11. Shan Li, “Best Buy Will Shrink Its Big-Box Stores by Sharing Space,” Seattle Times, July 9, 2011, http://www.seattletimes.com/business/best-buy-will-shrink-its-big-box-stores-by-sharing-space/. 12. From U.S. Bureau of the Census, Latest Quarterly E-commerce Report, http://www.census.gov/retail/mrts/www/data/excel/tsnotadjustedsales.xls. In using the Census e-commerce data, it is important to note that according to Census procedures, sales of all firms with distinct online operations, regardless of the firm’s main line of business, are to be reported under NAICS industry 454, Non-Store Retailers.

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Those business practices don’t make as much sense when all a consumer wants to do at a brick-and-mortar facility is pay and pick up his merchandise as efficiently as possible. Innovation has given consumers better ways to shop since they don’t need the services that traditional retailers provide, and they can shop at big-box stores and pay lower prices. Not coincidentally, there has been a steady and substantial increase in the relative importance of warehouse clubs and other supercenters since around 2000.16 Innovation has also given retailers better ways to sell. But that doesn’t make it easy for many of them to figure out what to do.

Fix Your Gut: The Definitive Guide to Digestive Disorders by John Brisson

23andMe, big-box store, biofilm, butterfly effect, clean water, Helicobacter pylori, life extension, meta-analysis, microbiome, pattern recognition, publication bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Zimmermann PGP

Most pharmacists that work for your local compounding pharmacy have average supplement knowledge and make recommendations to improve your health. The only disadvantages of a local compounding pharmacy are that the supplements can be expensive, and the pharmacy can have limited selection depending on the size of the pharmacy. Big Box Store (Walmart, Sam’s Club, Costco, BJ's Warehouse Club) Pros: Everywhere Cons: Everything Do not buy your supplements at any big box store ever, unless they are trusted brands, and you have no other alternative to buy it elsewhere. Chapter 24 Buying your Supplements Online: Risk vs. Reward I do not order my supplements online unless necessary. Even though ordering your supplements online might be less expensive, most of the time you never know the quality of the supplement you might be receiving.

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Food Poisoning Opportunistic / Infectious Gastrointestinal Bacteria Chapter 15 DIETS Bulletproof® Diet Elemental Diet FODMAP DIET GAPS Diet Standard Ketogenic Diet (Atkins® Diet) Low Acid Diet Low Residue Diet Paleo Diet Perfect Health Diet® Primal® Diet Semi-Elemental Diet SCD Diet Wheat Belly Diet Chapter 16 COLON CLEANSING Fiber Colon Cleansing Protocol Chapter 17 SUPPLEMENTS USED FOR DIGESTIVE AILMENTS 5-HTP Activated Charcoal Allicin-C Bioperine Chlorella Collagen Colloidal Silver Diatomaceous Earth Digestive Enzymes Fish Oil Humic Acid EDTA Lactoferrin Lauricidin Limonene L-glutamine Manuka Honey Melatonin Mitochondrial Support Supplements (Ubiquinol [CoQ10,] PQQ, and L-carnitine) NAC N-Acetylglucosamine Nu-Nefarious Ox bile Oxaloacetate R-lipoic Acid Seacure Undecylenic Acid Zeaxanthin Zinc Carnosine Chapter 18 HERBS / FOODS THAT ARE HELPFUL FOR DIGESTIVE AILMENTS Aloe Vera Astragalus Black Cumin Seed Oil Black Raspberry Powder Black Walnut Hulls Boswellia Butcher’s Broom Cardamom Carnivora Cayenne Cinnamon Chamomile Echinacea Fennel Ginger Goldenseal Horse Chestnut Licorice Marijuana Marshmallow Root Mastic Gum Olive Leaf Oregano Oil Peppermint Oil Sangre de Drago Slippery Elm Bark Swedish Bitters (Gentian) Triphala Turmeric (Curcumin) Witch Hazel Wormwood Chapter 19 ANTIBIOTIC INFORMATION GUIDE Aminoglycoside Class (Tobramycin, Neomycin, and Gentamicin) Carbapenem Class (Imipenem, Meropenem, Doripenem) Cephalosporin Class (Keflex, Rocephin) Glycopeptide Class (Vancomycin) Ketolide Class (Telithromycin) Lincosamide Class (Clindamycin) Lipopeptide Class (Daptomycin) Macrolide Class (Azithromycin, Clarithromycin) Monobactam Class Nitrofuran Class (Macrobid) Nitroimidazole Class (Flagyl) Oxazolidinone Class (Linezolid) Penicillin Class Quinolone Class (Ciprofloxacin, Moxifloxacin) Rifamycin Class (Rifampicin, Rifaximin) Sulfonamide Class (Sulfamethoxazole) Tetracycline Class Chapter 20 MEDICINE PRESCRIBED FOR DIGESTIVE AILMENTS Antacids Azathioprine 5-ASA Biological agents (Infliximab, Adalimumab) Bismuth Subsalicylate Calcium Channel Blocker Cholestyramine Colace Corticosteroids Dicycloverine (Bentyl) H2 Antagonist Laxatives Linaclotide Loperamide Lubiprostone Mebeverine Methotrexate Metoclopramide (Reglan) / Domperidone (Motilium) Misoprostol Nystatin Proton Pump Inhibitors Ondansetron Sucralfate Chapter 21 COMMON DIAGNOSTIC TESTS AND PROCEDURES FOR GASTROINTESTINAL PROBLEMS Anoscopy Barium Swallow Test Blood Tests Colonoscopy CT Scan Endoscopy Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography Esophageal pH Monitoring Test Esophagogastroduodenoscopy Gastric Emptying Test (Barium Meal) HIDA Scan Lower Gastrointestinal Series (Barium Enema) Manometry (Esophageal) MRI Sigmoidoscopy Sitz Marker Study Stool Test Ultrasound Upper GI Series X-ray Chapter 22 THE DIFFERENCE IN SUPPLEMENT COMPANIES Top Five Supplement Companies Niche Companies That I Trust Supplement Company Tier System (Non-Niche Companies) Chapter 23 BUYING LOCALLY: LOCAL HEALTH FOOD STORES AND CORPORATIONS Local health food store Vitamin Shoppe GNC Vitamin World Whole Foods Big Box Pharmacy Stores (CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid) Local Compounding Pharmacy Big Box Store (Walmart, Sam’s Club, Costco, BJ's Warehouse Club) Chapter 24 BUYING YOUR SUPPLEMENTS ONLINE: RISK VS. REWARD Amazon.com PureFormulas.com Iherb.com Swansonvitamins.com eBay.com Brick and Mortar Supplement Company Websites (Vitamin Shoppe, GNC, Vitamin World) Big Box Brick and Mortar Supplement Companies Websites (Pharmacies, Walmart, Target, Warehouse Clubs) Appendix / Sources General Source Information Difference in Supplement Companies How the Digestive System Works Zinc Magnesium Increase Stomach Acid Probiotics Opportunistic / Infectious Bacteria Supplements Herbs Antibiotic and Medicine Guide Common Diagnostic Tests GERD SIBO H. pylori and Gastritis GMO Information, Posture, Clothing LES Candida albicans Constipation and Chloride Gallbladder, Liver, and Pancreas Parasites D-Limonene LERD Gastroparesis Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome Barrett’s Esophagus Esophageal Spasms Nutcracker Esophagus SIBO IBS Chronic Functional Abdominal Pain Intestinal Renewal Celiac Disease IBD Appendix Hemorrhoid Colon Cleansing Colon Cleansing Protocols Chapter 1 My Story For twenty-two years of my life, I thought natural medicine was a sham.

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I prefer that instead of ordering from a brick and mortar supplement company online, you get your supplements from a local brick and mortar supplement company store. Support your local economy whenever possible! Big Box Brick and Mortar Supplement Companies Websites (Pharmacies, Walmart, Target, Warehouse Clubs) Pros: None Cons: Plenty Do not buy your supplements at any big box store website ever unless they are trusted brands, and you have no other alternative to buy them elsewhere. Appendix / Sources General Source Information Balch, Phyllis. Prescription for Nutritional Healing, Avery Publishing, 2010. Balch, Phyllis. Prescription for Herbal Healing, Avery Publishing, 2012.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Knowing they are being judged in advance and eager to get a jump on their competitors, retailers edge toward increasingly earlier opening times. While the earliest Black Friday sales used to begin Friday morning at 9 a.m., by the early 2000s they had moved up to 6 a.m. or even 5 a.m. Customers lined up in the cold outside their favorite big-box stores on Thursday night, and local news shows showed up to cover the spectacle. By 2011 some of the most aggressive stores, such as Target, Best Buy, and Macy’s, decided that they would push the envelope even further and start Black Friday at midnight. Walmart rolled Black Friday all the way back to Thursday evening at 10 p.m.

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Others felt the expanded hours just lengthened the shopping day beyond their endurance levels. Some even seemed aware of their complicity in overworking store clerks, and of how the fun of Black Friday had turned into more work for everyone. Employees complained, too, and those at some of the big-box stores were fired for refusing to come in for the overnight Thanksgiving shift. Memories of late-nineteenth-century union fights over workers’ hours were retrieved by the press: “Even though it’s a desperate time doesn’t mean that we should trade all that ground that our fathers and our grandfathers, everyone that came before us, fought really hard for,” a Target worker told the New York Times.18 JCPenney, in a nod to these sentiments, kept their opening time at a respectable 4 a.m., because “we wanted to give our associates Thanksgiving Day to spend with their families.”19 The extreme overwind has pushed many shoppers and workers over the edge, and even threatened the Christmas shopping season as a whole.

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Starting the Christmas season the day after Thanksgiving was already at the very boundary of spring-loading; pushing into Thanksgiving itself was an overwind. It broke through the patina of holiday spirit, masking this otherwise crude effort to get people to go further into credit card debt by encouraging them to purchase more electronics and other goods manufactured in Chinese plants and sold in big-box stores that kill local business. All this, we must remember, on borrowed money and borrowed time. No wonder our consumer economy went into present shock. In the process, many consumers and workers alike came to realize the artificiality of the whole affair and simply turned away. Anticonsumerist Adbusters magazine’s “Buy Nothing Day” had already morphed into the lifelong commitment to Occupy Wall Street.

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Once those people and places started to push back, digital technology came to the rescue, providing virtual territory for capital’s expansion. Unfortunately, while the internet can scale almost infinitely, the human time and attention that create the real value are limited. Digital companies work the same way as their extractive forebears. When a big box store moves to a new neighborhood, it undercuts local businesses and eventually becomes the sole retailer and employer in the region. With its local monopoly, it can then raise prices while lowering wages, reduce labor to part-time status, and externalize the costs of healthcare and food stamps to the government.

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The bookselling website doesn’t care if authors or publishers make a sustainable income; it uses its sole buyer or “monopsony” power to force both sides to accept less money for their labor. The initial monopoly can then expand to other industries, like retail, movies, or cloud services. Such businesses end up destroying the marketplaces on which they initially depend. When the big box store does this, it simply closes one location and starts the process again in another. When a digital business does this, it pivots or expands from its original market to the next—say, from books to toys to all of retail, or from ride-sharing to restaurant delivery to autonomous vehicles—increasing the value of its real product, the stock shares, along the way.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

But it makes those kinds of businesses more fragile, and easier to compete with. And it gives the competitive edge to the businesses that sell experiences, which can’t be copied or programmed into a machine nearly as easily. Several years ago, Best Buy learned this lesson out of necessity. Like lots of other big-box stores, Best Buy was struggling to keep up with Amazon and other online retailers. Sales of big-ticket items like TVs were falling, and many of the products that once lured customers into stores, like new-release CDs and DVDs, were becoming obsolete. When customers did come into stores, they were increasingly “showrooming”—that is, looking at an item, then going online to buy it for a lower price elsewhere.

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The company invested in more training for store associates, and started an In-Home Advisor program that allowed customers to get personal consultations from trained Best Buy experts, who would come to their house to help them choose the right big-screen TV for their living room, or figure out which stereo system would sound best on their patio. The program, which launched in 2017, was an immediate hit, and created a core group of hyper-loyal customers who began treating Best Buy as a kind of personal tech concierge, rather than just a big-box store. “The business we’re in is not simply selling products—it’s connecting human needs with technology solutions,” Joly told me. “So, our focus is on these human needs.” Joly’s humanist strategy brought Best Buy back to life. Sales skyrocketed, customers stopped showrooming, and within a few years, the company’s stock price was at an all-time high, with happy workers and satisfied shareholders.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

But there was a problem with this feel-good story. The downtowns of the towns and cities that these shopping centers surrounded began to die. From 1954 to 1977, the percentage of retail in American city centers dropped by 77 percent. Many downtowns never recovered. And then Walmart, Target, and other big-box stores came along. Because of their scale, big-box stores are able to offer lower prices and a wider selection than local, smaller stores. Consumers notice. Studies have found that new Walmart stores derive 84 percent of their sales by taking them away from existing local businesses. Another study found that the expansion of three thousand Walmart stores caused the closure of twelve thousand other stores.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

Most people still worked—it was rare to find employable locals on disability—and the crack and meth scourge hadn’t yet made it to Rockingham County. In the center of Madison, McFall Drug was still open with its lunch counter, alongside a men’s clothing store, two furniture shops, a shoe store, and a couple of banks. Kmart had brought the first big-box store to the area back in the 1980s, but there was not yet a single Wal-Mart in Rockingham County. Still, most people knew that large forces were bearing down and the area might be left behind. Dean always said that ambition wasn’t in the DNA down here, but those who had a little and were still young didn’t stay around.

…

Brandon’s main street was West Brandon Boulevard, or U.S. 60, and in the half mile between stoplights, the shops passed by in an uninterrupted blur: Einstein Bros Bagels Florida Car Wash State Farm Dairy Queen Express Lube Jesse’s Steaks McDonald’s Five Star Paint Ball Aquarium Center Sunshine State Federal Credit Union Mister Car Wash Weavers Tire + Automotive Wendy’s. The growth machine became the employment agency. Other than minimum wage jobs at restaurants and big-box stores, it was hard to find work outside the real estate industry. In the hierarchy of the boom years, the poor were Mexican day laborers on construction sites; the working class had jobs in the building trades; the lower middle class were bank tellers; the middle class were real estate agents, title insurance agents, and civil engineers; the upper middle class were land use attorneys and architects; and the rich were developers.

…

Around the farms and small towns of Southside, the aide found signs of life in renewable energy: a dairy farm outside Danville that was making electricity out of manure; a nursery just across the road where a former Goodyear engineer was testing crops for energy yield; a landfill in Martinsville where officials wanted to turn methane gas into electrical power. No one had told these people to do any of it, and they were just the kinds of businesses that Perriello wanted to highlight, tangible examples of a new economy in the Piedmont that didn’t look like the past. Instead of enormous factories and big-box stores that sucked the wealth out of a community before abandoning it, these were small-scale projects that created five or ten jobs at a time and kept the money local. Eventually, Perriello found out about Red Birch Energy. * * * Dean had worked up a pitch, a PowerPoint slide presentation, and he was taking it to any audience that would listen.

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

The lucky ones might snag a job at Parchman Prison, a huge penal complex in the nearby countryside that housed 3,000 inmates; or they might drive further afield, to the casinos one and a half hours north of town—where locals worked nonunionized jobs, with few benefits, at near-minimum wage. Most, however, stayed closer to home. And, said Blockett, they either remained jobless, or they ended up with dead-end work at fast food chains and big box stores. “[They work at] McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Walmart and Kroger. Some Dollar Generals. Different things like that.” HURRICANES, TORNADOES, AND SOME AWFULLY BIG BILLS Were he to return to life, Michael Harrington wouldn’t be pleased that modern-day poverty in a place like Mississippi, or in the Appalachian towns studied by Jim Ziliak, or in the urban community of North Philadelphia, still survived; but, nevertheless, as a student of the history of poverty he would understand it.

…

Believe that, dear readers, and you can find me after you’ve finished this book for a discussion about a bridge that I want to sell you in Brooklyn. The lesson from Chicago: Large corporations do respond to public protests about working conditions. But for such an intervention in the labor market as a living wage law aimed at big box stores to really work, it would have to be done at least at the state level, and ideally at the federal one. In this context, bigger is indisputably better: The larger the area covered by the law, the harder it is for companies simply to up the stakes and move their business elsewhere in response. How would consumers be impacted by these laws?

…

Partly, we fund such programs through paring other areas of the budget—for example, limiting defense spending increases and restricting the percentage of healthcare dollars that can be used to feather the nests of insurance company executives. And by asking consumers to pay marginally more—for goods bought at big box stores and fast food restaurants, for example—so as to provide mechanisms to boost the wages of the working poor. And partly, through designing them well, we make sure that these programs help fund themselves: Increasing the EITC, for example, by providing low-income families more money to spend on nutritional food and on preventive healthcare, reduces the medical costs associated with large numbers of low-weight and premature babies.

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger

addicted to oil, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, big-box store, centre right, commoditize, credit crunch, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, Ford Model T, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, walkable city, white flight

Somewhere in between driver and follower products are those that must have some demand in place before they open, and the developers and tenants are confident the market will fill in quickly. Those in-between products include regional-serving office and industrial development, bigbox power centers (clusters of big-box stores), regional malls, and hotels. I have found that the drawing radius of these products in a drivable suburban environment tends to be three to seven miles (one to three miles in a walkable urban environment). As the initial limited-access highways were being built, it was housing that led the way to the suburbs.

…

The high-density mixed-use office and housing over retail, such as West Village, will emerge as a conforming, standard product type. There is the “bury-the-box” mixed-use product type, which puts a big-box retailer in the center of a block surrounded with “liner” buildings. These liner buildings have retail on the ground floor and office or housing on the upper floors. The big-box store, movie 110 | THE OPTION OF URBANISM FIGURE 5.5. West Village was one of the pioneering mixed-use lifestyle retail centers with housing on the upper three floors when it opened in 2003. The structured parking is buried behind the buildings with only a small amount of teaser parking on the streets.

The Secret Lives of Hoarders: True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter by Matt Paxton, Phaedra Hise

big-box store, dumpster diving, fixed income, retail therapy

If it’s not in the house, hoarders worry that they can’t locate what they need instantly. Surprisingly, information hoarders can usually find what they’re looking for—or at least know where it is in the piles, though it may be buried three feet deep. ▶ The Shopaholic Marcie’s house was packed floor to ceiling with unopened plastic bags of items from discount and big-box stores. This stout, gray-haired grandmother who dressed in flowery polyester pantsuits loved to shop. Her hoarding had progressed to the point where she’d go shopping to replace things she couldn’t find in her mess, but then she would also buy extra stuff while she was at it. For years, Marcie would come home from her latest spree, put her shopping bags down on the nearest pile, and then never look at them again.

…

Kurt liked nothing better than to deck himself out in a suit, gold chains, and watch; spritz on a little cologne; style his toupee—and go shopping. He felt important and totally in control. Kurt admitted that he knew he was getting himself into debt and worsening his hoarding, but the act of shopping made him feel so good that he justified it to himself. On any given day he’d head off to his favorite big-box store, and he might tell himself that he’d just see what the sales were but wouldn’t actually buy anything. But then he would come home with hundreds of dollars’ worth of items. One could imagine his rationalization: “I know I shouldn’t do this; my credit card is maxed out. But this jacket fits me perfectly and it’s such a bargain.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

The downtown area he’s located in has been slated for redevelopment, and only corporate chain stores appear to have deep enough pockets to pay for storefront leases. It sounded like a good idea when Marcus supported it at the public hearing—but the description in the pamphlet prepared by the real-estate developer (complete with a section on how to compete more effectively with “big box” stores like Wal-Mart) hasn’t conformed to reality. Marcus’s landlord doesn’t really have any choice in the matter. He underwent costly renovations to conform to the new downtown building code, and needs to pass those on to the businesses renting from him. He took out a mortgage, too, which is slated to reset in just a couple of months.

…

While Dunning first conceived Birkdale as a real residential community with a few small shops, its financiers required a level of funding that only big anchor stores could provide. The ratio was gradually tilted in favor of commercial space, making the remaining residences less a functional town than an ornamental addition. (“Look, honey,” a shopper says to her husband as she notices the apartments over Victoria’s Secret, “people live here!”) The big box stores demanded the big parking lots, visibility from the “major arteries,” and the humongous signage already familiar to the automotive American consumer. Where Jacobs had always advocated building towns around the needs of people instead of the needs of cars, Birkdale was being constructed at the intersection of NC-73 and I-77, a ribbon of highway that is Birkdale’s natural environment, forcing many concessions by this walking town to the primacy of the automobile.

…

While Parker made some great TV commercials, they weren’t enough to put better clothes on the racks, and under pressure, Pressler resigned in 2007. The company is now struggling to stay alive. Other companies seek to remain competitive by dismantling the private sector’s social safety net—pensions, benefits, and the steady salary increases won by long-time employees. In 2007, Circuit City came under pressure from big box stores such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy, whose young employees earned less than its own. The company decided to dismiss 3,400 people, about 8 percent of its workforce. They weren’t doing a bad job, nor were the positions being eliminated entirely. It’s just that the workers had been employed for too long and as a result were being paid too much—between ten and twenty dollars per hour, or just around the median of American workers.

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

Some will journey clear across the continent. All will count the miles, which unspool like a filmstrip of America. Fast-food joints and shopping malls. Fields dormant under frost. Auto dealerships, megachurches, and all-night diners. Featureless plains. Feedlots, dead factories, subdivisions, and big-box stores. Snowcapped peaks. The roadside reels past, through the day and into darkness, until fatigue sets in. Bleary-eyed, they find places to pull off the road and rest. In Walmart parking lots. On quiet suburban streets. At truck stops, amid the lullaby of idling engines. Then in the early morning hours—before anyone notices—they’re back on the highway.

…

(At this wage, even if Linda convinced her employer to give her full-time, forty-hour weeks all year long—and didn’t take any vacations—her annual salary would amount to $17,680, with no benefits.) Linda was only a half day’s drive from the Home Depot in Lake Elsinore where she’d been a cashier, but the wilderness felt utterly remote. This new camp hosting job was the antithesis of running a checkout line under the sallow lights of a big-box store. It felt nothing like her gigs at restaurants, construction sites, casinos, or corporate offices, all the other places where she’d traded time for money. Best of all, she’d be getting paid while living rent-free. Though the campsite lacked utility hookups, her supervisor lent her a generator and dispatched a water truck each Tuesday to fill the fifty-five-gallon tank on her RV.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Cosmetology is “more psychologically rewarding, creative work,” he explains.28 It’s tempting to dismiss such a broad definition of creativity as out of touch, but Florida’s declarations illuminate an important trend and one that helped set the terms for the ascension of amateurism. It is not that creative work has suddenly become abundant, as Florida would have us believe; we have not all become Mozarts on the floor of some big-box store, Frida Kahlos at the hair salon. Rather, the point is that the psychology of creativity has become increasingly useful to the economy. The disposition of the artist is ever more in demand. The ethos of the autonomous creator has been repurposed to serve as a seductive facade for a capricious system and adopted as an identity by those who are trying to make their way within it.

…

What do we lose if we let the middle go missing, if the creative sphere splits in two, a few megahits orbited by trillions of megaflops? The topology of our cultural landscape has long been twisted by an ever-shrinking number of corporations. Powerful entertainment companies have bought up their competitors, consolidating into a handful of colossi, much the way big-box stores have decimated mom-and-pop shops, paving America over with brand-name sameness and dictating social and economic terms to our society. For years we have understood that this dynamic is detrimental and citizens have pushed back. What is the effect of the expanding corporate goliaths and super-celebrities online?

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

The commercial middle of Cleveland Heights can be a bit of a shock to those who haven’t seen it before. Where one might be expecting a 1920s main thoroughfare of heavy car and foot traffic, shops, and restaurants, there is an immense sea of asphalt parking lot and a sprawling mall filled with big-box stores: Walmart, Home Depot, Best Buy. It is called Severance Town Center, and it includes the Cleveland Heights City Hall on its outside edge, but it is not a community center in any meaningful suburban sense. It is difficult even to get from one end of the project to the other without driving. To anyone who believes in the virtues of human-scale commercial life, Severance Town Center is a hideous eyesore.

…

Walking from the station to the Walmart is not only a difficult experience, it is barely a feasible one. CityCenter Englewood is essentially a small, pleasant enclave masking oceans of asphalt. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the project is that a few blocks beyond all of it, beyond the town green and the town hall, the power center with the big-box stores, there is an old, slightly seedy, but interesting prewar downtown, with locally owned businesses still open. Unless you are driving, you have to take a shuttle bus from the front entrance of the town hall even to discover that it is there. Instead of sprucing up the historic center that already existed, the town planners and developers razed the development of the 1960s and built on top of that.

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There by Ted Books

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, big-box store, carbon footprint, clean tech, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, demand response, food desert, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Induced demand, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, McMansion, megacity, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, Zipcar

Steinberg had helped develop Philadelphia’s first cohesive plan for revitalizing the city’s postindustrial waterfront, and I listened excitedly as he explained how those piers overgrown with shrubs and thin trees would soon become parks reconnecting citizens to this oft-ignored waterway and how a suburban-style collection of big-box stores, including the country’s only waterfront Wal-Mart, would be reimagined as a pedestrian-oriented neighborhood with new housing. Bike paths would line the river, and Philadelphia’s historic street grid, like outstretched arms, would extend all the way to the water as it once had. Interstate 95 slices along the Philadelphia shoreline, dividing the Delaware River from downtown.

30 Days to a Clean and Organized House by Katie Berry

big-box store, Broken windows theory, clean water, Indoor air pollution, Mason jar

Add 1 teaspoon of Ivory or Dawn Original dish soap and 20-30 drops of your favorite essential oil (optional). Discard unused solution after cleaning. Bathroom Disinfectant Spray This spray relies on borax and washing soda, which is different than baking soda. You can find borax and washing soda in the laundry aisle of most big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Target. Both amplify the disinfecting power of white vinegar while helping the solution cling to surfaces a bit longer. For added disinfecting power, use tea tree or lavender essential oil. Ingredients: 1 tsp Borax 1 tsp of washing soda 2 cups hot water 1/2 cup white vinegar 10-15 drops of essential oils Directions: 1.

The Lost Bank: The Story of Washington Mutual-The Biggest Bank Failure in American History by Kirsten Grind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, big-box store, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, financial engineering, fixed income, fulfillment center, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, junk bonds, low interest rates, Maui Hawaii, money market fund, mortgage debt, naked short selling, NetJets, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, too big to fail, Y2K

WaMu’s board was a mix of longtime Seattle business leaders (“local yokels,” noted one critic) and executives from across the country with little hands-on banking experience. This scenario was not unusual. Corporate boards are frequently made up of well-known executives who don’t have extensive knowledge of the industry they oversee. In theory, this setup provides a company with access to expertise that transcends all industries. A board member of a growing big-box store, for example, might have no experience ordering crates of diapers and cranberry juice, but he might be skilled at acquisitions. Only one of WaMu’s board members had true banking experience: Mary Pugh, the chair of the finance committee. Pugh was one of Pepper’s hires in the 1980s, a young Yale graduate who had been tasked with figuring out the new, complicated developments in the banking industry.

…

The FDIC was spending time and money preparing for the failure of a giant U.S. bank, even though it had been a record two and a half years since any bank in the country had failed. “But who’s counting?” Bair joked at the time. She had spent much of her first year at the helm of an agency that oversaw some 8,500 banks dealing not with banks at all but with a big-box store that wanted to become a bank. Wal-Mart had filed what’s known as an “industrial loan company” application, which would allow it to offer limited bank services. The application was controversial.3 Wal-Mart claimed it was just trying to cut the costs of processing customers’ checks, but banks and credit unions were sure the company was trying to find a way to run its own commercial bank.4 Bair solved this problem in an unusual fashion—by doing nothing at all.

…

Bair describes the bounty: a polka-dot snail, a fruit hat, and a big mustache! (The last purchase nicely rhymes with “cash.”) Brock, as you might guess, saves hundreds of dollars, while Rock ends up with no money at all. Other regulators, bankers, and industry watchers, however, viewed Bair as out of her league. Some saw the whole big-box-store-trying-to-become-a-bank episode as her first major “gaffe.” “I thought the job of banking regulators was to regulate,” quipped Tom Brown, the Bankstocks.com hedge fund manager. Said one of her harshest critics, bank consultant Burt Ely, “Quite frankly, I wish she would spend more time doing her job of running the FDIC.

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law by Timothy Sandefur

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, housing crisis, independent contractor, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, minimum wage unemployment, positional goods, price stability, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wealth creators

For example, an ordinance designed to prevent a Wal-Mart Supercenter from opening in Los Angeles was recently estimated to cost neighborhood families an average of $482 per year because the cheaper groceries that the store would have provided were kept out of the market.85 Unfortunately, two recent cases from California illustrate the way courts turn a blind eye on laws that injure consumers for the benefit of private industries. In 2004, the city of Turlock adopted an ordinance relegating “big-box” stores like Wal-Mart to a specified area of the city and prohibiting them anywhere else. City officials were quite explicit in their protectionist motive: the ordinance declared that a Wal-Mart would “negatively impact the vitality and economic viability of the city’s neighborhood commercial centers by drawing sales away from traditional supermarkets located in these centers”86—in other words, it would be cheaper than “traditional” supermarkets, and customers would want to shop there.

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Merrifield v. Lockyer, 547 F.3d 978, 991 (9th Cir. 2008). 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. at 991, n. 15. 81. “Wal-Mart 2007 Annual Report,” Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Bentonville, AR, http:// walmartstores.com/Media/Investors/2007_annual_report.pdf. 82. Richard Vedder and Wendell Cox, The Wal-Mart Revolution: How Big-Box Stores Benefit Consumers, Workers, and the Economy (Washington: AEI Press, 2006). 83. Eric R. Claeys, “Euclid Lives? The Uneasy Legacy of Progressivism in Zoning,” Fordham Law Review 73 (2004): 731–70. 84. Anthony B. Sanders, “The ‘New Judicial Federalism’ before Its Time: A Comprehensive Review of Economic Substantive Due Process under State Constitutional Law since 1940 and the Reasons for Its Recent Decline,” American University Law Review 55 (2005): 457–540. 85.

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Timothy Sandefur, “Plunder Gets a Boost,” The Freeman 50, no. 2 (February 2000): 25–26. 336 Notes for Pages 200–204 49. Robert Scally, “Calif. Retailers Defeat Big Box Legislation,” Discount Store News, October 4, 1999, p. 1, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3092/is_19_38/ai_ 56229578; and James Burger, “Big-Box Stores Urge Veto of California Legislation,” Bakersfield Californian, September 16, 1999. 50. Redish and Wasserman, “What’s Good for General Motors,” 296. See also Martin Redish, “First Amendment Theory and the Demise of the Commercial Speech Distinction: The Case of the Smoking Controversy,” Northern Kentucky Law Review 24 (1997): 583.

Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, cotton gin, en.wikipedia.org, game design, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Wall-E, web application

In the present day, we can see a few parallels. In a quest for higher crop yields and lower production costs, farms have become headless corporations pitting profits against human welfare. But local farmers are finding new markets as consumers search for food produced by people for people. While big-box stores proliferate disposable mass-market goods, websites like Etsy and Kickstarter are empowering artists, craftspeople, and DIY inventors who sell goods they’ve designed and created. And their customers love the experience. When you buy from an independent craftsman, you support creative thinking and families (not corporations), and you gain the opportunity to live with an object that has a story.

Home Building Secrets: Save Thousands Building Your Next Home: For the first time homeowner or the second time homeower who did not learn from their first mistakes by Ronald Jones

big-box store, independent contractor, place-making, time value of money

He meets you at the sight, breaking the news that he has installed the $5000.00 worth of landscaping. Now, you are no dummy and know the price of sod, shrubs, and bedding material. You ask for an itemized accounting. The contractor e-mails you the statement: $1000.00 for tractor grading work; $1000.00 for fill dirt; $1000.00 for shrubs that you could buy at the big box store for $300.00; $2000.00 for sod. Communication and clarity is the key to avoiding this type of situation. Do not settle for vague specifications. I have read contracts that stated, “Sod front yard.” One would assume that would mean the front yard would be sodded, yet the contractor sodded from corner to corner of the house to the front lot line, not to the street.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

As cars allowed Americans to migrate out into the “crabgrass frontier,” a term Columbia historian Kenneth Jackson once used to describe the new bedroom communities popping up outside city centers, the shopping patterns that had defined my mother’s childhood disappeared.8 New neighborhoods began to boast Main Streets of their own, obviating the need for residents to go downtown. In the decades that followed, outdoor shopping strips, enclosed malls, and big-box stores emerged as the nation’s primary retail outlets.9 The newer venues offered consumers the opportunity to shop without having to sort through racks geared for other demographics—it cut down the hassle of searching for a new outfit. Years later Chris Rock would joke that in every town in America there are two malls: “they’ve got the white mall, and the mall where the white people used to go.”10 To an uncomfortable degree, Rock got it right.

…

Amid all the changes wrought by the last several decades, have the sorts of gangs that Gordie, Chris, Teddy, and Vern joined become relics of the past? Admittedly, friendships are still forged among adolescent boys. But the landscape has inarguably changed. Today, just as we’re less likely to shop along the local strip because we can order what we want online or travel to the mall or a big-box store that caters specifically to our demographic, we’re less likely to befriend the kid sitting in the seat next to us because we can text our closest pals. We’re less likely bump into a neighbor on the street because, in the growing suburbs, we tend to drive everywhere we go. A comic-book aficionado who loves Batman doesn’t need to befriend the Superman fanatic down the street, because there’s a whole world of Batman-lovers is just waiting to kibitz with her at the other end of a broadband connection.

Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends by Martin Lindstrom

autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, big-box store, correlation does not imply causation, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Richard Florida, rolodex, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, too big to fail, urban sprawl

In a country with the world’s highest incarceration rate, that spends around $640 billion a year on its military,3 which is more than the next seven countries combined, and where 37 percent of all Americans say that they, or someone in their household, owns a gun,4 I couldn’t help but find this paradoxical. America is a military superpower whose prevailing design aesthetic does everything it can to muffle, discourage and eradicate any trace of conflict. Most American malls, motels, hotels, big-box stores and fast-food chains are climate-controlled, mood-controlled, secure, antiseptic and completely the same. Sharpness and angularity have been smoothed out. Whether you’re entering the lobby of a Holiday Inn or sitting down at a table at Chili’s, guests can be assured they are in for no surprises at all.

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In both countries, men escape. In Russia, men disappear on fishing boats weighed down with cases of vodka. In American, men go golfing. In an era of pervasive solipsism, where we hear the continuous refrain that technology has unified the world as never before, community in America was vanishing, eroded by big-box stores, a homogenous landscape and the Internet. The American women I met were kind, generous people, but they seemed as isolated as the women I’d met in Russia. They spent most of their time inside their cars. They traveled in lockstep to malls and shopping centers whose density falsely replicated that of cities.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

But they also were built by demolishing lots of homes much like the one I currently live in—the Eisenhower led to 13,000 families being relocated—and now they run like a scar through the city. If you are on foot or on a bicycle, when you cross over or under them you go through whole blocks of what is essentially wasteland—half-used parking lots, derelict buildings, and a lot of awful big-box stores surrounded by acres of tarmac. Just a fifteen-minute walk from some of the most expensive real estate in Chicago, it can feel like an outer suburb. If you travel by car, you will probably miss the colossal waste of space, but if you walk or cycle around, it is impossible to ignore. When the freeways were built, West Town, the neighborhood Wicker Park is a part of, fell into decline.

…

That is, it is designed for cars to move fast (to get somewhere, along the road), but it also has businesses, homes, and the like all along it (like a street). Stroads are essentially highways within cities. If you have driven anywhere on the edge of a big American city, you know what they look like: six or eight lanes of traffic, lined by fast-food joints, big-box stores, and gas stations, all with plentiful parking. And stroads are insanely dangerous. As Speck notes, when you think about it, what makes highways safe is precisely that pedestrians and cyclists cannot use them; exits and entrances are rare, and everyone is going in the same direction. That is incompatible with city driving.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

The final evolution of postwar retailing of food involved a bifurcation between small convenience stores that challenged the supermarkets for size, quick check-out, and convenience, and the evolution of the Target, Costco, and Walmart supercenters, which combine under one roof shopping not just for food, but also for clothing, appliances, drugs, and almost everything else. Now shoppers could avoid the supermarkets altogether, using nearby convenience stores and large chain drugstores for small purchases of staples, together with the big-box stores for major shopping trips. Among the early victims of the large variety of items available at the big-box stores were the lower-priced department stores and the chains of small variety stores such as Woolworth’s and Ben Franklin. The controversy about the growth of Walmart is similar to the traditional economic classroom analysis of free trade. Imports benefit consumers with lower prices, and free trade benefits owners and workers of firms selling exports.

…

This tax deduction, which grows with the size and expense of a home, has been called “the mansion subsidy” and is widely interpreted as a major cause, together with zoning laws, of the much larger house sizes in the United States than in Japan or Europe.64 The suburban sprawl in the United States compared to that in Europe has advantages in productivity that help to explain why the core western European countries never caught up to the U.S. productivity level and have been falling behind since 1995. Careful research studies of the sources of the European productivity advantage focus on the retail and wholesale trade sectors.65 The ease in the United States of building highly efficient “big-box” stores near suburban interstate highway junctions raises productivity through economies of scale and the ease of segregating truck traffic from customer entrances. One only need drive through central Milan or Rome to be impressed with the small sizes of the shops and to gaze in amazement as several men carry a single mattress out of a tiny shop for delivery in a small truck to a customer who may live in a walk-up fourth-story apartment.

…

The postwar era involved mainly a transition in styles, both at home and at work, toward a more casual and less expensive wardrobe. Retail options blossomed as Walmart and Target allowed customers to browse through large selections of clothing at rock-bottom prices, and the arrival of inexpensive imported clothing at these and other big-box stores contributed to a sharp decline in the relative price of clothing. The rise of the big-box chains had negative consequences, including the decimation of central-city department stores and the flood of imports that virtually eliminated textile and clothing manufacture as a part of the American economy.

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cognitive bias, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, gentrification, guest worker program, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, iterative process, mass immigration, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, price discrimination, refrigerator car, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

They’re not mostly looking to date or pay for fancy, frilly, or “cool” locations. If I am in a hitherto unknown part of the United States, the region has immigrants, and I am looking to eat, I head away from the center of town. I look for the strip malls. The best strip malls, for food, are usually those without Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or other big-box stores. Large anchor stores bring high rents and large crowds, which are typically not the right combination for interesting ethnic food. The ultimate low-rent venue is the food truck. New York City, Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, have started allowing food trucks to sell their wares, and it has greatly improved food in those cities.

…

That being said, longer supply chains will give San Diego a much more varied supply of seafood. San Diego can sell seafood from around the world, whereas Tijuana, and Mexico more generally, is better at handling the purely local product. Both the United States and Mexico also offer frozen fish products through supermarkets and big box stores like Wal-Mart. In this category the United States is usually superior, again because of American specialization at handling long supply chains. Our average fish will be better in America than in Mexico, even though fresh fish of a particular kind will be much better and much cheaper in any part of Mexico that has access to that fish in a fresh form.

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

“I bought a lot more than I planned to,” another woman admitted. “You just see so much.” Yes, you do, and that’s the idea. It’s why big malls sell much more per square foot than do their smaller counterparts. Seeing so much leads to impulse buying, the key to mall profitability and to the success of big-box stores like Wal-Mart. Impulse: a devilish little snake that cajoles first, then bites later when the credit card bill comes due. Only a quarter of mall shoppers come with a specific product in mind. The rest come just to shop. “What else matters?” asked one of the ladies from Dallas, only half in jest.

…

Thomas even wants the quarantine to begin around his state, Vermont. He’s been leading a campaign called the Second Vermont Republic, which actually calls for that state to secede from the United States, to protect its unique quality of life. Vermont may be less infected by affluenza than any other state. It’s almost Wal-Mart-free, and few other big-box stores or tacky mini-malls mar its quiet beauty. Vermont towns still have the feel of permanence and livability; citizens still participate regularly in public forums; everybody in the state has a guaranteed right to health insurance. Shopping locally and buying wholesome food is encouraged. Many Vermonters, like Thomas, who moved there because of Vermont’s quality of life, want to prevent their good life from being overtaken by affluenza.

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

They hope to avoid long commutes and hostile work environments. And they hope to gain experience that refreshes their résumé or opens a door to new possibilities. Also true is that many saw few other options for themselves or their families. Full-time employment in their towns often meant an hourly wage at a big-box store, working a fixed shift, adapting to unpredictable work schedules, and without meaningful opportunities to advance. On-demand jobs gave them real-world experiences scheduling meetings, testing and debugging websites, developing computer expertise, finding sales leads, and managing full-time employees’ HR files.

…

Those jobs led to the growth of a middle class that had hit its zenith in the United States by the late 1970s. In the decades that followed, the middle class was hollowed out by deindustrialization and outsourcing.3 What was left behind was the burgeoning growth of service jobs. This new form of employment rose from the thousands of retail chains, fast food outlets, and chain big-box stores that filled, first, American malls and suburbs and, not long after, their global equivalents. But service jobs weren’t designed to replace the stable salaries and lifelong careers anchored to Cold War–era full-time work. Without the will among the business class to split profits with service industry employees or the strength of organized labor to push for the same safety nets put in place for manufacturing, service work arrived with low pay, uncertain schedules, long commutes from affordable housing, and a new set of customer service demands.4 Working with the public was now a part of the job, too.5 As sociologist Gina Neff argues, by the beginning of the dot-com bubble, in the early 1990s, a generation of college-educated young people, particularly white men, faced a crowded job market made even more competitive by the GI Bill, post–Jim Crow, and second-wave feminism.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Smart shuttles hold high appeal for the ride-hail generation, especially as the value of safe screen time grows. And shuttles are already becoming just another cost of doing business for brick-and-mortar organizations of all kinds trying to lure in these distracted customers. Universities, office parks, hotels, hospitals, and even big-box stores already use them to bring students, shoppers, patients, and guests through the front door. Costs are falling—thanks to companies like San Francisco-based Ridecell, which sells web-based dispatch software complete with rider apps. And automation could slash costs further. So what if microtransit were just another perk, offered by schools, employers, and housing developments to fill in the gaps in conventional transit?

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If you change your mind once you have something in hand, a few more gestures will take it back to where it came from in a jiffy. Once unleashed by freight-hauling AVs, continuous delivery will have more rapid and far-reaching impacts on our communities than any future yet imagined by either autonomists or car-lite communards. Shopping malls and big-box stores will continue to go dark. Some, wrapped in mysterious-looking cocoons, will metamorphose and reopen as fully automated distribution centers. As forward-operating bases for global retail giants, they’ll serve as depots for swarms of conveyors, mules, and cargo-carrying caravans that schlepp stuff into the surrounding territory for as little as four to seven cents per package per mile.

The Gated City (Kindle Single) by Ryan Avent

big-box store, carbon footprint, company town, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, income inequality, industrial cluster, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, offshore financial centre, profit maximization, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, Thorstein Veblen, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Veblen good, white picket fence, zero-sum game

Blame San Franciscans and their Bay-area neighbors. The region around the Bay is home to some of the country’s most aggressive opponents of new development -- NIMBYs (for Not-In-My-Backyard). Residents use government zoning rules, historical designations, and public pressure to block changes of all kinds: from skyscrapers and big box stores to fiber optic cable hubs and trauma helicopters.[1] Their actions aren’t necessarily nefarious. Most just want to protect neighborhoods, views, and buildings they love from changes they fear. But the cumulative effect of this battle against change is dramatic. In 2005, the San Francisco metropolitan area issued permits for just under 15,000 new housing units.

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Kensington Market is exactly the kind of place that mounts campaigns against Walmarts in other cities and towns, analogous to neighbourhoods like Greenwich Village, San Francisco’s Mission or Hackney in London: traditionally working-class neighbourhoods that have become playgrounds for the middle class, with just a bare vestige of those working-class roots still visible. Around the same time the Walmart was proposed, an immense and infamous big-box store called Honest Ed’s was quietly put up for sale in a neighbourhood a few blocks north. This retail upheaval inspired a hue and cry from many Torontonians, all of whom lamented its imminent end. To paraphrase another Morrissey song, there was panic on the streets of Kensington. But if someone made a Venn diagram of these two emotional responses, the overlap would have been considerable.

Freedom by Daniel Suarez

augmented reality, big-box store, British Empire, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, corporate personhood, digital map, game design, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Naomi Klein, new economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, private military company, RFID, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, telemarketer, the scientific method, young professional

As Loki brought his huge pickup and trailer rig through the sleepy town's main street--if such a loose collection of a dozen houses could be called a town--he marveled at what some people accepted as living. The downtown consisted of a single convenience store, a weather-beaten gas station, and a down-in-the-mouth auto-parts store. Loki knew the big-box stores thirty miles off near the interstate had killed most of the local businesses. He imagined the auto-parts store survived primarily because you couldn't get to the big-box stores if your car was broken down. With gas rising past six dollars a gallon, that dynamic would likely change soon--as would the shipment of cheap, plentiful parts from China. Beyond the old commercial center of Garnia, there were new businesses sprouting, and ironically much of that life seemed to be sprouting out of the same shipping containers that had helped to destroy the local economy in the first place.

Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge by Ted Conover

autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fixed income, gentrification, George Floyd, McMansion, off grid, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, place-making, social distancing, supervolcano

Frank had discovered it near the burn pit, a midden several feet across that was filled with shiny pieces of the girls’ toys—a bit of lamé from a Barbie dress, some neon-colored mane from a My Little Pony doll. Terry had collected not the eye-catching but, rather, the potentially useful, in a way known to generations of those raised in a time when screws and nuts and bolts were sold by the piece, instead of in packets hanging in plastic packages in big-box stores. There were cans and jars and boxes of hardware. Though I’d asked him to help me carry everything outside, Joseph kept getting distracted and looking a little too hard for stuff he wanted to keep for himself—a vinyl gym bag, a frame backpack, a fleece-lined denim jacket. (I said yes to everything.)

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And even if you’re not a nineteenth-century-style homesteader, the wide-open spaces of the valley evoke a sort of ongoing frontier, virtuous because unsettled, pure because off-grid. However, these days the grid is not far away. Convenient sources of manufactured energy, such as gasoline and propane, change everything, as do the big-box stores in Alamosa, military flyovers, and cell phones. Another change in our lifetime is a reassessment of humankind’s relationship with nature. Ideas of dominating the natural world, of taming and subjecting it to the human will, are in retreat as Americans, with some foot-dragging, join other countries in responding to climate change, a crisis that our country, in producing so much carbon dioxide, has had such a big hand in creating.

Simple Matters: Living With Less and Ending Up With More by Erin Boyle

big-box store, Indoor air pollution, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sharing economy

And feeling like there might be something that we could buy to make our work easier is tempting. But it’s not always the path to thoughtful purchasing. My best advice is to slow down. Mull it over. Let it marinate. Choose whatever metaphor for taking your time that best works for you, and do it. Consider the first trip to a big box store after a move to a new apartment. Do you know the one I mean? The one that you take while half of your things are still in boxes, but you find yourself stymied by the cabinet layout in the kitchen, or realizing that your old bath mat has gotten tattered and worn and a new one would just make you feel so much better about the slightly scummy mess left by the previous tenant.

City on the Verge by Mark Pendergrast

big-box store, bike sharing, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, desegregation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, gentrification, global village, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, jitney, land bank, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, power law, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, young professional

Born in a northern Atlanta suburb in 1982, Griffith held a bachelor’s in ecology from the University of Georgia and a master’s in city planning from Georgia Tech. He had studied invasive species in Chile, done desert restoration in California, and worked for an environmental engineering firm in Norcross, Georgia. But he hated that job, which helped build big box stores, so now he drove a mobile food truck for Waffle House and taught tennis part time.* He used to live in the Old Fourth Ward, but it got too expensive, so he rented a room with two other men in this house. It didn’t look like the landlord did much maintenance, since water from a recent heavy rain dripped into the kitchen.

…

Back to the City While the city of Atlanta faces crucial choices, its suburbs also face a daunting task, as Georgia Tech architect and urban design professor Ellen Dunham-Jones observed in her 2009 book, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, which offered examples of how to remodel dying shopping malls, big box stores, and acres of surrounding parking lots.* Despite the dramatic titles of other books, such as Leigh Gallagher’s The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (2013), the suburbs aren’t going away; they are, however, scrambling to adjust. Most planners and developers recognize that empty-nest baby boomers and young Millennials disdain cars and want to be able to walk to a restaurant, park, or grocery store.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

At their proposed shopping center nearby, Gruen and Krummeck included a nursery school, a post office, a clubhouse, a library, and a pony stable. It was less a shopping center than a town center—with better parking. Gruen carried this idea forward as he honed his vision for the mall. As downtown’s star fell, Gruen’s rose. In 1949, he designed a big-box store for Milliron’s on Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles. Three hundred parking spaces on the roof, accessed by eye-catching X-crossing ramps running up the building’s sides. Then he convinced the Detroit department store Hudson’s to embark on a campaign of suburban expansion, which began with the opening of Northland shopping center in 1954.

…

See shopping centers management, 85, 202, 260–61 mandates, costly parking, 209 Manhattan, New York, 87, 101–2, 107, 148, 254–55 street parking in, 31–33, 35–36, 37–39, 41, 45, 99–100 traffic agent in, 33–34, 37–39 Manville, Michael, 157, 167, 193 Marina City, Chicago, 128 market demand, parking policy compared to, 86 Markowitz, Marty, 256 Marsden, Brett, 112 Marusek, Sarah, 22 Maryland, Silver Springs, 68 Massachusetts, 76, 85, 109, 205 Boston, xii, 20, 86, 94 mass production, of automobiles, 55 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 251 Maxis, SimCity of, 76 McCahill, Chris, 82 McCardell, William, 95–96, 98 McClintock, Miller, 53 McClure, Paul, 23 McCourt, Randy, 159 McGlockton, Markeis, 23 McKenna-Foster, Daniel, 155–57, 160 McNew, James, 93 Mebrahtu, Freweyni, 95 Melbourne, Australia, 21 Mell, Richard, 126 merchants, in downtown, 29, 54, 58–59, 72 meter maids, police attacking, 36–37 meters, parking, 161–62, 163, 165, 166–67, 168–69 in Chicago, 121–22, 123–24, 127, 132–34, 137–38, 139, 140, 143, 198–99, 203–4, 260 Mexico City, minimum parking laws in, 273, 274 Meyer, Chris, 204 Miami Beach, Florida, 92 Michigan, 59–60, 63, 65, 74, 152–53 Millard-Ball, Adam, 83 Millennium Park, Chicago, 122–23 Miller, Bella, 110 Milliron’s, big-box store of, 59 Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55, 204, 214 Minnesota, 55, 60, 111, 204, 214 mismanagement, of commercial parking, 19–20 Missouri, Ferguson, 163–64 Mister Softee, 248–50 Mitchell, Joni, 160 mixed-use buildings, 217 models, parking, 128, 180, 183, 219 Mohammad Abu-Salha, Yusor, 23 monopolies, in commercial parking, 109–10 Moore, Joe, 134 Moore, Michael, 9 Morgan Stanley, 125, 126, 136, 140–41, 142 parking meters of, 121–22, 123–24, 132–34 Morono, Leon, 103 Mumford, Lewis, 72 municipal parking, 67–68, 73 murders, 22–23, 37, 150 N Najdovski, Christophe, 274–75 Naqvi, Ali, 113–14 National Conference of Housing (1929), 237–38 National Municipal League, 64 National Parking Association (NPA), 105, 106–7, 112 Neal, Esther, 35 Neumann, Adam, 110 Nevada, Las Vegas, 181, 243 Newark, New Jersey, 98–99 Newport News Shipbuilding, Virginia, 25 Newsom, Gavin, 212 New York, 20–21, 52, 66, 85–86, 238, 262 bicycles in, 256, 257–58 during coronavirus pandemic, 270–72 Dumbo in, 252, 254 Genovese crime family in, 101–3 government employees in, 43, 45 Manhattan, 31–34, 35–36, 37–39, 41, 45, 87, 99–100, 101–2, 107, 148, 254–55 Operation Meltdown in, 250, 259 parking garages in, 99–103 parking requirements in, 215 parking supply in, 75 parking whisperer in, 26 pedestrians in, 253–55 Queens, ix–x, xiv, 82 Rochester, 63 Rockaway Beach, 9 street parking in, 247–48, 258, 263–64, 271 Syracuse, 58–59 towing service in, xv traffic in, 53 New York Daily News (newspaper), 48–49, 264–65 New York Ice Cream, 249–50 New York Police Department (NYPD), 40, 47, 48, 50 New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System, 107 The New York Times (newspaper), 37, 48, 64, 264 Nichols, Chrissy Mancini, CPM relation to, 198–99 Nichols, Mike, 15 Nixon, Richard, 92, 228 Norris, Mary, 41 North Carolina, Charlotte, 216–19 Northland shopping center, Detroit, 59–60, 65 North Plano, Texas, 223 Norway, Oslo, 274 NPA.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

Walmart also borrows from this model. If you’ve ever noticed the shipping pallet under a big box of goods in the middle of a wide aisle in a Walmart, you’ve experienced a retail experience designed not so much for you as for the distribution center–centric supply chain that put it there. The reign of big-box stores might have continued indefinitely were it not for the internet. E-commerce hasn’t exactly been the asteroid strike to end all lumbering retail dinosaurs, but then again the actual dinosaurs didn’t die out as quickly as once thought, either. As of this writing, e-commerce sales in the United States are, by the most commonly cited official measure, about 16 percent of all retail sales, after growing an astonishing 50 percent in the first half of 2020, thanks to the pandemic.

…

See also automation, at ports; intersection of humans and automation; robotic warehousing; self-driving trucks automation, at ports, 77–86; automated stacking cranes, 73, 79–81; autostrads (automatic straddle carriers), 78, 79, 80; container yards and blocks of containerized shipping, 79–88; Covid-19 pandemic, effects of, 76; dwell time of containers in ports, 83–84; electrification and, 75–76; gantry cranes, 78–79; intersection of humans and, 69, 70–71, 77, 79, 85–86; labor/employment and, 76; lasers identifying and locating cargo, 84; of longshoring, 70–76, 85–86; order of stacking containers, queuing theory, and grooming, 81–83; STS (ship-to-shore) cranes, 20, 23, 34, 68–71, 77–78, 81; trucks/truck drivers and, 74–75, 79, 81, 84–85 autopilot systems for ships, 41–42 autostrads (automatic straddle carriers), 78, 79, 80 Avalon National, 134–35 Awood Center, Minneapolis, 171 AWS (Amazon Web Services), 162, 222 Baidu, 153 Ball, Lucille, 191, 213 Baltimore, MD, Amazon fulfillment center at, 161, 180, 192, 203, 220, 227 Bandstra, Jan, 5, 19 Bannerjee, Ashis, 238–39 Bayer, 266 Bayesian analysis, 151–52 bell curve, ranking workers on, 204, 205–6 Bernard, Brett, 148, 149, 150, 156 Bethlehem Steel, 12, 97 Better Homes Manual, The (1931), 103 Betz, John, 50–51, 53–55, 57–59, 62–65 Bezos, Jeff: Amazon warehouses and, 166, 169, 170; Bezosism and other management systems, 198, 199, 201, 209, 216, 221, 223–24, 236; Joy Covey and, 275–76; robotic warehousing and, 241, 246; supply chains and, 7, 14, 15; Sam Walton and, 281 Bezosism, 3, 197–220; accidents/injuries and, 197–98, 200, 202, 206–9, 213–14, 235, 275–76; algorithmic drivers of, 198, 200, 203, 234; compared with other management systems, 198–99, 207, 214, 231, 232; Darwinism and employee turnover, 203, 209–11; deliberate nature of, 199; delivery of goods to customers and, 275–76; deskilling, 214–15, 217; enabling technology, 199, 200–202, 211–21; failure of Amazon to come to grips with consequences of, 199; geographic placement of Amazon facilities and, 217–19; “making rate” and its consequences, 197–98, 202–9, 213; robots, treating workers like, 208, 216, 219–20; stressful work conditions due to, 214–16; surveillance, automation, and work intensification, 203, 211–14, 231–32; worker experience of, 197–98, 200, 202. See also management systems Bien Hoa, Vietnam, 17, 19 big-box stores, 167 Binh Duong port, Vietnam, 19 BlackBerry, 284, 286 Borges, Jorge Luis, 142 the box. See containerized shipping Brady, Tye, 247–48 Brandeis, Louis, 87, 98, 103 Braun, Wernher von, 144 Brookings Institution, 76, 235 Brooks, Rodney, 218 Bruder, Jessica, Nomadland, 187 Brussels (shipping vessel), voyage of, 26–27, 29–43 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 111 business unionism, 278 BuzzFeed News, 276 Cai Mep International Terminal, Vietnam, 11, 16, 19–23, 26, 27, 30, 32–34, 37 Čapek, Karel, 219 cargo plans, 32–35 carpal tunnel syndrome, 200 Carter, Jimmy, 110 CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), 9, 68 CDL (commercial driver’s license), 115, 220 cell phones.

Habitat by Lauren Liess

big-box store, do what you love

It can be challenging to accessorize a home when starting from scratch. Some of us may be just beginning our decorating journey and have only a few special, loved possessions, and some of us may even have nothing at all. How do we develop a meaningful collection of things rather than instantaneously filling our home with trendy impulse purchases from big-box stores? In my own home, I like to mix newer pieces with older ones. For example, in the kitchen, I use vintage tableware and antique ironstone and sturdy, hand-blown drinking glasses, along with basic and practical pieces from chain retail stores such as Pottery Barn or Target, and, overall, it looks as if it’s been collected over time, even though I have new pieces mixed in.

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, big-box store, blue-collar work, congestion pricing, Donner party, edge city, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, Ralph Nader, side project, smart transportation, Southern State Parkway, streetcar suburb, traveling salesman, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen

But the dinner correctly recognized that the interstates had turned out to be more than fancy roads—that, often in ways unanticipated by their creators, they had been agents of far-reaching change and had reordered the American landscape. That we could thank the interstates for shrinking the distances between our cities, and the untidy growth of those cities beyond Lewis Mumford's worst nightmare; for the "Edge City" of shopping and office space springing up on beltways in any number of metropolitan areas, and the "big-box" stores that were fast becoming ubiquitous features of suburban interchanges. They'd tamed rivers and bays, high plains and remote reaches of blackwater swamp where earlier roads dared not venture. You could set your cruise control (an automotive feature that would have been needless had the interstates not come along) and at seventy miles per hour, in climate-controlled comfort, summit the Sierra Nevada pass that claimed the Donner party.

…

My second-floor window looked onto the Shoney's rooftop air conditioners and satellite dishes; farther away, beyond the immediate craze of lights and traffic and the expressway's rumbling blur of red and white, lay the mercantile glut served by Exit 82-B, along northbound Highland—strip malls, chain restaurants, big-box stores. Jackson itself was a mile or two away. South on Highland, past the Old Hickory Mall and a mammoth hospital, a compact, red-brick downtown clustered around a dignified county courthouse. When I visited, a live band's country-rock covers were spilling onto a street busy with pedestrians, a good many of them, no doubt, students from Jackson's Union University.

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

In June 2006, California’s Humboldt County took this legislation one step farther, passing a resolution that not only directly challenged corporate personhood but also banned all out-of-county corporations from making political contributions in local campaigns. In 2005, Charlevoix Township in Michigan was one of dozens of cities to approve ordinances giving local government the authority to limit the size of big-box stores. That same year, Maryland passed legislation requiring organizations with more than 10,000 employees in the state to spend at least 8 percent of their payroll on health benefits. The only enterprise affected by this legislation is Wal-Mart. Similar legislation has been proposed in several other states.

…

Index Abacha, Sani 44, 125 Abedi, Agha Hasan 69, 70, 75, 77, 86, 87 Abu Dhabi 69, 73, 75, 76 Adham, Kamal 75, 86, 87, 88 Afghanistan 26 drug trade in 70 civil war in 70–71 African Development Bank 251 Africa Oil Policy Initiative Group 119 Akbayan 192–93 Alamieyeseigha, Diepreye 121, 123 Algeria 15, 200, 266 Allende, Salvador 27 al-Qaeda 77, 89 and offshore banks 24 al-Taqwa Bank 71, 89 Altman, Robert A. 78, 79, 86, 88 American Express Co. 268 American Mineral Fields 99 Amin, Idi 27 Annan, Kofi 126 AngloGold 244 Anglo-Iranian Oil Company 14 Angola 27, 95 foreign debt 243, 244 Aquino, Benigno 26 Aquino, Corazon 190 Arbusto Energy, Inc. 76 Argentina 236 defiance of IMF 273 foreign debt 228, 230, 233, 241, 244, 273 popular movements in 276 World Bank lending in 169–73 Asari, Alhaji 121, 123, 128–29 Asian “tiger” economies 21, 229, 257n16, 258n27 Azerbaijan 200 Bahamas, as offshore banking haven 45, 89 Baker, Howard 100 Baker, James 239, 256n12 Baker Plan 228, 239–40 Balfour Beatty 211 Banca del Gottardo 71 Banca Nazionale del Lavoro 72 Banco Ambrosiano 71 Bank of America 69–70, 74, 77 Bank of England 84 Bank of Credit and Commerce International 24 accountants and 83–84, 86 arms trade and 72–73, 90 CIA and 69, 70, 71–72, 73, 76 drug trade and 70, 80, 87, 90 indictments 86–88 Iran-Contra 72 money laundering 69, 79–81, 90 operations 73–75, 86 owners 69–70, 75, 76 as Ponzi scheme 75 terrorism and 70, 72, 73, 88–90 U.S. operations 77–79 Bank of New York-Inter-Maritime Bank 83, 88–89 Barrick Gold Corp. 99, 244 Bath, James R. 76 Bechtel Corp. 3, 99, 138, 278 Belgium 101, 104 Bello, Walden 186–87, 273 Ben Barka, Medhi 26 Benin, foreign debt of 249 Berlusconi, Silvio 54 Bernabe, Riza 191 “big-box” stores, campaigns against 278 bin Faisal al-Saud, Prince Turki 75, 78 bin Laden family enterprises 71–72, 89 bin Laden, Haydar Mohamed 89 bin Laden, Osama 26, 77, 88, 89, 42 and BCCI 71 Binladen, Yeslam 89 bin Mahfouz, Khalid 76, 77, 78, 86, 87, 88, 89 bin Sultan al-Nahyan, Sheikh Zayed 69, 75 Blair, Tony 219, 250 Blandón, José 80 Blum, Jack 79–81, 85–86 Bolivia 236, 273 foreign debt 230, 246, 247, 249 gas industry 154, 208 water privatization in 277 Boro, Isaac 122 Brady, Nicholas 80, 256n12 Brady Plan 221, 227, 228, 240–41, 259n35 Brazil 18, 27, 130, 208, 216, 236 foreign debt 227, 228, 230, 241, 244 Bretton Woods agreements 63 Bretton Woods institutions see World Bank, International Monetary Fund British Gas 139 British Petroleum 139, 144, 153 British Virgin Islands, as offshore banking haven 54 Brown & Root 99 Brown, Gordon 126, 127, 219, 250 Burkina Faso, foreign debt of 246, 249 Burundi 95, 247, 249 Bush, George H.W., and administration 27–28, 69, 72, 77, 80, 87, 88, 91n10, 100, 138, 206, 271, 272 Bush, George W., and administration 66, 271, 278 and Iraq War 13, 28 Bush Agenda, The (Juhasz) 4, 275 Cabot Corporation 104, 112n32 Cameroon, foreign debt of 249 Canada 99, 101, 201, 268, 271 Canadian Export Development Corp. 201, 202, 203, 204, 206 capital flight 24, 43–44, 231–36, 253, 258n27 Carter, Jimmy 76, 140 Casey, William 70, 82, 90 Cavallo, Domingo Felipe 238 Cayman Islands, as offshore banking haven 65, 72, 73, 74, 75, 86 Center for Global Energy Studies 145 Center for Strategic and International Studies 119, 120 Central African Republic 231 Central Intelligence Agency 3, 5, 15 Afghan rebels and 70–71 BCCI and 69, 70, 71–72, 73, 76, 78, 79–82, 85 Saudi intelligence services and 75 Chad, foreign debt of 249 Chavez, Hugo 3, 25, 273 Cheney, Dick 28, 133 Chevron Oil 135, 138, 139, 144, 153 in Nigeria 123–24 Chile 236 1973 coup in 27 China 4, 229, 236 foreign debt 222–23 Third World resources and 5, 117–18, 120–21, 124, 126–27, 130 Chomsky, Noam Hegemony or Survival 4 Christian Peacemaker Team 96, 106–8 Citibank, Citigroup 75, 100, 130, 138, 226, 238, 268 Clifford, Clark 78–79, 85, 86, 88 Clinton, Bill, and administration 119, 120, 126, 212, 271 Coalition of Immokalee Workers 272, 280 COFACE 201, 205, 212 Cogecom 100 cold war 4 and decolonization 16–17 Colombia, human rights in 107 colonialism, decline of formal 13–14 coltan: efforts to control 5, 26, 95 shortages of 95 uses for 94 Commission for Africa 251 Communism: appeal of 14 fall of 4, 13, 27, 137–38, 238 Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Perkins) 1–4, 6, 17 Congo, Democratic Republic of (Zaire): civil war in 26, 94–96, 108n3 corruption in 24, 254 foreign debt 220, 230, 247, 249 human rights in 107–8 rape as a weapon of war in 93, 96–98 Western role in 98–105, 109n4, 111n29 World Bank and 158 Congo Republic 230, 247, 249 cooperatives 276–77 corporations, as legal persons 277 CorpWatch 278 corruption: culture of 51–54 IMF/World Bank and 24–25, 157–74 offshore banking and 44–45, 52- power and 24 privatization and 24–25, 256n12 COSEC 209–10 Council on Foreign Relations 119–20 dam projects, 209–12 Dar al-Mal al-Islami 89 Daukoru, Edmund 125–27, 128 Davos see World Economic Forum DeBeers Group 101, 103 decolonization 13, 16–17 debt/flight cycle 231–36, 253, 258n27 debt relief, campaigns for 246, 252–55, 268 in U.S. 235 debt, Third World 32, 35 amount of relief 224–29 banks and 226–27, 229, 232–34 business loans 35–37, 227 cold war strategy and 17 corruption and 230, 231, 232, 253, 254, 257n23 1982 crisis 39, 55 disunity among debtor nations 237–39 dubious debts and 230, 235, 247, 253, 257n23, 261n68 growth of 18–19, 181, 229–36 as means of control 17, 23, 183–84 payments on 19, 190–91, 223, 228, 231, 247–48, 275 relief plans 220–22, 225–29, 239–52, 274 size of 221–24, 259n37, 260n46 social/economic impacts of 190–91, 231–36, 247–48 democracy: debt crisis and 236 economic reform and 276–79 global justice and 279–81 in Iraq 151–54 Deutsche Bank 226 drug trade 70, 80, 87 Dubai 73 Dulles, Alan 15 Eagle Wings Resources International 104 East Timor 205 economic development strategies: “big projects” and 16–17 debt-led 18–19 state-led 16–17, 19 economic forecasting 3 economic hit men 5 definition 1, 3, 18 John Perkins and 1–4, 17 types of 5, 18 Ecuador 236, 266 foreign debt 244 Egypt 14 Suez Crisis 15–16 Eisenhower, Dwight, and administration 15 elites, wealthy 4, 18, 57, 176, 183, 228, 232, 253 use of tax havens 43–44, 54–56, 65–66, 226, 232–34 El Salvador 26 empire see imperialism Eni SpA 144, 153 Enron 53, 54, 208–9 Ethiopia 230, 249 European Union 51 agricultural subsidies 22 environment degradation: development projects and 199, 200–211, 257n23 oil production and 115–16 export credit agencies: arms exports and 204–5 campaigns against 209–16 corruption and 200, 202–3, 205, 207–8 debt and 200 environmental effects 199, 200–211 nuclear power and 202, 205–6 operation of 197–201 secrecy of 205, 210–12 size of 201 World Bank and 199, 201, 202, 204 Export Credit Group 210, 215 Export Credits Guarantee Department 201, 205, 211 Export Finance and Investment Corp. 203, 204 export processing zones 178 Export Risk Guarantee 203, 211, 213 ExxonMobil 144 fair trade movement 280 Faisal, Mohammad al-89 Faux, Jeff Global Class War, The 4 Federal Bureau of Investigation 71 Federal Reserve Bank of New York 87 Federal Reserve System 78, 82, 88 Ferguson, Niall 13 First American Bankshares 78, 79, 82, 83, 85, 88 First Quantum Materials 101 First, Ruth 26 Focus on the Global South 187, 273 foreign aid 19 in Congo civil war 99–100 France 236, 244 empire 13 Suez Crisis and 15 free trade 4, 19, 21–23, 268, 271 British development and 21 U.S. development and 21 Free Trade Area of the Americas 271 Friends of the Earth 104, 269 G8 summits 212, 213, 219–20, 221, 246, 250, 271, 275 Gambia 243, 249 García, Alan 74 Gates, Robert 85 Gécamines 100, 104 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade agricultural trade 186–87 establishment of 267 TRIPS 23 Uruguay Round 23, 267 General Union of Oil Employees 135–36, 141–44 Georgia 207 Germany 212, 213, 216, 236 export credit agency 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209–11, 212, 215–16 Green Party 206, 215 Ghana 16 development projects in 16, 207 foreign debt 230, 247, 249 impact of IMF SAP 5, 22 Giuliani, Carlo 271 Global Awareness Collective 278 Global Class War, The (Faux) 4 Global Exchange 278 globalization 3 alternatives to corporate 275–79 economic 176–79, 230, 236 impacts of 185–90, 234, 236, 263–65 of the financial system 55, 63–66 Globalization and Its Discontents (Stiglitz) 3, 4 Global justice movement: achievements of 276–79 campaigns 269–72, 274–75 in Global North 268–69, 271–72, 274 in Global South 271–74 origins of 268–69 proposals of 275–79 protests by 265–66, 270–71 Global South see Third World Gonzalez, Henry 72, 90 Gorbachev, Mikhail 137 Goulart, João 27 Groupement pour le Traitment des Scories du Terril de Lubumbashi 104 Guatemala 14, 236 Arbenz government 26 Guinea, foreign debt of 249 Guinea-Bassau 26, 247, 249 Guyana: export credit agencies and 203 environmental problems 203 foreign debt 241, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249 Haiti 236, 249 World Bank and 158 Halliburton 3, 133, 278 Hankey, Sir Maurice 145 Harken Energy Corp. 77, 78 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative 221, 225, 226, 230, 242–48, 275 conditions of 243–45 results of 248–50 Hegemony or Survival (Chomsky) 4 Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin 70 Helms, Richard 82 Henwood, Doug 23, 177–79 Heritage Foundation 121 Heritage Oil and Gas 100 Hermes Guarantee 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209, 211, 212, 215–16 Honduras, foreign debt of 249 Hope in the Dark (Solnit) 281 Hungary, Soviet intervention in 16 Hussein, Saddam 28, 90, 141–42 and BCCI 72 Hutu people 94–96 Hypovereinsbank 209 Ijaw people 116, 121–23, 128 Illaje people 123 immigrant rights movement 281 imperialism 13–14 coups d’état and 27 divide-and-rule tactics 25, 26, 265 post-cold war changes 4–5 pressure on uncooperative countries 25, 142 resistance to 28, 115–17, 121–30, 143–44, 151–54, 176, 191–92, 265–66 resources and 98–106, 118–21, 133–34, 136, 139–40, 145 as system of control 17–28, 176 use of force 5, 25–28, 111n22, 113–14, 115–17, 123, 111n22 India 16, 119, 229, 236, 266 foreign debt 222, 223 export credit agencies and 206, 208 Maheshwar Dam 209–10 Indonesia 236 corruption in 202–3 export credit agencies and 200, 202–3, 205, 207, 216 foreign debt 228, 230, 244 inequality 44 Institute for Policy Studies 278 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development 157 International Development Association 157, 242 International Forum on Globalization 266 International Monetary Fund 3, 4, 19, 135, 275 conflicts of interest 244 debt relief and 221–22, 224, 226, 237, 240, 243–46, 250–51, 252 Iraq and 151–53 Malaysia and 273 neoliberalism and 176–79, 222 offshore banking and 43, 234 protests against 266 structural adjustment programs 22, 23, 245, 265–66 Rwanda and 100 Uganda and 100 International Tax and Investment Center 134–35, 138–39, 144–54 International Trade Organization 267 Iran 14, 90, 145, 200 coup against Mossadegh 14–15 nationalization of oil industry 14 Iran-Contra affair 71–72 Iraq: BCCI and 72 foreign debt 152 Gulf War and 28, 72, 140, 141, 146 human rights in 105–6 oil production and reserves 135–36, 139–54 production sharing agreements in 147–54 sanctions against 72, 142 social conditions in 135, 142, 143 U.S. occupation of 28, 140, 141–42, 146, 250, 275, 278 Israel: and Suez Crisis 15 Yom Kippur War and 17 Ivory Coast 230 foreign debt 244, 249 “jackals” 25–26 James, Deborah 273 Japan 216, 236 Japan Bank for International Cooperation 201, 202, 203, 241 Jersey 88 banking boom in 46–47 impact on island 46, 51–52, 56–62 as offshore banking haven 43, 45, 56–61 Johnson, Chalmers Sorrows of Empire 4 Jordan 241, 266 Jordan, Vernon 100 JPMorganChase 226, 238 Jubilee South 190 Jubilee 2000 268 Juhasz, Antonia Bush Agenda, The 4, 275 Juma’a, Hassan 135–36, 140, 142–44, 154 Kabila, Joseph 96 Kabila, Laurent 94, 96, 99 Kagame, Paul 94, 98–99 ties to U.S. 99 Kazakhstan 138, 139, 144, 150 Keating, Charles 83 Kenya 236 foreign debt 243, 244 Kerry, John 76 investigation of BCCI 79–83, 87, 89 Kirchner, Nestor 273 Korea, Republic of 229, 272 Korten, David When Corporations Rule the World 4 KPMG 52 Krauthammer, Charles 13 Krushchev, Nikita 16 Kurdistan 211–12, 214 Kuwait 133, 141, 146, 152, 154 labor exports 235–36 Lake, Anthony 119–20 Lance, Bert 77 Lawson, Nigel 242 Lawson Plan 221, 242 Lee Kyung Hae 272 Liberia, World Bank lending to 159–67 Liberty Tree Foundation 276 Li Zhaoxing 117–18, 124 Lu Guozeng 117 Lumumba, Patrice 26 Luxembourg, as offshore banking haven 72, 73, 74 Madagascar, foreign debt of 249 Mahathir, Mohamad 273 Malawi 254 foreign debt 243, 249 Malaysia 41–43, 229 defiance of IMF 273 Mali, foreign debt of 246, 249 Marcos, Ferdinand 31, 48, 175, 176, 181–85 markets, corporate domination of 16 Martin, Paul 54 mass media, manipulation of 25 Mauritania, foreign debt of 247, 249 McKinney, Cynthia; hearing on Congo 98–99, 110n11 McLure, Charles 137–39 mercenaries: in Congo 111n22 in Nigeria 5, 25–26, 113–14, 115–17 Mexico 207, 256n14, 273 foreign debt 55, 227, 228, 230, 233, 240–41, 244 labor exports 236 Zapatista uprising 272 Middle East, and struggle for oil 27–28 military-industrial complex 99 military interventions 27–28 Mizban, Faraj Rabat 141 Mitterand Plan 221 Mobutu Sese Seko 24, overthrow of 94 Mondlane, Eduardo 26 Mongolia 207 Morales, Evo 277 Morganthau, Robert 69, 84–87 Moscow, John 58, 87 Mossadegh, Mohammad 3, 14–15, 27 Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta 122–24, 129 Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers’ Movement) 272 Mozambique 26, 27, 230 foreign debt 241, 246, 249 Mueller, Robert 87 mujahadeen (Afghanistan): and BCCI 70 and drug trade 70 Mulroney, Brian 100 Multilateral Agreement on Investment 269–70, 281 Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative 222, 225, 230, 250–52 Multilateral Investment Agreement 269 multinational corporations: export credit agencies and 209–11 export processing zones and 178 globalization, pressure for 138, 268, 275 mercenaries, use of 25–26, 111n22, 113–14, 115–17, 123 resources and 101–6, 111n29, 112n31, 112n32 scandals 5 transfer mispricing by 49–51 offshore banks, use of 24, 49–51 patents, control of 23 Museveni, Yoweri 95 Myanmar, foreign debt of 230 Nada, Youssef Mustafa 71–72 Namibia 95 export credit agencies and 207 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 15–16 National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia 88–89 National Family Farm Coalition 272 nationalism: pan-Arab 15 Iranian 14 Nehru, Jawaharlal 16 neocolonialism see imperialism neoliberalism 4, 19 critique of 176–79, 190–92, 234, 236 defined 176–77 economic development and 176–79, 232 economic strategies 178–81, 222, 230, 231, 236 Netherlands, overseas empire of 13 Newmont Mining Corp. 244 New World Order 27–28 Nicaragua 207 foreign debt 225, 230, 247, 249 U.S. proxy war against 26, 27, 79 Nicpil, Liddy 190–91, 192 Nidal, Adu 73 Niger, foreign debt of 241, 249 Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force 121, 123 Niger Delta Volunteer Service 122 Niger Delta region: attack on oil platforms 116–17 as “Next Gulf” 118–21 pollution from oil production 115–16 struggle against Shell 115–16, 121–24 Nigeria 200, 266 China and 117–18 colonial rule 115 corruption in 44–45, 230 foreign debt 223, 230, 233, 243, 244 oil production 115–16, 125–27 World Bank lending in 158, 167–69 Nkrumah, Kwame 16 nongovernmental organizations 239, 250 Noriega, Manuel 80 and BCCI 72, 79 North American Free Trade Agreement 4, 268, 272 nuclear power 205–6, 210 Obasanjo, Olusegun 125, 127 Obiang, Teodoro 48 O’Connor, Brian 144–45 OECD Watch 105 offshore banking havens: arms trade and 71–73 campaign against 62–64 central role in world trade 44, 47–48, 64–65 corruption and 24, 44–45, 52–56, 64, 231–33, 253 drug trade and 70 extraction of wealth 43, 54–56, 64–65, 226, 231–33, 253, 258n58 financial centers and 234, ignored by academia 44, 234 secrecy and 47–48, 53, 66 tax evasion and 43, 48, 49–51, 54, 57–59, 64–65, 226, 232 terrorism and 71, 88 Ogoni people 122–23, 125 Okadigbo, Chuba 116 Okonjo-Iweala, Ngozi 118 Okuntimo, Paul 123 Oil Change International 278 oil price spikes 236 oil production and reserves: future shortages of 28, 140 Indonesia 207 Iraqi 135–36, 144–54 Nigerian 113–14, 128–29 strategies to control 25–26, 27–28, 139–40 OM Group, Inc. 104, 112n31 OPEC 125–26, 128 1973 oil embargo by 17 dollar deposits in First World 17–18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 135, 269 “Action Statement on Bribery” 216 export credit agencies and 210, 215 Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises 101, 102, 105–6, 112n31 “OECD Arrangement” 215 Overseas Private Investment Corp. 204, 206–9 Oxfam 43, 62–63, 250 Pakistan 90 Afghan mujahadeen and 70–71 BCCI and 70 export credit agencies and 207 foreign debt 244 Panama 3, 26, 72 as offshore banking haven 73, 74 Papua New Guinea: export credit agencies and 204 mining and environmental problems 204 Paris Club of creditors 220, 225–26, 227, 228, 242, 252 Peru 74 foreign debt 241 impact of IMF SAP 22 petrodollars, recycling of 17–18 Perkins, John 19 Confessions of an Economic Hit Man 1–2, 17 Pharaon, Ghaith 76, 77, 86, 87, 88 Philippines, the 31–34, 35–36 corruption in 181–82 democratic movements in 182–85, 236 economic decline in 187–89 emigration from 189, 236 foreign debt 181, 190–91, 230, 241, 244 Marcos regime 31, 34, 175, 176, 180–85, 261n61 martial law in 180–85 social conditions in 179–80, 185–86, 189–91 U.S. rule 175–76 World Bank and 158, 178–81 Pinochet, General Augusto 27, 45–46, 48 PLATFORM 140, 156n28 Portugal 209–10 Posada Carriles, Luis 26 poverty reduction strategy programs see structural adjustment programs Price Waterhouse 83–84 privatization 191 production sharing agreements 147–54 protectionism 21, 181, 186–87 proxy wars 27, 70–71 Public Citizen 269, 273 public utilities, privatization of 191, 261n61, 277 Rahman, Masihur 85 Reagan, Ronald, and administration 19, 79, 87, 136–37, 239 Iran-Contra affair 72 Rich, Marc 90 Rights and Accountability in Development 101, 104, 105 Rio Tinto Zinc 204 Ritch, Lee 79–80 Robson, John 138 Roldós, Jaime 3, 26 Roosevelt, Kermit 15 Rumsfeld, Donald 138 rural economic development 183, 186–87 Russia: debt relief and 225 oil industry 154 transition to capitalism 137–39, 258n28 Rutledge, Ian 149 Rwanda 94–96, 98, 249 massacre in 94, 99 SACE 201 Sachs Plan 221 Saleh, Salim 95 Saõ Tomé, foreign debt of 247, 249 Saud al-Fulaij, Faisal 86, 87 Saudi Arabia 3, 88 and BCCI 70, 75 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 125–26 Scholz, Wesley S. 104 Scowcroft, Brent 72 Senegal 16, 249 Senghor, Léopold 16 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks 71 Shell Oil 144 Nigeria and 113–15, 122, 123, 125–29 at World Economic Forum 127 Shinawatra, Thaksin 54 Sierra Club 269 Sierra Leone 247 SmartMeme 276 Solnit, Rebecca Hope in the Dark 281 Somalia 251 Sorrows of Empire (Johnson) 4 South Africa 236 military interventions 27 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 26 Soviet Union 13, 14 de-Stalinization 16 Hungary, intervention in 16 influence in Third World 14 U.S. and 137 Stephens, Jackson 76, 77 Stiglitz, Joseph 24 Globalization and Its Discontents 3, 4 structural adjustment programs (SAPs) 19, 229–30 in Ghana 5, 22 in Peru 22 in the Philippines 176–79, 183–85, 190–92 in Zambia 22 Sudan 230, 251 Suharto 200, 202–3 Syria 211 Switzerland, as offshore banking haven 45, 65, 72 Taco Bell, boycott of 280 Tanzania, foreign debt of 247, 249 tax evasion 43, 48, 49–51, 54, 57–59, 64–65 Tax Foundation 137–38 tax havens see offshore banking havens Tax Justice Network 63 Tax Reform Act of 1986 138 Tenke Mining 99 terrorism: as EHM strategy 26, 72 financing of 42, 88–89 inequality and 44 Islamist 71–72, 89 Palestinian 73 Thatcher, Margaret 19, 138 Third World: as commodity producers 17, 23 conditions in 5, 96–97, 106–8, 116, 179–80, 185–90, 234, 236 development strategies 176–79 divisions among countries 265–68 elites in 25, 28, 43–44, 176, 226, 232–34 emergence of 14 lack of development in 232, 237 terms of trade and 22, 178–79 Third World Network 269 Tidewater Inc. 113 Torrijos, Omar 3, 26 Total S.A. 144, 153 trade unions 135–36, 141–44, 180, 186, 269, 274 transfer mispricing 49–51 cost to Third World 50 Transparency International 45 Turkey: export credit agencies and 206 Ilisu Dam 211–14 Turkmenistan 200 Uganda 94–96 foreign debt 241, 246, 249 Union Bank of Switzerland 57, 58, 77, 226, 250 United Arab Emirates 69, 73 United Fruit Company 15 United Kingdom 213 NCP for Congo 102–3 empire 13–14, 115, 129, 145 Iran and 14–15 Iraq occupation and 146, 151, 152 offshore banking and; Suez Crisis and 15 United Nations: trade issues and 265, 276 Panel of Experts, Congo 100–106, 112n32 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development 220, 265, 267 United States: agricultural subsidies 22 aid 98 as empire 13, 28 cold war strategy of 16, 17, 24, 26 in Congo 99, 104, 105 debt-led development strategy of 176–79 Iran coup and 14–15 Iraqi oil and 133–34, 136, 139–40 Iraq wars 72, 133, 141–42 Islamists and 26 Nigerian oil and 118–21 Philippines and 175–76, 180 strategic doctrines 27–28, 118–19 support of Contras 72 trade deficit 23 trade policies 267 U.S.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

Burnout, associated, in particular, with the millennial generation, in the case of retail workers, could be the exhaustion that comes from convincing oneself over and over again that low-wage work is fun and fulfilling, even if not deserving of higher wages. 40 And now even emotional labor, rarely recognized as requiring skill in the first place, is undergoing its own process of deskilling. Big-box stores like Walmart and Target give workers scripts to follow when they interact with customers, foreclosing their own ability to make decisions, and secret shoppers might also check to see how closely workers follow such a script. Such deskilling itself seems once again to point toward full automation, but in the moment, it’s just another tactic of control. 41 The coronavirus pandemic accelerated many of the trends already existing in retail.

…

With the shift to online ordering as shelter-in-place orders spread across the globe, some companies, such as J. Crew, slid into bankruptcy, while some e-retailers—particularly Amazon—profited wildly. Companies laid off workers, particularly part-timers, as they tried to save money for eventual reopening. Big-box stores like Walmart and Target remained open, putting up safety shields for workers and providing in some cases short-term bonus pay for those who continued to show up. Workers, however, demanded more. The workers deemed “essential” during the pandemic, explained Travis Boothe, a pharmacy technician at Kroger in West Virginia, were retail workers like him, and the whole country was realizing “just how essential we are to the very foundations of this country’s economy.”

Slow by Brooke McAlary

Airbnb, big-box store, clean water, imposter syndrome, Lyft, off grid, Parkinson's law, Rana Plaza, retail therapy, sharing economy, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, uber lyft

Our society and economy is built upon a strong foundation of consumption and a firm expectation that we will contribute, so much so that choosing to live with less stuff is viewed as counter-cultural. We pick up the crappy novelty present for the office Christmas party because that’s what everyone else does. We hang things on the wall because the neighbours might think we’re weird if they remain empty, devoid of photos or artwork or trendy wall hangings. We browse the sale racks at our big box stores because that’s what we’ve always done, and we allow TV or social media to fuel the fire of discontent (I’ll be happy when we book a holiday . . . the kitchen is updated . . . we put in a pool . . .). If we want change, we need to learn how to care less and how to care more. Care less about trends, status and the outward signs of ‘success’, and more about the important things.

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

These are slower to transform, largely because of the cost. Putting solar panels on the roofs of all the nation’s Walmarts (this is happening) is not the same as putting solar panels on top of one’s garage. Nor is the difference just a matter of scale. Every suburb and semirural outpost where big-box stores cluster has its own culture of wires, its own utility, balancing authority, and regulatory apparatus that must prepare for (and often upgrade existing infrastructure to accept) every new source of power. When we consider the grid in this way it becomes even more evident that some sort of hub capable of translating across all the competing interests and integrating all the structural intransigencies will be essential to the success of an infrastructural upgrade that is national in scale.

…

Two different sorts of things, then, need to be integrated into our accounting. First, all the electricity made, no matter who is making it. And second, all the electricity not used, no matter who is saving it. If we can work out how to do this, systemically, it will start to matter when a couple of big-box stores, a cement factory, or a subdivision or two are energy-efficient enough that a utility, or anyone else, can avoid building a new power plant. The owners of these enterprises, just like any homeowner who’s invested in a smart thermostat or a host of compact fluorescent bulbs, naturally want credit for what they are saving.

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

He’d been president of the Texas Automobile Dealers Association for a generation. He’d joined the association after starting his career working for Ford in Texas and elsewhere, a role that had him dealing with the automaker’s franchise dealers. It had been a long career and one that shaped his thinking about the fabric of the small towns across his native Texas. As big-box stores and shopping malls rose to replace familiar downtowns, in many places the car dealer was one of the last remaining locally owned businesses. Yes, the customers might be buying a Chevy, but they were buying and getting it serviced regularly from a recognizable family name. “When I was a kid in Lewisville, Texas, there were 2,000 people that lived in that small farming community and there were 40 Main Street merchants—all locally owned and operated,” Wolters would later say of his motivations.

…

“When I was a kid in Lewisville, Texas, there were 2,000 people that lived in that small farming community and there were 40 Main Street merchants—all locally owned and operated,” Wolters would later say of his motivations. “Today, one of those businesses exists and it’s Huffines Chevrolet. Everybody else has been replaced by a big-box store because they didn’t have laws that prevented them from being terminated.” The typical franchise car dealer generated money on a mixture of new and used car sales, as well as servicing those vehicles. Overall, the average dealer that year made about $1.2 million in profit before taxes, selling 750 new vehicles and 588 used ones, according to the National Automobile Dealers Association.

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

But as political theorist Susan Fainstein noted: “Residents are caught in a vicious circle: they cannot afford to patronize independent shopkeepers because their wages are so low, and their wages are so low because large corporations have been able to force down the general wage rate, justifying their stinginess as required by competition.” Big-box stores then “create more poorly paid employees who can only manage to patronize businesses that pay exploitative wages.” And on the vicious circle goes. In East Harlem, the East River Plaza is getting bigger, blander, and more estranged. A trio of high-rise towers will be built right on top of the mall, rocketing nearly fifty stories into the sky and filled mostly with luxury tenants.

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They’ve protested against FreshDirect and the de Blasio administration’s planned transformation of blue-collar Jerome Avenue into a new neighborhood—about which Bronx Documentary Center founder Michael Kamber wrote in the Times, “The formula is simple: rezoning; tax incentives for developers; new 11-story buildings that house thousands (some low income, most not). Chain and big box stores are in—immigrants fixing cars are out. Speculators are already staking claims.” They also protested a pop-up art show at the abandoned old Bronx Borough Courthouse, a landmark Beaux-Arts building shuttered since the 1970s, bought by a developer in the 1990s, and opened briefly in 2015 for No Longer Empty, a nonprofit that curates art exhibits in vacant spaces around the city.

What's Your Future Worth?: Using Present Value to Make Better Decisions by Peter Neuwirth

backtesting, big-box store, Black Swan, collective bargaining, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Long Term Capital Management, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, the scientific method

Let’s now look at a couple of others. A “Once in a Lifetime” Opportunity? If you are like me, your mailbox, telephone, and e-mail are constantly inundated with marketing offers that seem too good to be true. From offers to switch cable companies to “free” home inspections, blowout sales at your local “big box” store, and Groupon deals, it seems that we go through life spending far too much money on the things we need and if we just took the time to read and act on all these “once in a lifetime” opportunities, we could improve our financial situation considerably. Many of us are either so suspicious or have become so numb to sales pitches that we just refuse on principle to even investigate the offers.

Green Interior Design by Lori Dennis

big-box store, carbon footprint, clean water, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), McMansion, the built environment

Many contemporary fashion lines have clearly marked sustainability initiatives on their websites or on their clothing’s tags. When it comes to designing a closet, the most important thing to know before you begin is exactly what is going to go back into the closet when it’s finished. All set? Okay, let’s move on: Part II: Design Tips for Customizing Your Dream Closet Some good news—you can actually shop big-box stores with off-the-rack shelving units relatively cheaply and sustainably! Just be sure to read online product reviews diligently. Watch out for buzzwords like “wobbly” or anything about the edges chipping. But otherwise, you don’t have to be too precious with the building materials used in your closet.

Introverts in Love: The Quiet Way to Happily Ever After by Sophia Dembling

Albert Einstein, big-box store, Burning Man, fake it until you make it, longitudinal study, telemarketer, young professional

He was male and he was a Christian, so I was the one she thought of.” Married twenty-one years now. Is there a shop you visit regularly? Can’t hurt to get on friendly terms with the proprietor, who sees a lot of people every day. (One good reason among many, by the way, to patronize small, independent stores over big-box stores.) When he worked at night, Eric would often stop for “exactly two drinks” at a low-key bar where there were rarely any other patrons in his age bracket (most were younger). So one night when he saw an age-appropriate woman there, he struck up a conversation. “I am good at small talk when I’m motivated,” he says.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

And thrift finance enables a middle class whose stagnant wages no longer match its needs to fund consumption through borrowing. Thrift retail—low-cost supermarkets, dollar stores, and big-box stores—has grown astronomically in the past decades. Walmart alone has grown from a single store in 1962 to generate nearly $300 billion in U.S. revenue in 2016. And Dollar General and Family Dollar have averaged nearly 9 and 7 percent annual revenue growth in recent years. Shoppers at all three stores earn substantially less—in the case of Family Dollar nearly 40 percent less—than shoppers even at other less downmarket big-box stores like Target, and the earnings gap to shoppers at upmarket stores is much greater still.

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revenue growth in recent years: See Dollar General Corporation, “DG’s Revenue Growth by Quarter and Year,” CSIMarket.com, accessed November 19, 2018, http://csimarket.com/stocks/single_growth_rates.php?code=DG&rev, and Family Dollar Stores, Inc., “FDO’s Revenue Growth by Quarter and Year,” CSIMarket.com, accessed November 19, 2018, http://csimarket.com/stocks/single_growth_rates.php?code=FDO&rev. less downmarket big-box stores like Target: These relationships are calculated using data on incomes for shoppers at Family Dollar, Dollar General, Walmart, and Target, reported in Hayley Petersen, “Meet the Average Walmart Shopper,” Business Insider, September 18, 2004, accessed November 19, 2018, www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-average-wal-mart-shopper-2014-9.

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

Using arts festivals to make small towns appear “vibrant”—a favorite stratagem of ArtPlace—was not one of his suggestions. What he proposed instead was universal health coverage. Other solutions to the problem of rural depopulation are just as easy to come up with. Prohibit corporate agriculture; this would encourage not only small farms but food diversity as well. Use zoning rules to restrict big-box stores, thereby saving small-town merchants. Make college excellent and affordable, so that graduates aren’t forced by the weight of student debt to seek corporate employment in the big cities. Resist the urgings of foundation dignitaries and focus instead on the far less beguiling reverie of durable, productive enterprise.

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard L. Brandt

Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, deal flow, drop ship, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Free Software Foundation, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, Pershing Square Capital Management, science of happiness, search inside the book, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, software patent, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

However, a big part of that jump was due to print-on-demand (POD) books, produced by specialty printers that focus on public domain titles, self-publishers, and micro-niche publications. These titles jumped 181 percent over 2008. The problem is that actual sales of these titles are very low compared to books from the major publishing houses. And retailers say they have not seen the number of readers increase with lower prices. “The big box stores were supposed to increase the numbers of readers too,” says Richard Howorth, the owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, who was one of the teachers of the class on running a bookstore that Bezos took. “But they didn’t.” The other complaint is the tactics Amazon uses to keep its prices low.

Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade

affirmative action, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, clean water, Donald Trump, white flight, white picket fence, working poor

Our metrics for success became how high the stock market got, how large the profits were, how efficient the company was. If certain communities, towns, and people, suffered in this, it was all for the greater good in the name of progress. Our obsession with economic growth empowered massive corporations that filled many communities with franchises and big-box stores, crushing the downtowns that had once had small locally owned shops and restaurants. The economy grew, but gone were the local community, the labor union, and lifetime jobs for those without a college degree. While our front row neighborhoods filled with bespoke and artisanal stores, those left behind, literally and figuratively, were left to cope with the new landscape we had created.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton

affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, estate planning, eternal september, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invisible hand, liberation theology, longitudinal study, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, price anchoring, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, walkable city, Washington Consensus, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Works Progress Administration

Thomas projÂ�ect would be allowed into the new development. “In reality,” argued a critic, “it’s a way to get a lot of money for high-income housing.” Renamed “River Garden,” the site would lure desirable residents with the pastel pedestrianism of the New Urbanist design movement. And while the big box store Â�wasn’t quite the period piece the architects had envisioned, Wal-Mart did agree to landscape the parking lot.2 For the Arkansas-based company, its first stake in central New Orleans represented a form of urban homesteading. “The company started in rural areas [because] people in those areas did not have access to goods that other people did,” explained a spokeswoman, and now that rural Americans could buy brand-name goods in their Wal-Marts, the company was extending that serÂ�vice to another population left behind in national consumption.

…

“Americans have decided they want discount shopping in volume, and that’s the real world,” he explained succinctly.3 In 2001 former residents of St. Thomas and their white neighbors packed a tense five-hour meeting of the New Orleans City Planning Commission, arguing on opposite sides. The mostly white forces against Wal-Mart saw their challenge to a subsidized big-box store as a stand for the common good. The data was in: Wal-Mart Â�didn’t add jobs, it cannibalized existing ones. It drove locally owned businesses under, homogenized communities, and degraded the landscape—and all with help from the public purse. With the government contracting out its public housing to for-Â�profit developers, the tenants became loss leaders in a slick real-estate deal.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

THE GREAT COMET RETURNS Two hundred years and change after the Great Comet blazed over the skies of industrializing England, ominous signs have again been appearing that the latest incarnation of factory owners and entrepreneurs—tech execs and startup founders—are using new technologies to reshape the world of work to the disadvantage of the workers. There may not be a burning celestial body overhead, but throughout the 2010s, there was no shortage of omens closer to earth. Closed for Business signs sit in the windows of mom-and-pop shops and the vacant husks of big-box stores in strip malls outside town grow ever more numerous, victims of the rise of Amazon and e-commerce giants, and the disappearance of the hundreds of thousands of jobs once held inside those walls. Rideshare drivers are sleeping in their cars in parking lots and rest stops, even after working around the clock logging gigs on their smartphone apps, unable to afford rent in the richest country in the world.

…

Amazon, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, InstaCart, TaskRabbit, and other companies drove algorithm-mediated work platforms into the mainstream, normalizing a mode of work that left workers without benefits or protections. Delivery drivers, cleaners, carpenters, masseuses, you name it—the twenty-first century has seen the rise of precarious, gig-based, platform-mediated jobs, begetting the decline of traditional ones. Meanwhile, e-commerce and the Amazon effect hit retailers hard, shuttering shops and big-box stores alike. Headline after headline proclaimed “The Robots Are Coming for Our Jobs,” in stories about hyper-intelligent AI and logistics automation. Will all these trends eventually lead to a world where the bots and algorithms do our dirty work, making our lives easier and more prosperous? Or will the machines push us out of our jobs and deposit us into a dystopia?

Fodor's Hawaii 2012 by Fodor's Travel Publications

big-box store, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Easter island, gentrification, global village, Maui Hawaii, new economy, off-the-grid, out of africa, place-making, polynesian navigation, urban sprawl

Although the current real-estate boom on Kaua‘i has attracted mainland millionaires to build estate homes on the few remaining parcels of land in Hanalei, there’s still plenty to see and do. It’s the gathering place on the North Shore. Restaurants, shops, and people-watching here are among the best on the island, and you won’t find a single brand name, chain, or big-box store around—unless you count surf brands like Quiksilver and Billabong. The beach and river at Hanalei offer swimming, snorkeling, boogie boarding, surfing, and kayaking. Those hanging around at sunset often congregate at the Hanalei Pavilion, where a husband-and-wife slack-key-guitar-playing combo makes impromptu appearances.

…

The commercial and political center of Kaua‘i County, which includes the Islands of Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau, Līhu‘e is home to the island’s major airport, harbor, and hospital. This is where you can find the state and county offices that issue camping and hiking permits and the same fast-food eateries and big-box stores that blight the mainland. The avid golfer will like the three golf courses in Līhu‘e—all within a mile or so of each other. The county is seeking help in reviving the downtown; for now, once your business is done, there’s little reason to linger in lackluster Līhu‘e. Getting Here and Around Route 56 leads into Līhu‘e from the north and Route 50 comes here from the south and west.

…

A variety of sewing patterns and notions are featured, making it a must-stop for any seamstress. If you’re seeking something that’s truly one-of-a-kind, check out the selection of purses, aloha wear, and other quality hand-sewn items. | 4-1326 Kūhiō Hwy. | Kapa‘a | 96746 | 808/822–1746. Līhu‘e Līhu‘e is the business area on Kaua‘i, as well as home to all the big-box stores and the only real mall. Do not mistake this town as lacking in rare finds, however. Līhu‘e is steeped in history and diversity while simultaneously welcoming new trends and establishments. Shopping Centers Kilohana Plantation. This 16,000-square-foot Tudor mansion contains art galleries, a jewelry store, and the new farm-to-table restaurant 22 North.

Fodor's Hawaii 2013 by Fodor's

big-box store, carbon footprint, Easter island, gentrification, global village, Maui Hawaii, new economy, off-the-grid, out of africa, polynesian navigation, three-masted sailing ship, urban sprawl

Although the current real-estate boom on Kauai has attracted mainland millionaires to build estate homes on the few remaining parcels of land in Hanalei, there’s still plenty to see and do. It’s the gathering place on the North Shore. Restaurants, shops, and people-watching here are among the best on the island, and you won’t find a single brand name, chain, or big-box store around—unless you count surf brands like Quiksilver and Billabong. The beach and river at Hanalei offer swimming, snorkeling, body boarding, surfing, and kayaking. Those hanging around at sunset often congregate at the Hanalei Pavilion, where a husband-and-wife-slack-key-guitar-playing combo makes impromptu appearances.

…

The commercial and political center of Kauai County, which includes the islands of Kauai and Niihau, Lihue is home to the island’s major airport, harbor, and hospital. This is where you can find the state and county offices that issue camping and hiking permits and the same fast-food eateries and big-box stores that blight the mainland. The county is seeking help in reviving the downtown; for now, once your business is done, there’s little reason to linger in lackluster Lihue. Getting Here and Around Route 56 leads into Lihue from the north and Route 50 comes here from the south and west.

…

A variety of sewing patterns and notions are featured as well at Vicky’s Fabric Shop, making it a must-stop for any seamstress. If you’re seeking something that’s truly one-of-a-kind, check out the selection of purses, aloha wear, and other quality hand-sewn items. | 4-1326 Kuhio Hwy. | Kapaa | 96746 | 808/822–1746. Lihue Lihue is the business area on Kauai, as well as home to all the big-box stores and the only real mall. Do not mistake this town as lacking in rare finds, however. Lihue is steeped in history and diversity while simultaneously welcoming new trends and establishments. Shopping Centers Kilohana Plantation. This 16,000-square-foot Tudor mansion contains art galleries, a jewelry store, and the farm-to-table restaurant 22 North.

Simply Living Well: A Guide to Creating a Natural, Low-Waste Home by Julia Watkins

airport security, big-box store, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, demand response, Mason jar, microplastics / micro fibres, off-the-grid

A great deal of the circular economy is accomplished by smarter designs, innovative materials, technological advances, and radically different business models. But there’s a lot—and I mean a lot— you can do in your own home, often by looking back to a time when the demands of feeding a family of four were no different than they are today, but with no fancy supermarkets or big box stores down the road or fast and easy take-out or delivery options a phone call away. This is why, for me, zero-waste has been about so much more than just avoiding trash or preventing waste. It’s been about changing my mindset, developing an inner resourcefulness, and creating deep, meaningful connections to the natural world, my ancestors, my food, my health, and my community.

Sustainable Minimalism: Embrace Zero Waste, Build Sustainability Habits That Last, and Become a Minimalist Without Sacrificing the Planet (Green Housecleaning, Zero Waste Living) by Stephanie Marie Seferian

8-hour work day, Airbnb, big-box store, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, do what you love, emotional labour, food desert, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lifestyle creep, Mason jar, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, ride hailing / ride sharing

Sustainable Minimalism: Embrace Zero Waste, Build Sustainability Habits That Last, and Become a Minimalist without Sacrificing the Planet Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-501-6 , (ebook) 978-1-64250-502-3 BISAC category code: HOM019000—HOUSE & HOME / Cleaning, Caretaking & Organizing Printed in the United States of America To Haig, Ani, and Lara Table of Contents Part 1 Getting Started with the Low-Hanging Fruit Chapter 1 Why You Overbuy (and How to Stop) Chapter 2 The Five Pillars of Responsible Decluttering Chapter 3 Sustainable Minimalism on a Budget Chapter 4 Day-to-Day Minimalism with Kids Chapter 5 Eco-Friendly Capsule Wardrobes Part 2 Sustainability and the Middle of the Tree Chapter 6 Your Low-Waste Kitchen Chapter 7 Less Plastic, Please Chapter 8 Carbon Footprints and On-the-Go Sustainability Chapter 9 Gifting and Thrifting Part 3 The Highest-Hanging Fruit: Self-Sufficiency Chapter 10 Why Self-Sufficiency Matters Chapter 11 DIY for a Life with Less Chapter 12 Become a Change-Maker Acknowledgements About the Author Appendix Endnotes The Sustainable Minimalist Tree Work Your Way to the Top! Introduction America, we have a purchasing problem. I’ll never forget the first (and only) time I participated in Black Friday. I woke up early—too early, if I’m honest—and stood in a line that snaked around the side of a big box store. It was a frigid November night and I shuffled from side to side to keep warm. The lights in the parking lot illuminated the exhalations of the crowd; in that moment, I had the fleeting thought that this was all so silly. I should go home. I should get back in bed. But in the end, I bought a flat screen television.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

Every Sunday outside the playground in my neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, the aisles of the farmers’ market are packed with those looking for the best pickles in New York City, local goat cheese, or a bounty of beautiful produce grown by small-scale farmers within a hundred miles. And while the aisles may be harder to navigate than the typical chain grocery store, the popularity of these markets is undeniable. From bodega-lined urban neighborhoods to big-box store suburbs, we are seeing a longing for a meaningful connection to our food—a way to create community, connect with the growers, and heal the planet. In the Purpose Economy, we see the circumvention of traditional retail channels, which mark up goods at several points along the food chain. An increasingly robust direct producer-to-consumer retail capacity is emerging in which any individual can sell her wares at whatever price she determines.

Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects by Glenn Adamson

big-box store, Biosphere 2, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, dumpster diving, fake news, Ford Model T, haute couture, informal economy, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kintsugi, Mason jar, post-truth, race to the bottom, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, trade route, VTOL, white flight

He has trained many people to work for him over the years and observes that what they really need is not the ability to memorize the names of parts and equipment, but spatial and visual awareness. I asked him what his plans were for retirement—did he intend for someone else to take over from him? He said no. It would be tough for someone to start out in the business today, with the intense competition from big-box stores like Home Depot. He has kids, but he’d never ask them to inherit the store; he doesn’t want them to have to work so hard. In any case, his bricks are worth more than his business. He’s already had many offers from real estate developers to buy the property. Someday in the not-too-distant future, that is probably what will happen.

Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris

big-box store, call centre, David Sedaris, desegregation, illegal immigration, index card, Maui Hawaii, remote working, stem cell

In ’08, my gifts were pretty paltry. I’d bought eight dozen safety pins in Greece, and while they were foreign, they didn’t look much different from what you could get in the States. Ditto the German Band-Aids. So when Bob mentioned Costco I felt that all my problems had been solved. As with every big-box store in Winston-Salem, it took fifteen minutes to drive there and another fifteen minutes to cross the parking lot. If the building seemed large from the outside, inside it was twice as big, the kind of space that has its own weather. The carts, too were slightly oversize, and made me appear even smaller than I actually am.

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business by Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ronen Palan

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business process, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, critique of consumerism, cryptocurrency, currency risk, democratizing finance, digital capitalism, distributed ledger, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, independent contractor, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ross Ulbricht, shareholder value, short selling, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail

The banks themselves tend to justify their action in terms of optimization of costs and better services. ‘Large banks invest billions of dollars to deliver the products and services consumers want – investments that only a company that has achieved scale can make. Scale allows them to deliver, like big-box stores, more innovation, greater convenience and consistent, reliable service,’ argued in 2012 William B. Harrison Jr, an architect of the 2000 merger that created J. P. Morgan Chase, and the bank’s former chairman and chief executive.12 Economists tend to deduce motivation from the resulting data.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, big-box store, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Donald Davies, double helix, Hernando de Soto, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, negative emissions, ocean acidification, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Nevada Department of Wildlife—agencies that cooperate (and sometimes squabble) over the fish’s future. It took me a while to arrange a trip; by then it was time for the summer census and about 105° Fahrenheit. I met up with the team in the town nearest the cavern—Pahrump, Nevada. Pahrump has one main road, which is lined with fireworks shops, big-box stores, and casinos. From there it’s a forty-five-minute drive to Devils Hole, through a mix of desert scrub and emptiness. In Manly’s day, the cavern would have been hard to spot until you practically toppled into it. Today, it’s impossible to miss owing to the ten-foot-tall fence, which is topped with barbed wire.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Before that though, HOT Lane Networks will be converted to automated-only operation. Daily Travel? Taken to an extreme, these conditions suggest a future where travel—a daily 1 - 2 hour set of chores of getting to things and having things come to us—might be be a thing of the past. Driving to work five days a week and driving to the big box store for detergent are both disappearing. The Amazon Dash button336 demonstrates how we might take care of some of this. Parents will soon be able to order a self-driving car to take their children to soccer practice. Relying on descendants of apps like Skype and FaceTime and Google Hangouts, workers will meet colleagues periodically at both offices and random third places.

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, bonus culture, business cycle, carbon tax, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, false flag, financial innovation, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, Naomi Klein, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, profit maximization, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, union organizing, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Why should society pay for the retirement of someone who hasn’t been responsible and collected Krugerrands? The older generation had a rendezvous with destiny, their hero FDR used to say, and soon it will occur to America’s class-war populists that every slow-moving moocher and senior-parasite needs to make that rendezvous—which is to say, that appointment with the human resources guy at the local big-box store. Every problem that the editorialists fret about today will get worse, of course: inequality, global warming, financial bubbles. But on America will go, chasing a dream that is more vivid than life itself, on into the seething Arcadia of all against all. Notes Introduction 1. As far as I can tell, the first to use a form of this metaphor was Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA), who told the Washington Independent reporter Dave Weigel in September of 2009 that the movement was an “awakening in America.”

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

The year Facebook went public, it recorded $1.1 billion in American profits, but didn’t pay a cent of federal or state income tax. Indeed, it earned a $429 million refund. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, Facebook bilked the treasury by taking a single deduction: It wrote off the stock options it gave to its executives. It’s hard to have sympathy with Walmart or Home Depot or the other big-box stores. They hardly pay the largest tax rates in the nation. Still, they cough up a reasonable sum. Over the last decade, Walmart, the supposed Beast of Bentonville, handed over about 30 percent of its income in taxes; Home Depot paid 38 percent. We can bemoan the fact that they don’t pay more, yet it seems reasonable to note that their prime competitor isn’t paying even half that rate.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

But bar codes and scanners greatly reduced the costs of maintaining a large inventory. The decades after the introduction of the bar-code scanner in the United States witnessed an explosion in the size of retail stores; with automated inventory management, chains were free to balloon into the epic big-box stores that now dominate retail shopping. Without bar-code scanning, the modern shopping landscape of Target and Best Buy and supermarkets the size of airport terminals would have had a much harder time coming into being. If there was a death ray in the history of the laser, it was the metaphoric one directed at the mom-and-pop, indie stores demolished by the big-box revolution

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

It is the middle-class outlets that have seen relative decline in the online world. Moreover, it is overwhelmingly smaller, local media organizations that have lost out to national sources.38 The distinction between Hindman and Anderson’s Long Tail comes down to comparisons. The Long Tail compared online platforms to large chain stores and big-box stores such as Walmart or the now-defunct Blockbuster video, Tower Records, or Borders books, but Hindman compares the online ecosystem to a more complete range of non-digital national and local media. As a result, he catches a key aspect of the comparison that Anderson misses: variety in a world subject to “the tyranny of geography” was always supplied by a variety of institutions, each capable of working at different scales.

Protecting Pollinators by Jodi Helmer

Anthropocene, big-box store, clean water, Columbine, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, the scientific method, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

Vaughn Bryant, director of the Palynology Laboratory at Texas A&M University cites a lack of truth in labeling as the main reason consumers might be duped at the supermarket. Bryant tested sixty jars, jugs, and plastic bears of honey purchased in ten states and the District of Columbia in 2011. The results showed that 100 percent of the honey purchased at drugstores, 77 percent of honey sold at big-box stores like Costco and Target, and 76 percent of the honey purchased at supermarkets contained no pollen. Manufacturers claim that pollen is removed before honey is bottled because consumers want crystal-clear honey (and unfiltered pollen particles can crystallize); supermarkets also prefer filtered honey because it has a longer shelf life.

Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States by Bernadette Hanlon

big-box store, classic study, company town, correlation coefficient, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, feminist movement, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, McMansion, New Urbanism, Silicon Valley, statistical model, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white flight, working-age population, zero-sum game

The suburb has also been involved in such initiatives as developing new housing, mostly aimed at higher-income inhabitants; offering incentives for the redevelopment of local storefronts and streetscape improvements; enhancing the suburb’s McCain Park; and encouraging new commercial ventures, such as the redevelopment of Severance Town Center (Keating 2008; Morton 2002). In 1986, Cleveland Heights’ city hall relocated to the periphery of the old Severance mall in an effort to boost commercial activity there (Morton 2002). The mall area still struggled until, in 1998, the old Severance mall was demolished. The new structure that replaced it was anchored by big-box stores, such as Walmart and Home Depot, and a large cinema complex. New housing developed around the new town center. Cleveland Heights sees such redevelopment as a way to increase its local tax base, to improve the quality of life for its residents, and, ultimately, to compete with newer suburbs on the metropolitan fringe.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The announcement of its location in 1965 touched off a frenzy of speculation in the pastureland of Southlake, Euless, Grapevine, Irving, and half a dozen other farm towns. Today these communities have a population of a million. The remaining acreage at Las Colinas has been sold; the Metroplex has run out of room. The last place to build is within DFW itself. The airport is planning its own strip malls, big-box stores, and convention hotels to pair with a miniature Las Colinas tucked against the fairways of its twin golf courses. Fearing this day would come, the communities surrounding DFW sued twenty years ago to stop its expansion, refusing to let it build on what was technically their land. Euless, Grapevine, Coppell, and Irving took their case to the Supreme Court, and lost.

…

That doesn’t include the year his firm spent disassembling the factory, yielding forty thousand tons of scrap metal and one hundred thousand tons of recyclable concrete. Auto plants are easy by Jacoby’s standards; try cleaning up after a steel mill’s mess. That’s what he did in midtown Atlanta to create Atlantic Station, a 138-acre constellation of high-rises, condos, townhomes, and big-box stores. Nine thousand loads of contaminated soil were extracted from the foundations of Atlantic Steel, replaced with twenty-eight hundred trees and the first LEED Silver-certified tower in the Southeast. (Ironically, some of the country’s greenest buildings stand on its most polluted sites.) To do it, he needed federal, state, and local cooperation and funds.

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A. Roger Ekirch, big-box store, card file, dark matter, Evgeny Morozov, game design, index card, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Minecraft, off grid, Rubik’s Cube, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, statistical model, the built environment, urban planning

* For Roofman, it must have looked as if the rest of the world were locked in a trance, doing the exact same things at the exact same times of day—in the same kinds of buildings, no less—and not just in one state, but everywhere. It’s no real surprise, then, that he would become greedy, ambitious, overconfident, stepping up to larger and larger businesses—but still targeting franchises and big-box stores. They would all have their own spatial formulas and repeating events, he knew; they would all be run according to predictable loops inside identical layouts all over the country. With overconfidence came carelessness, and Roofman was eventually arrested and imprisoned in North Carolina’s Brown Creek Correctional Institution.

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

At the height of the boom, the combination of real estate, housing, and the construction-related industries accounted for more than a quarter of the entire economies of Las Vegas, Miami, and Phoenix; more than 30 percent of Orlando’s; and upward of 40 percent of that of Naples, Florida.1 In these places, real estate, mortgage finance, and construction literally became the economy, making up a bigger piece of it and employing more workers than manufacturing, government, health care, and education combined. This created what I like to call the great growth illusion of development for development’s sake. New housing development brought new shopping malls, with chain restaurants, big-box stores, and the like providing at least the semblance of expanding jobs and growth. Of course, all these new homes needed furniture, electronics, appliances, granite countertops, window treatments, and more, necessitating even more retail. And the people flocking there needed more and more cars, which meant more car dealerships and ultimately more roads.

Tyler Cowen-Discover Your Inner Economist Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist-Plume (2008) by Unknown

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Andrei Shleifer, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, cross-subsidies, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, George Santayana, haute cuisine, low interest rates, market clearing, microcredit, money market fund, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

It will try to attract a large number of customers, which usually means predictable, mainstream food, the scourge of the dining sophisticate. If I am in a hitherto unknown part of the United States, the region has immigrants, and I am looking to eat, I head away from the center of town. I look for the strip malls. The best strip malls, for food, are those without Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or other "big box" stores. Large anchor stores encourage high rents and large crowds, which are not always the right combination for interesting ethnic food. Lower rents also mean that more people can try their hand at starting a restaurant. Many more people can try to market the family cooking. Few immigrant families can afford to rent or buy a restaurant space in the middle of downtown Philadelphia, or for that matter in the middle of an upper-middle-class shopping center, such as Tysons Corner (northern Virginia), South Coast Plaza (Orange County), or Paramus Park (northern New Jersey).

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment by Guy Spier

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, book value, Checklist Manifesto, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, NetJets, pattern recognition, pre–internet, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, two and twenty, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Since opening its first store in Virginia in 1993, CarMax has sold over 4 million cars, and it currently boasts about a hundred stores across America. It’s a highly efficient operation with a narrow spread between what it pays for cars and the price at which it sells them. Customers know that the sales prices in its big-box stores are among the lowest around. And there’s a huge selection of cars on display, ranging from two-year-old Mercedes SUVs to Mustang convertibles from the 1950s. There is one other key aspect to the CarMax business model: it provides customers with access to financing. In the United States, a significant portion of cars are leased.

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

A decent guess, favoring the convenient round number, is ten residential windows per Seattleite. There are also windows at places of work, Starbucks, Nordstrom, airports, concert halls, and so forth. This probably doesn’t add all that much to the per capita total. The average cubicle has no windows. A big-box store has little surface area (and few windows) relative to its volume. The windows in public spaces like restaurants and airports are shared among the huge mass of people using them. Don’t forget windows in cars. (You might ask the interviewer whether to count them.) A car is going to have four windows at bare minimum, often twice that.

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

No longer shuttered away in a factory, today’s working class is interwoven into nearly every aspect of our lives. It’s the black woman in a caretaker’s smock wearing special comfort shoes and a name tag above her heart. It’s the white man in a uniform (which he had to pay for) who punches in each day and restocks the shelves of your favorite big-box store. It’s the Latina home health aide who cares for your mom, the janitor who empties your office wastebasket, the woman who rings up your groceries, and the crew who fix the bumpy freeway you take every day to work. Yet despite how interwoven this new working class is in our lives, we don’t really know enough about it.

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida

Abraham Maslow, active measures, assortative mating, back-to-the-city movement, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, Celebration, Florida, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, edge city, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, extreme commuting, financial engineering, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, invention of the telegraph, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-work, power law, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, World Values Survey, young professional

One is built on top of an old railway viaduct. It’s perhaps forty feet wide, several miles long, and passes through at least one modern building. I haven’t seen them all. After returning home to a college town, I have become an advocate for public beauty, particularly for our small downtown. I argue that, when competing with big box stores in strip malls, we cannot afford not to make downtown beautiful. People will go out of their way to spend time in beauty, and once there they will linger. Visiting alumni don’t buy artist’s prints of the local Wal-Mart. So what is it about aesthetics that makes us feel satisfied and happy with our communities?

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, big-box store, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, call centre, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital nomad, drop ship, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, follow your passion, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, growth hacking, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, index fund, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, passive investing, Paul Graham, pets.com, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, software as a service, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, uber lyft, web application, William MacAskill, Y Combinator, Y2K

But Need/Want, a physical product company that sells everything from bedding to notebooks to iPhone cases, has managed to build a big business with only a tiny team. Need/Want uses scalable systems and channels to increase profits. They use prepackaged software, Shopify, to run their online store, which can handle anywhere from one order a day to over a million. They stay out of big-box stores, so they don’t need a dedicated outside sales team. They don’t do trade shows, and all their marketing efforts stem from a team of three who focus entirely on online channels, like social media, paid ads, and a newsletter (all of which can increase reach without too many extra resources to manage).

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, big-box store, business cycle, cashless society, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, vertical integration, women in the workforce

But, of course, as one discount store owner suggested, “the easiest thing to do is to open up near a shopping center because you know darn well they made an expensive survey and, if they thought it is right, it must be right.”23 Kmart turned its exclusion into an opportunity, opting instead for freestanding locations with its own 1,000-car parking lots—the first big-box stores.24 Shoppers appreciated the free parking, which was largely absent at downtown department stores. In some ways, Cunningham rode the baby-boom wave. Young people and young families came of age at a disproportionate rate in the mid- to late 1960s, and it was always the young who needed good deals.

Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff by Dinah Sanders

A. Roger Ekirch, Atul Gawande, big-box store, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, clean water, clockwatching, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, credit crunch, do what you love, endowment effect, Firefox, game design, Inbox Zero, income per capita, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Kevin Kelly, late fees, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Merlin Mann, Open Library, post-work, side project, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand

I find that, after the initial glut of buying many things for relatively less money, I spend more in a warehouse store than I would by shopping at neighborhood stores—even pricier than average ones—and end up with more than I can use or with things that I don't really need. Even sillier, I wind up buying not quite what I wanted—different brands, other flavors, higher calories—because the selection is more limited. Take a good hard look at your shopping habits and the kind of eating habits to which they're leading. Try taking a month off from the big-box stores. Remember: Locally owned, independent merchants return significantly more of their money to your local economy. Get more fresh fruit and vegetables, pick out ingredients with which to cook, or make a sandwich for tomorrow's lunch instead of a frozen entree. Visit the farmers' market and find the good bakery nearest to your house.

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, big-box store, clean water, digital nomad, do what you love, fixed income, follow your passion, if you build it, they will come, index card, informal economy, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, late fees, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, price anchoring, Ralph Waldo Emerson, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, web application

Erica Cosminsky grew her transcription team to seventeen people at one point, but by working with contractors instead of hiring employees, she retained the freedom to keep things simple. The Tom Bihn luggage factory in Seattle grew to a seven-figure operation, while remaining completely independent and turning down offers to sell its line to big-box stores. Others pursued partnerships that allowed each person to focus on what he or she was best at. Fresh out of design school and disillusioned with their entry-level jobs, Jen Adrion and Omar Noory began selling custom-made maps out of an apartment in Columbus, Ohio. Patrick McCrann and Rich Strauss were competitors who teamed up to create a community for endurance athletes.

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

By contrast, items with dedicated uses, whether they’re kitchen appliances or specialized wardrobes, take a great ecological toll from a life-cycle perspective because they are used more infrequently. A third principle is customization, which brings us to the retail environment that supports the plenitude spending model. It’s the other end of the spectrum from the big-box store with its high turnover, low prices, and minimal service. Because the consumer is investing in fewer, more expensive items, they need to be perfect fits and remain so over time. To achieve that match, retailing should be more personal, based on communication between the designer and the consumer, and offer postpurchase product maintenance.

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

2 Why We Work Work is love made visible. —Gibran Khalil Gibran, “On Work” Imagine this scenario: Jordan is a three-year-old whose favorite toy is a T. rex he got for Christmas. Unfortunately, the T. rex’s head broke, and the little boy is devastated. He is in tears, and his mom brings him to the local big box store—where, unbeknownst to Jordan, Santa Claus sourced the original T. rex. Jordan’s mom explains the situation to two sales associates. Unengaged sales associates will direct Jordan’s mom to the toy shelves and let her find a replacement. At best, Jordan gets a new T. rex out of it, but he has to throw his beloved old toy into the trash.

Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies by Charles de Ganahl Koch

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, big-box store, book value, British Empire, business process, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income per capita, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, oil shale / tar sands, personalized medicine, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Solyndra, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing

A successful business doesn’t earn good profit by attempting to force customers to buy its books at independent bookshops. That is bad profit. Good profit comes from responding to customers who volunteer their dollars to have books delivered to their homes by a faceless website and its algorithms—or to purchase them in a big box store that sells many other items besides books. Again, responding to customers is the proper role of business in society. The once-popular BlackBerry became unprofitable because, although efficient for direct communication, it has far fewer apps, which makes Internet access harder than with an iPhone.

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

It’s in society’s interest, as well as his own, for him to pursue training as a mechanic at a local trade school, to help take care of his four-year-old son, and, perhaps, to take his grandmother to her sessions at the dialysis center. Yet if those activities preclude him from a long commute to a minimum-wage job at a big-box store, he risks losing the skimpy benefits he might have qualified for. As society punches down on him, he and his family suffer. To roll back poverty shame, we simply must help the poor, without questions or conditions. Skip Notes * This perspective became all too clear during the COVID-19 pandemic, when a host of Republican governors blamed worker shortages in low-wage industries on unemployment checks and pulled the plug on the federally funded emergency aid.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

These methods discourage the researcher from considering the underlying context or plausibility of his hypothesis, something that the Bayesian method demands in the form of a prior probability. Thus, you will see apparently serious papers published on how toads can predict earthquakes,50 or how big-box stores like Target beget racial hate groups,51 which apply frequentist tests to produce “statistically significant” (but manifestly ridiculous) findings. Data Is Useless Without Context Fisher mellowed out some toward the end of his career, occasionally even praising Bayes.52 And some of the methods he developed over his long career (although not the ones that are in the widest use today) were really compromises between Bayesian and frequentist approaches.

…

Grant and T. Halliday, “Predicting the Unpredictable: Evidence of Pre-Seismic Anticipatory Behaviour in the Common Toad,” Journal of Zoology, 700, January 25, 2010. http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Environment/documents/2010/03/30/toads.pdf. 51. “Hate Group Formation Associated with Big-Box Stores,” ScienceNewsline.com, April 11, 2012. http://www.sciencenewsline.com/psychology/2012041121000031.html. 52. Aldrich, “R. A. Fisher on Bayes and Bayes’ Theorem.” 53. McGrayne, The Theory That Would Not Die, Kindle location 111. 54. Sir Ronald A. Fisher, “Smoking: The Cancer Controversy,” Oliver and Boyd. http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/smoking.htm. 55.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

Here is how “dynamic” the U.S. retail environment is: The top ten best-performing stocks of 1982 were Chrysler, Fay’s Drug, Coleco, Winnebago, Telex, Mountain Medical, Pulte Home, Home Depot, CACI, and Digital Switch.18 How many are still around today? The best-performing stock of the eighties? Circuit City (up 8,250 percent).19 In case you don’t remember, Circuit City was the now-bankrupt big-box store that sold TVs and other electronics, where “Service is State of the Art.” RIP. Of the ten biggest retailers in 1990, only two remain on the list in 2016.20,21 Amazon, born in 1994, registered more revenue after twenty-two years in 2016 ($120 billion) than Walmart, founded in 1962, did after thirty-five years in 1997 ($112 billion).22,23 In 2016, retail could largely be described as the crazy success of Amazon and the disaster that is the rest of the sector, with a few exceptions, such as Sephora, fast fashion, and Warby Parker.

You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up by Annabelle Gurwitch

Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Donald Trump, Donner party, Exxon Valdez, Future Shock, Joan Didion, Mahatma Gandhi, open immigration, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Yogi Berra

I might have had a frozen expression on my face throughout our stay, but any discomfort on my part was completely overshadowed by the Sturm und Drang of Jeff Kahn’s hometown visit. From the moment we drove by the WELCOME TO ALBANY, CAPITAL OF NEW YORK sign, Jeff transformed into a petulant teenage Alexis de Tocqueville, treating us to long-winded tirades about the preponderance of big-box stores and the oppressiveness of the cookie-cutter bedroom communities that surround Albany proper with their artificial lakes and confounding nomenclature. “Turning Leaf Manor—is that a housing development or a rehab community or both?” Because he’s a major food snob and a picky eater, getting him to agree to a meal at one of the local eateries—Ruby Tuesday, T.G.I.

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization by Jeff Rubin

addicted to oil, air freight, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, big-box store, BRICs, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, energy security, food miles, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Just-in-time delivery, low interest rates, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, profit maximization, reserve currency, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, work culture , zero-sum game

Either our living arrangements or our transportation options are going to have to change. In other words, our whole way of life depends on the price at the pumps, and that price depends on an uninterrupted supply of oil. Think about that as you drive to work. Have a look at all those car dealerships, the gas stations and garages, the drive-thrus and big-box stores surrounded by huge parking lots. Try to imagine your life—picking up dry cleaning, taking your kids to hockey, going to Home Depot on the weekend, heading to the cottage in the summer—without a car. If you are like most people in North America or Australia, or even a less car-dependent country like the UK, you probably can’t do it.

Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, American ideology, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, car-free, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, congestion pricing, desegregation, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, operational security, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

ay Already a number of highway-intersection-spawned commercial centers have become so congested that a new generation of bypasses are being built around them. One wonders if the malls these intersections serve, like the downtowns they once replaced, will likewise decline as the traffic moves one step farther outward, to the big-box stores located on the new ring. az Carol Jouzatis, “39 Million People Work, Live Outside City Centers,” 2A. As a result of its massive highway construction, the Atlanta area is “one of the nation’s worst violators of Federal standards for ground-level ozone, with most of the problem caused by motorvehicle emissions” (Kevin Sack, “Governor Proposes Remedy for Atlanta Sprawl,” A14).

Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy by Howard Karger

Alan Greenspan, big-box store, blue-collar work, book value, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, delayed gratification, financial deregulation, fixed income, illegal immigration, independent contractor, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microcredit, mortgage debt, negative equity, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, predatory finance, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, underbanked, working poor

(In 2004 Wal-Mart employed 1.2 million people and reported $250 billion in revenues, or about 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product. By 2007 Wal-Mart is expected to control 35% of all U.S. food and drug sales.5) Despite having the title of “associate,” Robert earns $9.75 an hour (11 cents more than the average Wal-Mart wage of $9.64), substantially less than when he owned his own small sporting goods store. Surrounded by big box stores like Wal-Mart and Target, Robert couldn’t compete and was forced to close down. The prospects for him to get ahead at Wal-Mart are limited, since the average store has one manager, one to three assistant managers, 15 department heads, and 300–350 “associates.” On the other hand, he is one of the lucky few who have a 40-hour workweek, as opposed to the average 32-hour workweek for most Wal-Mart employees.6 Robert is one of 47% of Wal-Mart employees who receive health care benefits.

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

The new plan called for repurposing and redeveloping the large institutional buildings as community centers, art studios, small business incubators, and apartments. That wasn’t the only major change. Before the flood, in 1999, the city plan promised support for regional commercial development on major roadways and intersections, places where big-box stores could fit comfortably and parking would be abundant. After Katrina, as citizens and civic groups grew more concerned about climate change, that idea was discarded in favor of pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use commercial and residential developments that encouraged local social activity on sidewalks and streets.

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

From the 1950s onwards, growing car ownership made it possible for cities to develop in any direction, regardless of transit availability. Places of employment become spatially separated from housing and housing decoupled from amenities. Increasingly, we shaped our towns and villages around the highways, building vast suburbs miles beyond our gritty urban centers, adding “big-box stores” and mega-malls surrounded by acres and acres of parking lots. Cars were never really necessary in early cities, nor were they the ideal cohabitant. In many respects, they worked against the founding purpose of cities: to group people together in a space where trade, social and cultural synergies would develop.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

I can buy grapes from South America in my supermarket in Massachusetts for a few dollars because it is astonishingly cheap to ship the grapes over approximately 5,000 miles. But not for long. Christopher Steiner, a senior reporter at Forbes, has estimated that if (when?) gas hits $14 per gallon, WalMart (the world’s largest truck fleet) will not be able to afford to ship goods from China and other manufacturing centers to their big box stores.37 Paying $14 a gallon for gas may not be so far off; as the noted author and journalist Peter Maas has noted, “even the oil companies themselves—who are the most optimistic—say ‘maybe another 20–30 years, we’ll be able to maintain or increase the amount of oil we’re producing every day. … That is the tail end.

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World by Christopher Steiner

23andMe, Ada Lovelace, airport security, Al Roth, algorithmic trading, Apollo 13, backtesting, Bear Stearns, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, dumpster diving, financial engineering, Flash crash, G4S, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, High speed trading, Howard Rheingold, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge economy, late fees, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, medical residency, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Sergey Aleynikov, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

Creativity is thought of as something so incorporeal that it can hardly be taught, let alone left for a machine to carry out. But there now exist algorithms, including one with a human name—Annie—that can produce music as daring and original as the works of masters like Brahms, Bach, and Mozart, and as popular and catchy as the tunes played inside a big-box store. YOU HAVE A 41 PERCENT CHANCE OF BEING LADY GAGA As a musician and writer, Ben Novak drove the car he could afford in 2004: a 1993 Nissan Bluebird. The vehicle propelled him around his hometown of Auckland, New Zealand, just fine. Novak’s main complaint about the car concerned its radio, which could capture only two FM stations out of the dozens broadcasting in the city.

Stuffocation by James Wallman

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Black Swan, BRICs, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Hargreaves, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, post-materialism, public intellectual, retail therapy, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, Streisand effect, The future is already here, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, World Values Survey, Zipcar

Most days, you’ll find Dave – full name David Roberts – in regular blue jeans and a dark red plaid shirt. He grew up lower middle class, in an average backwater in Tennessee. It was the sort of monotonous town that is the inevitable result of mass production. It was based, if you can call it that, on the modern world’s signpost to materialism: a suburban row of big-box stores. “It was very dull,” Dave will tell you. “The sort of place where kids would drive up and down the strip and the parking lot for fun, and where you’d bump into people you knew in Walmart.” Dave now lives a regular, low-key life, in a nondescript neighbourhood, in a smallish house, in Seattle, with his two children and wife, Jennifer Roberts.

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

It’s not uncommon for Y Combinator to fund multiple companies all tackling the same problem, albeit in different ways. Here are some recent RFS entries: BRICK-AND-MORTAR 2.0 We are interested in seeing startups that use brick-and-mortar commercial or retail space in interesting and efficient ways. Amazon is putting malls and big-box stores out of business. Rather than fight a losing battle with Amazon, brands need to rethink how to use retail space in ways that play to their strengths. Tesla, Warby Parker, and Peloton, for example, use brick-and-mortar locations as showrooms that complement their online sales channels. Without the need to store inventory, retail space can be used much more efficiently.

The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide: How to Declutter, Organize, and Simplify Your Life by Francine Jay

big-box store, book scanning, carbon footprint, dumpster diving, Ford Model T, indoor plumbing, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, pez dispenser, place-making, young professional

Breathing polluted air, and drinking polluted water, so that retailers can fill their shelves with more gizmos, and corporate executives can take home bigger bonuses. Hmm, something about that doesn’t seem quite right… But here’s some wonderful news: minimalist living sets us free! It unshackles us from the “work and spend” cycle, enabling us to create an existence that has little to do with big box stores, must-have items, or finance charges. Instead of toiling away as consumers, we can become “minsumers” instead: minimizing our consumption to what meets our needs, minimizing the impact of our consumption on the environment, and minimizing the effect of our consumption on other people’s lives.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

As automation has advanced relentlessly in factories, for example, the efforts of an individual manufacturing worker have been vastly amplified. The same has been true in sectors like retail and fast food, where the introduction of new technology as well as more efficient workplace organization, management techniques and business models—including the advent of “big box” stores and online shopping—have likewise boosted productivity. In healthcare, however, patients continue to require highly individualized attention from doctors, nurses and other skilled professionals. To be sure, new knowledge and technology have increased the quality of care and produced vastly better patient outcomes, but so far, this has not amplified the efforts of healthcare workers in the way that we have seen with factory workers.

Hawaii by Jeff Campbell

airport security, big-box store, California gold rush, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, company town, creative destruction, Drosophila, Easter island, G4S, haute couture, land reform, lateral thinking, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, risk/return, sustainable-tourism, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence

Hwy 11 goes south and is called Kanoelehua Ave in town; further south, it becomes the Hawai′i Belt Rd and leads to the Puna district, Hawai′i Volcanoes National Park and Ka′u. South of the airport, Kanoelehua Ave is lined with shopping malls; this is Hilo’S main retail district, complete with a Wal-Mart, a multiplex cinema and all the other big-box stores. Return to beginning of chapter INFORMATION Bookstores Basically Books (Map;961-0144, 800-903-6277; 160 Kamehameha Ave; 9am-5pm Mon-Sat, 11am-3:30pm Sun) One of the island’S best bookstores; carries the full range of Hawaiian titles, plus kids’ books, music, travel guides and topo maps.

…

Central Maui also holds other watery wonders: a dazzling tropical aquarium, two waterbird sanctuaries and rainforested ′Iao Valley. KAHULUI pop 20,150 All roads lead to Kahului. It’s home to the island’s gateway airport and cruise-ship ports. Just about everything that enters Maui comes through this workaday town thick with warehouses, big-box stores and shopping centers. Hardly a vacation scene, you say. True, but if you dig a little deeper you’ll find more to your liking. You have to go island-style to have fun here: talk story with the locals at the Saturday swap meet, take in a concert on the lawn of the cultural center or join the wave-riding action at Kanaha Beach.

…

But, in Lihu′e and its vicinity, the ethnic makeup still reflects the island’s plantation history, with substantial numbers of Japanese and Filipino residents, as well as Caucasians and mixed-race people. Now Lihu′e’s economy relies not only on tourism but on retail, which is obvious from all the big-box stores at Kukui Grove Shopping Center. You might not think an island of 63,000 needs a Costco but, in October 2006, it got one. Return to beginning of chapter ORIENTATION Lihu′e’s focal points are Nawiliwili Bay, the island’s only major harbor, and Lihu′e Airport, the island’s only major airport.

What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear by Danielle Ofri

big-box store, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, medical residency, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, stem cell, sugar pill

The hardest time of the year was the carbo-clysmic gauntlet that stretched from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. You couldn’t squeak two feet down the linoleum school corridors without running into a plate of doughnuts or a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels or a vat of caramel corn the size of an oil drum that someone had lugged in from a big-box store in the suburbs. Leftover pumpkin pies and apple pies showed up in the teachers’ lounge. There were bowls of chocolate Kisses in the principal’s office and candy canes taped to any surface that wasn’t plastered with tinsel or book reports. Extra cupcakes from class parties piled up on the counters of the main office.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, cloud computing, collaborative economy, company town, crowdsourcing, Eben Moglen, game design, hype cycle, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, inventory management, iterative process, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, job automation, late fees, mental accounting, moral panic, operational security, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, security theater, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, software patent, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, zero day

Beyoncé released a surprise self-titled “visual” album with 17 attached videos, exclusively sold through Apple. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke pulled his work from Spotify and dumped his album Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes onto BitTorrent. Taylor Swift pulled her work too, then sold nearly two million copies of her album 1989 in a month, the bulk of those as compact discs at big-box stores. Retail still meant leaks, but the industry was taking better precautions. Kanye West had been a favorite target for RNS for years. In 2011, he struck back. An article in Billboard detailed the “near-military-scale planning” he took to keep his collaborative album Watch the Throne in-house, storing the masters on hard drives locked in waterproof “Pelican” cases that never left the sight of his studio engineers.

vN: The First Machine Dynasty (The Machine Dynasty Book 1) by Madeline Ashby

big-box store, company town, iterative process, natural language processing, place-making, retail therapy, synthetic biology, traveling salesman, urban planning

Kneeling, Amy dug a small hole in the ground and coated her hands with dirt. She wished she had mud, instead. It wouldn't really stop the burn once she stuck her hands in the garbage, but it might delay it for a while. She'd have to rely on her mods to take care of the rest. The garbage dump wasn't actually that big. It was roughly the size of the big-box store they had visited earlier, and sat on a square of green spongy material, sort of like the stuff that got sprayed over oil spills, when there were more of those. The sponge spanned the entire width of the dump, from fencepost to fencepost. It was darker and plumper under each pile of garbage. If Amy could get some of it on her hands, it might absorb the acid – maybe even the electricity from the fence, too.

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Time in prison and out of the labor force translates into fewer skills, an even lower wage, and tremendous difficulties in actually getting hired.63 GLOBALIZATION AND FREE TRADE While incarceration of young black men caused the statistical illusion that inequality was slowing in America in the 1990s, the jobs available were becoming more polarized into high-wage management jobs and low-wage service sector jobs with no hope of serving as a stepping stone to a middle-class career.64 During the 1980s, improvements in communications technology and the expansion of “big box” stores like Walmart and Target provided greater markets in the United States for goods either produced or finished inexpensively overseas. Factories in Asia could quickly adapt to slight product changes.65 Companies that could do so in the 1990s cut their costs by offshoring portable jobs, maximizing profit through lower input costs (it is estimated that labor costs are “58 to 72 percent lower in China and 22 to 62 percent lower in Mexico”), but at the same time contributing to American unemployment.66 Computers and telecommunication advances enabled companies to use smaller workforces to accomplish their goals, also helping to increase unemployment.67 Free trade became another vector of inequality during the Clinton administration, in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Food and Fuel: Solutions for the Future by Andrew Heintzman, Evan Solomon, Eric Schlosser

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, big-box store, California energy crisis, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, deindustrialization, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, full employment, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, hydrogen economy, Kickstarter, land reform, megaproject, microcredit, Negawatt, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social contagion, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

It’s as though the world’s energy system, left unchecked, engineers its own crisis; new solutions are often transitory, effectively mere stopgap measures within a limited economic horizon. This fault is increasingly evident outside of North America, where economic pressures and lack of wealth show systemic flaws more clearly. For example, China’s incredible thirst for energy feeds not only a booming export market accelerated by North America’s big-box stores but also the hungry appetites of an emergent middle class across Asia, one that rivals 1950s America for its growth in rates of car ownership and consumer accumulation. Faced with today’s estimated 170 million itinerant workers and continued labour uprisings, Mao Zedong would have been hard-pressed to discern parts of modern China from the industrial England of Karl Marx.

Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth

accounting loophole / creative accounting, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, digital divide, full employment, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, megacity, microcredit, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, pirate software, planned obsolescence, profit motive, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, yellow journalism

Before the street laborers could receive their pay, the administrators would have to draw their salaries, and there would be a deduction to pay the expenses of buying and maintaining the trucks and purchasing fuel. These are the values of the modern economic system. Outsourcing is okay because it is a rational and efficient choice: multinational companies can realize massive savings on labor costs by moving jobs to low-wage countries. Similarly, promoting big-box stores and driving out small retailers is okay because larger scale cuts down on overhead and reduces the need for redundant labor, allowing products to be sold more cheaply. Compare this with the haphazard street market economy. Alaba International Market has dozens of merchants selling essentially identical flat-screen TVs.

How to Fix Copyright by William Patry

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, barriers to entry, big-box store, borderless world, bread and circuses, business cycle, business intelligence, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lone genius, means of production, moral panic, new economy, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, search costs, semantic web, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The analog world was one of fragmented markets, each controlled by gatekeepers, with overall access controlled by a central gatekeeper: in the case of music, the record label or music publisher (often divisions of the same media corporation) to whom the composer or performer had to assign rights. Royalties were received, if ever, only after cost recoupments, including recording studio time, as well as manufacturing and promotion costs. CDs were in record stores or big-box stores like Wal-Mart which exercised content control. MTV provided the outlet for music videos. Radio play was controlled by large companies such as Clear Channel. Today, bands or individual performers can be their own studio technicians, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and promoters, LAW IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO BUSINESS PROBLEMS 145 through no- or small-cost websites and social networks.

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg

big-box store, carbon footprint, classic study, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, employer provided health coverage, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, young professional