In November, at the start of the holiday shopping season, the people of Damariscotta learned that Wal-Mart was coming to town, and in a big way.
The world’s largest corporation wants to build a Wal-Mart Supercenter just north of town, near the junction of Route 1 and Business Route 1. The store would have over four acres of floor space — 186,700 square feet — on which could be found everything the residents of Lincoln County might want to buy: from groceries, clothing, and auto parts to flowers, pharmaceuticals and photo processing, with vision and automotive centers thrown in. Another ten acres of asphalt would ensure that the county’s people will never have to circle downtown Damariscotta in search of parking.
The result, says Wal-Mart spokesman Philip Serghini, will be “a tremendous opportunity” for the town. “I think it will actually improve things for the downtown businesses. You’re going to have people shop at Wal-Mart who are probably going to come down to Damariscotta and see the beautiful town, shop for specialty items and have lunch,” he explains. It’s not something that will negatively impact downtown businesses.”
“Until you see the site and the property, it’s hard to get a feel for the flavor of the place,” says Serghini, who is based in New York City. “I’ve been there twice now.”
But many of downtown Damariscotta’s merchants are strongly opposed to the gigantic store. And, as it turns out, flavor has a lot to with it, as Damariscotta is one of those rare towns where people still work and shop right on the old main street, year-around.
“The post office is still downtown and you can walk from there to banks, the dentist, a bookstore, a place to hang out and have a cup of coffee, to stores like ours where you can buy what you need,” says Mary Kate Reny, a member of the local family that owns the RH Reny department store chain, which started here in Damariscotta and is based in neighboring Newcastle. “It’s a very workable, livable and convenient downtown that’s so easy to lose and so hard to get back once you’ve given it away.”
Renys, which has 14 stores around the state, has gone head-to-head with Wal-Mart in Farmington, Ellsworth and other towns and lived to tell the tale, even though its largest store (the old Shaw’s in Saco) has only one-sixth the floor space of the proposed Supercenter. In the process, the company’s vice president, John Reny, has learned a lot about Wal-Mart’s tactics. “They don’t want to coincide; what they want to do is to put everybody else out of business,” says Reny, who is Mary Kate’s brother-in-law. “Once they’re the last guy standing it will no longer be `low prices all the time’, but rather `our prices all the time.’ ”
“If a big box store were to come into Damariscotta, it will take five or seven years, but one by one the stores that make the downtown web thrive will start to go out of business,” Mary Kate Reny says. “People have short memories, so they may not even realize that the closures were a direct impact of Wal-Mart.”
Susan Porter worries her business may be among the casualties. For ten years she’s operated the Maine Coast Bookshop and Café, one of only a handful of independent booksellers in the state who’ve managed to avoid turning over much of their floor space to the sale of t-shirts, plastic lobsters and other tourist bric-a-brac. “It would probably be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” she says of Wal-Mart. “Even though Wal-Mart doesn’t sell the breadth of books that we do, they sell the bestsellers, which are the books that really provide the profit for us to maintain the rest of our stock.”
So what has happened in other parts of the country, when a Wal-Mart Supercenter opens up on the outskirts of a rural shire town? “The first to go are the grocery stores and flower shops, and then over a longer period Wal-Mart tends to drive out most of the rest of the commerce of small towns,” says filmmaker Robert Greenwald, whose latest documentary, Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price, paints a picture of a rapacious company that harms workers, communities and the environment. “You see it as you drive around the country, and it makes sense if you think about it. People aren’t going to buy more clothes or milk or bicycles, they’re just going to be buying them at Wal-Mart instead of a family business.”
There’s evidence that that’s what’s happened in Maine. According to a 1999 University of Maine PhD dissertation by economist Georgeanne Artz, the average Wal-Mart store in Maine captured $7.8 million from existing local businesses during its first year of operation; general merchandise sales tend to increase in communities with a Wal-Mart, but decline or stagnate in surrounding towns. Biddeford, for example, saw a 50 percent increase in general merchandise sales after Wal-Mart came to town (including Wal-Mart itself), while neighboring Saco saw a 6 percent decline.
Critics also point out that most of the money spent at big box stores tends to leave the local area, the state and often, the country itself. A 2003 study of Midcoast Maine by the Minneapolis-based Institute for Self-Reliance estimated that only $14 of every $100 spent at big boxes in Knox and Waldo County stayed in Maine, as compared to an average of $54 for every $100 spent at locally owned businesses. Local businesses also gave four times more than big boxes, as a share of their revenues.
“Money from local businesses stays local and has a multiplier effect on the economy,” says Eleanor Kinney of Bremen, co-founder of Our Town, a citizen’s group that is spearheading an effort to place a 35,000-square-foot size limit on new retail stores in Damariscotta and other area towns. “They’re more likely to use local banks and accountants, to advertise in the local newspaper, and hire local contractors,” she says. “Why support Bentonville, Arkansas [where Wal-Mart is based] or China [where many of its products come from] when we can keep so much more of are money here?”
But Serghini says Wal-Mart will provide something Midcoast Mainers really want: a wider selection at lower prices. “Everything we do is consumer-driven,” he says. “We talk about the taxes and jobs we provide, but we’re really consumer activists.” He says the people of Damariscotta clearly want what Wal-Mart offers, initially claiming that the town’s 2,041 residents spend $20 million annually at existing Wal-Mart stores in Rockland, Augusta and Brunswick, or nearly $10,000 for every man, woman and child in the town; he later revised that to “several million.”
“Ask the average hourly, hard-working person in Damariscotta if they want to shop at a Wal-Mart or a high-priced boutique and they are going to choose Wal-Mart,” he suggests.
Serghini estimates the store will provide 350 jobs at an average wage of $9.98 an hour, plus about $200,000 a year in property taxes to the town of Damariscotta. He refused to discuss how the Supercenter would affect surrounding towns like Newcastle, Bristol, Bremen or Boothbay, nor would he say how large he thought the store’s service area would be. (The stores usually serve approximately 50,000 residents; Lincoln County as a whole is home to only 36,000.)
This being Maine, residents of Damariscotta will actually get to decide what sort of community they want to live in. On March 21 the town holds a special vote on the 35,000-square-foot size cap, which, if passed, would kill the project in that town. At this writing, selectmen in neighboring Edgecomb and Newcastle were considering whether to put similar measures up for votes in their towns. “Wal-Mart has been very clear that if they didn’t build in Damariscotta, they would go to one of the adjacent towns,” says Kinney. “This will require a regional effort to maintain the scale and character of the Midcoast.”