The UFCW is celebrating the California senate passage of SB 469, the Small and Neighborhood Business Protection Act, which punishes so called “big box retailers” for being too successful. As defined by the bill, a “big box” is any retailer with more than 90,000 square feet of space where more than 10% of that space is used to sell food. SB 469 was pushed hard and almost exclusively by the UFCW and is expected to sail through the state assembly and past Gov. Brown into law. The introduction to the bill boldly asserts the state’s obligation to engineer the future of retail and claims that the following plagues befall a community when a superstore comes to town. “Local grocers, who yield a greater community return on investment, are driven out of business; (there is) less community access to viable superstore alternatives; lower wages and benefits (are) paid to grocery workers by superstore retailers; and (there are) a host of complex land use, traffic, and fiscal impacts” that municipalities are apparently too backward or tax hungry to consider without a state mandate. SB 469 would require big box retailers to pay for cities and/or counties to conduct complex impact studies before issuing permits for any new superstores anywhere in California. These studies must investigate a laundry list of concerns from the impact of expected market share on existing (unionized) retailers to the long term environmental impact of any added miles residents might travel to reach a superstore if a (unionized) grocer goes out of business. Of course the big box retailer can still offer “measures that might mitigate any materially adverse impacts” like, we can assume, card check for its employees. No surprise here, Mickey Kasparian, president of UFCW Local 135, is tickled pink. “When it becomes law (the bill) will empower California communities where the public’s quality of life is threatened by the uncontrolled spread of ‘big box’ retail stores… Too often, we have seen mammoth corporations move into communities, destroying long-established local businesses, driving down wages and turning their surrounding areas into blighted colonies dominated by outside interests.” No word on how this bill itself might impact “quality of life issues” for low-income California consumers protected against their will from local tax revenue, lower prices, attainable (union free) jobs and the convenience of one stop shopping.
