Alternative To ‘Goliath,’ For Community’S Sake

Do you remember that story from the book of First Samuels in the Bible? It was about this tiny guy, a kid really, who had delivered some cheeses to his brothers in battle and by fate, or by God, became the historic shepherd boy, David, who fought and killed the great Goliath.

I can’t help but feel that same imagery when driving through Ponderay, passing the present and still growing, modern-day version of Goliath: Wal-Mart.

If you haven’t traveled down Kootenai Cutoff Road lately, you are in for a mega-visual and shopping surprise. What was far and away the biggest store for 50 miles around is expanding by 58,000 square feet. It will include the old retail shopping and pharmacy, as well as a bank, hair salon, super-duper supermarket and acres and acres of pleasantly asphalt covered, conveniently located parking places.

I can’t help but be cynical about Wal-Mart. Anything so out of proportion to human scale must be looked at slightly askance. And, thankfully, many others in our community are just as cynical. We who are old-timers can remember the rampant rumors of eight years ago that Wal-Mart was imminent. Nothing materialized then but we learned that lots of towns, from Kansas to Vermont, were fighting the invasion of the behemoth, some even successfully.

In the end, though, since our clearly was an underprivileged town with just a Kmart, Wal-Mart came to save our consuming souls from high prices, poor parking and doing business with people we actually knew or maybe even grew up with.

What is fascinating to me is that parallel to the rise of Wal-Mart nationally and locally, people have become reinterested in the opposing and ancient life of Main Street. As Shopping 2000, a national retail report, tells us that four out of 10 women shop now at Wal-Mart once a week, it is deeply gratifying that a competitor for Goliath has taken the field.

Main Street USA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to revitalizing the small-town shopping experience that is as much a part of Americana as apple pie. And in Sandpoint, that national movement has become tangible and hopeful with the creation of the strongest Downtown Business Association in decades. Two years ago, the association completed a long-range plan for downtown enhancement. And this year - a prospect unthinkable to many of us pundits - they passed a tax, assessed upon themselves, to enhance business life in the downtown core.

Beyond the obvious assets of cooperation and greater marketing power is the background strength of their vision, one that says in part that small stores owned by local people still matter. They are valuable as a community atmosphere and that economy is more than just how much stuff can be bought and sold per unit of time. It’s an overall context that holds, nurtures and energizes community life. As Nobel Prize winner E.F. Shumacher said, it is an economics as if people mattered.

While I was in Germany this past summer, in need of oil for the car, I was horrified that a friend offhandedly motored straight to the Wal-Mart at the edge of town. Even more horrifying was discovering that Wal-Mart and its monster dot-com brothers and sisters are lobbying heavily to get the entire shopping structure of Germany changed: Saturday and Sunday, all day. Shopping, 24-seven, seems like the next hallmark of a free society.

In Sandpoint, what the Downtown Business Association is showing is that David, as small as he is, still has a chance.

And not because we can clone him, distribute him and sell him on the mass market but because the essential core of our economics was built on the joy of meeting and communing with our friends and neighbors. Community life, not just merchandising, always has been the root of an economics that sustains the body but also the soul.

Here’s toasting the Downtown Business Association for rising to the task of caring just a little about soul at a time when the bottom line seems to be the only thing that matters.