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Nobody’s perfect. Today is the one day each year I permit myself to be a petty thief. There is a thrill in being bad. Plus, there is cheap stuff to be had. Let me clarify—I don’t plan on breaking any laws. My indulgence is perfectly legal, and many would even consider it smart shopping. But one of my concerned friends has another term for it: “community lifting.” Call it what you will. I am going to buy my new winter coat at Wal-Mart.

I find the route to the store on a big travel website which is headquartered in San Diego, print it out and I am on my way. Forty-five minutes later I arrive. Wal-mart, with $374 billion in annual sales, has become the largest corporation in the world, and it shows. Did you know that each “Walmart Supercenter” is about the size of three football fields? Whatever my heart desires, chances are I can find it here. And boy, am I ready to hand over $200 for that new coat!

I find what I am looking for very quickly indeed, and, as I snake my way through the aisles, I notice a few other items I could use. We just ran out of cereal, milk and chocolate chip cookies. We need new batteries, and clearly we could use another red plastic car for my son, and a bigger doll for my daughter. What a steal! A doll for only $20 bucks!

I fell for it. After saving big on my coat, I frittered away my savings on unnecessary items. If I saved 20 percent that day, I saved $60. Based on the current IRS guidance for per-mile write-offs, the fifty-mile round trip cost me about $27, and I will spend it again when I have to return one of the plastic widgets that I bought. So I saved $6. Still, that’s a deal, not a steal. Why does my friend call it “community lifting?” The reality is that every time I bypass my local businesses for a big box store, it sucks a little bit of vitality from my community—all for bargains that turn out to be much less than I thought. For every dollar that I spent at that big box store, I pulled one dollar out of my neighbor’s pocket.

On average, every child, man, woman, and senior in the US spends $944 a year at Wal-Mart. If that applies in Winchester—a town of around 20,000 residents—that’s an enormous $19 million per year! Take into account what is spent at Home Depot, iParty, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, and you will quickly arrive at staggering figures. During times when our community is raising private money for beaches, playgrounds and sport fields, it strikes me how much less money might be needed if the Winchester economy had leaked less over the past decade to big-box stores.

I don’t begrudge the success of Wal-Mart or that of any other big-box store. I applaud the innovation and determination that has gone into building such highly efficient businesses. Unfortunately, their success is built at the cost of communities which, at their very natur, provide quality of life by being inefficient, by being diverse and fragmented. Efficiencies for efficiency’s sake naturally results in huge paved parking lots, strip malls, and anonymity. Is that really what we want?

The challenge for our community is to maintain and build competitive strength around our local alternatives—to maintain and increase competitiveness while preserving the natural advantages that have made Winchester what it is. Join me in December for the Community Conversation meetings at McCall (December 9 and 16, at 7:00 pm) where the future of our town center is discussed, and as I spend most of my holiday shopping dollars in small stores in and around Winchester—with my WinCentral Deal Card in my pocket.

Happy Holiday Shopping!

Alex Lorenz

(Taken and adopted, with permission, from the introduction of Michael Shuman's The Small-Mart Revolution, www.small-mart.org, available at Book Ends)