Wal-Mart gets local... Good, bad, or somewhere in between?

[little old me]

Wal-Mart gets local
Good, bad, or somewhere in between?

By Savannah Naffziger
July 29, 2008

Wal-Mart, you may have heard, has decided to jump on the local bandwagon. With gas prices pushing $4.50 a gallon and diesel well over $5 per, it doesn’t make much economic sense to ship produce from, say, California to the Midwest.

Go to the Wal-Mart site to see what’s being sourced locally in your state. It looks pretty great if you live in California, Florida, or Texas. But if you live in Oregon, Hawaii, Iowa, or Vermont, the small number of products makes the announcement seem like a bit of a joke.

On the Huffington Post, Isabel Cowles (1)writes about how Wal-Mart’s new policy might be valuable for farmers and consumers, but on Grist, Tom Philpott (2)worries that small local farmers might find themselves, like previous Wal-Mart suppliers, run over by the company’s near-monopoly.

http://www.culinate.com/articles/sif...art_gets_local

(1) Wal-Mart Goes Local ... So?, by Isabel Cowles
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/isabel..._b_110513.html

(2) Wal-Mart Comes to the Farmers Market: As the ground shifts under their feet, food giants experiment with new strategies, by Tom Philpott
http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2...tml?source=rss

little old me

[maat]

I'll just stick to buying at my LOCAL natural market (O.K., Walmart?). My LOCAL natural market is chock full of LOCALLY-GROWN organic foods.

Efforts like this might be a good thing for some, however.