The Global Village
Here at the Capitola Book Café we're getting a fast lesson in the politics of commerce and public space. We are currently part of a coalition of local citizens and other business owners opposed to the inclusion of a Borders chain bookstore in a recently approved site of yet another shopping mall in our area. For more than a decade Borders and Barnes & Noble, both publicly traded chain bookstores, have been targeting independent bookstores. Their pattern is to open stores close by, saturate the area with advertising, exploit unfair trade practices and force the independents out of business. They have been successful in taking out thousands of stores across the country including most recently two community landmarks in the Bay Area - A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in Marin County and Printers Inc. in Palo Alto. Between 1991 and 1998, American Booksellers Association's membership dropped from 5,200 to 3,300, a 45% decline.

BOOK INDUSTRY NEWS AND INFORMATION Industry Fair Trade Practices - American Booksellers Association Proposed B&N purchase of Ingram Wholesaler: American Booksellers Association Christian Science Monitor - 02/01/99 Christian Science Monitor - 01/07/99 ABA, Independent Bookstores sue B&N and Borders Is the End Near for Small Retailers? 10/28/97 Crown Books seeks Chapter 11 7/8/98 Mergers Imperil Diversity in Books by Bill Petrocelli, owner of Book Passage in Corte Madera When Local Stores Go, What Goes With Them? by Bill Petrocelli CIVIC POLITICS AND SPRAWL Sprawl-Busters - consulting advice on how to fight big box retailers from building in your town, from a man who successfully kept Wal-Mart from building in his town. Download Beyond Sprawl - a report on urban sprawl put together by Bank of America, Greenbelt Alliance, California Resources Agency, and Low Income Housing Fund Economic Policy Network - an immense web page with a section of links on Civic Politics and Participation Civic Practices Network - includes collaborative ways to solve problems, renew civic culture, and revitalize democratic institutions BOOKS on the subject Support for Independents from Barbara Kingsolver

Our battle against big-box retailers is not simply a local issue. Citizens in communities large and small all over the nation are feeling the effects of chain store expansion. In the cover story of September 1996 issue of Atlantic Monthly, James Howard Kunstler writes: "American's sense that something is wrong with the places where we live and work and go about our daily business. We drive up and down the gruesome, tragic suburban boulevards of commerce, and we're overwhelmed at the fantastic, awesome, stupefying ugliness of everything in sight--the fry pits, the big-box stores, the office units, the lube joints, the carpet warehouses, the parking lagoons, the jive plastic townhouse clusters, the uproar of signs, the highway itself clogged with cars..." And the issue is not simply economic or aesthetic; it goes to the heart of our notions of citizenship, of community, of public morality. Kunstler continues: "The ugliness is the surface expression of deeper problems--problems that relate to the issue of our national character. The pattern it represents is economically catastrophic, an environmental calamity, socially devastating, and spiritually degrading." As these battles between local citizens and big business have been waged in recent years, more and more writers, scholars, and critics have tried to sort out the different sides of the issue and help readers understand the long term and far reaching results of local decisions.