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