The strip-mining of Alaska’s retail economy

I was very encouraged to read the recent editorial from the Anchorage Daily News supporting small businesses. The editorial board was spot-on in its call for Alaskans to support Alaskans. Not only is it a great social policy to keep our towns unique and diverse, but the economics mandate that we all shop locally if we want a healthy economy. Small business supports much more than just the jobs they create in-house. Local small business supports many other industries and professional jobs. All the “good” jobs for national chains are not in Alaska. I am speaking about their legal departments, their advertising departments, their accounting departments and so much more. When a local small business needs these services, they use local professionals. The same goes for local products and foods produced in Alaska.

Amazon is like a strip-miner of the local economy; they take our dollars and leave nothing behind. No jobs, no taxes, nothing. When you swipe your card at Wal-Mart or Costco, the money is immediately transferred out of Alaska; they don’t even use a local bank. A recent ex-employee of Sam’s Club told me that they didn’t even buy their supplies locally; they shipped them in by container for all the stores. Seattle may benefit from Amazon and Arkansas from Wal-Mart but they minimize their costs in Alaska.

Local small businesses produce more economic activity than all the oil companies combined. With hundreds of millions of economic activity at stake, my question is: What are our state and local governments doing to promote small business? Shouldn’t we be promoting policies that support the businesses that invest in Alaska, that call Alaska home?

Many aspects of our traditional local economy are now dominated by these large multinational corporations. If we don’t actively support the small guys, we know what will happen. All over the United States, towns have the same stores, restaurants and hotels. While Wal-Mart rakes in $500 billion per year in sales and Amazon $200 billion in sales, politicians fall all over themselves trying to give the big guys incentives and tax breaks. Politicians at every level should be passing laws that force these corporations to invest in Alaska the same way our small businesses are doing. Policy should favor those businesses that reinvest the dollars consumers spend back into the local economy, not the other way around. Certainly, consumers should be encouraged and educated on the economic benefits of spending locally, but our local governments could and should be doing so much more.

John Staser is a former member of the ADN guest editorial board and owns, with his wife Julie, two retail operations in Anchorage.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.