In a recent episode of the Strong Towns podcast, ILSR’s Stacy Mitchell spoke with Strong Towns’s Chuck Marohn as part of the organization’s special week on big-box retailers.
“When we were thinking about this a few weeks back, I said there’s nobody I want to talk to more than Stacy Mitchell,” says Marohn in the introduction.
Over the course of the 47-minute conversation, Mitchell and Marohn cover the origins of the big-box store, how the stores win public subsidies at the expense of communities, and the way they are undercutting the American middle class.
“Walmart and Target have come in and… they’ve destroyed a lot of those small business livelihoods, and in their place what they have given us are jobs making an average of $9.00 an hour in their stores,” says Mitchell in the episode. “A huge part of the inequality story in this country, you can lay it right at the feet of these companies.”
Listen to the full episode online here, or by subscribing to the podcast.
Marohn is the founder and president of Strong Towns, a non-profit media organization with a focus on transportation, land use, urban design, and community resilience.
