Tag: economic

The Dollar Store Backlash

by , posted in Protectors, Uncategorized

The economic restructuring of the United States is reconfiguring cities, political alignments, rural patterns and so many more systems.  I would like to highlight how retail has changed in the last few decades in the United States. 

In the early 2000s, I was visiting a small, declining Pennsylvania town name Bradford.  One of the residents was bemoaning the economic and demographic decline of this Appalachian city of about 10,000 residents, noting how the most ambitious and brightest high schoolers from the area have moved out, leading to brain drain.  Many locally owned businesses on Main Street had been struggling, and the resident said, “Thank goodness for Walmart and the Dollar stores…those are the only things that are keeping business around this town.”  Out of politeness to my host, I didn’t mention that I saw the opposite happening: Wal-Mart and the Dollar stores, were capitalizing on economies of scale to muscle out locally businesses, creating an economic pattern that would have negative long-term consequences on this community and others like it. 

Bradford, PA is not unique, but emblematic of many places in the United States.  Over 10,000 new dollar stores have sprouted up in the United States since 2000, especially in small towns and rural areas.  Some places are starting to push pack, since the communities are not seeing this as a positive development for the community. 

Online shopping is another persistent pattern of the last few decades that is reconfiguring our cities, and the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified these issues that were already under way.  Department stores have been anchors of shopping malls, which themselves are struggling after overexpanding.  Many department stores have gone under, and those remaining brick-and-mortar department stores are struggling against the online shopping paradigm shift.  Business with continue, but it will not be business as usual. 

QUESTIONS TO PONDER: Why can cheap retail stores have a negative impact on a local community?  Can you see this anywhere in your community?  How does online shopping positively and negatively impact your community? 

SOURCES/Further Reading materials:

CITYLAB: The Dollar Store Backlash has begun

VOX: Death of the Department Store and the Middle Class (from November) 

NY TIMES-Death of the Department Store (from April)

CNBC-Department stores could be in their last stages (from September)   

Unexpected Discoveries using the Observatory of Economic Complexity

by , posted in Protectors, Uncategorized

Do you need a case study on how to explore big data like the Observatory of Economic Complexity with students to uncover geographic patterns? This site let’s you ask interrelated questions and enter a rabbit hole of economic, geographic data. This is one of the best online tools for student projects in geography, so let me show you how the data visualizations can be used to make concrete observations that will unearth spatial relationships.

While I was wondering about the world largest coffee exporters, I looked at the Observatory of Economic Complexity’s data visualization tools. I was expecting to find mostly tropical countries where coffee is grown. I was baffled to find that Germany was listed as a major coffee exporter, along with many other Western European countries. 

Major Global Coffee Exporters (but definitely not all producers). SOURCE: OEC

This at first seemed like a misprint but many European countries like Germany import import green coffee beans from a variety of tropical countries, so they are a major producer of coffee without growing a single bean. In fact, the world’s largest single port for shipping coffee is Hamburg.

Where does Germany import coffee from? SOURCE: OEC

The highlands of East Africa were the original hearth of coffee beans and today, countries like Ethiopia and Uganda export green coffee beans overwhelmingly to European countries which in turn, roasts them and then exports them internationally. 

Which African countries does Germany import coffee from? SOURCE: OEC

African coffee growers face some steep difficulties when it comes to exporting roasted coffee.  This “value added” step would certainly increase the trading power of their agricultural commodities on the international trading market, but many European coffee labels already dominate that step in the commodity chain and have the made deep in-roads with consumers. 

What does Germany export? SOURCE: OEC

Exporting the finalized roasted coffee is but a very small part the overall German economy (the largest of the light green boxes-0.26% of total exports). For Ethiopia however, coffee exports is a major component of all their international trade (34.6%). Ethiopia produces something of high value, but is not positioned to extract a lot of profit from that commodity.

What does Ethiopia export? SOURCE: OEC

This is the crux of what makes decisions about free trade/fair trade difficult for individual consumers that are hoping to “vote with their pocketbook” to put their dollars in economic practices that they approve of. Commodity chains of so many products have become increasingly complex and these goods are more connected with far more places and workers than most would imagine.  Simply reading the label does NOT tell the full story of most products and the economic geographies that produced them.

This is just one story about the global economy that can be unearthed by exploring the Observatory of Economic Complexity. Were you wondering about Ethiopia’s cut flowers or Uganda’s gold? There is an entire network of economic relations that waiting to be uncovered if you are curious and willing to explore the data. This is why it is one of the best online tools for student projects in geography.    

GeoEd Tags: agriculture, economic, Germany.