"You get a bit bitter and twisted," says Ken Earby wearily behind his glass cabinet counter. Earby and his brother Philip have been running Huntly Hardware Supplies for 30 years, 17 years from these premises, but now the wretched whiff of extinction rises from the Hitachi drills and hunting knives. Late morning, midweek, and not a customer in sight.
Since The Base, Hamilton's latest big-box shopping complex, opened on the city's northern fringe last year only 20 minutes' drive away, sales here have plunged 30 per cent. Road-works outside are compounding the problem.
"We're going to take another hit because the big Mitre 10's opening up there," says Earby. On some prices, his store beats the big chains like Bunnings Warehouse, but he's annoyed that shoppers have stopped bothering to check. "People have got a built-in Warehouse culture, unfortunately, these days. They think The Warehouse will supply everything, and if it doesn't, they'll make do with what The Warehouse has got."
He's hoping the new Countdown coming to Huntly will bring shoppers who'll browse the main street after they've filled their trolleys. New subdivisions should also help. "You gotta hang through," he says. "Within six months it should start picking up."
Up the road $5 Max and Mr Max is a different world. Merchandise clutters tables and racks in a twinkling confusion of colour and plastic. A steady flow of shoppers comes to hunt out their bargain; a thin middle-aged man buys a thin-bottomed saucepan.
Huntly has three of these ultra-cheap, lucky dip-style shops that have sprung from the ashes of more traditional local stores in New Zealand's small towns and suburbs since the 1990s. Owners Clive and Jan Quintal are unfazed by competition from the likes of the Red Shed. "Competition has always been there, it's just getting a bit more aggressive, and the opponents have got to be a bit smarter," he says. "You've just got to go with the flow, wherever you can make a buck, that's what you've got to do."
Since New Zealand's big-box retail revolution spread to Waikato in the 1990s, Huntly's shopping strip has slowly but surely changed. A forlorn Deka sign still towers on spindly poles above K Beez' grocers-cum-$2 shop - the department store chain an early Red Shed casualty.
David Lane is stoical. He and his wife Doreen have run D & D's Family Footwear for 11 years, and Lane is chairman of the local business association.
"We are still surviving. A lot of the shops have changed, but there's only two empty," he says. Huntly is on the up - a new surfwear store has opened across the road; the money-lenders who moved in a few years back have moved out again.
They've had to downsize - Rebel Sport's pulling power resulted in Adidas cancelling its supply to the store five or six years ago, and when The Warehouse in Hamilton started stocking slippers, D & D's had to stop. The Warehouse was selling them for less than the shoe shop used to buy them for. But in a twist, "Now the suppliers can't supply at the price The Warehouse is selling them for, so The Warehouse stopped getting those slippers." He shrugs. "The shoe shop's surviving - it's got good stock. But we just need a bit more foot traffic."
"The Warehouse is a way of life for countless New Zealanders. We make a difference to people's lives, especially family life, by making the desirable affordable." - The Warehouse core purpose
"In everything we do, we're driven by a common mission: to improve the quality of life for everyday people around the world." - Wal-Mart website
Call it the Wal-martisation of New Zealand. On once-pastoral town fringes and in far-flung suburbs, see the monolithic malls and super-sized discount chains sprawl. Last year, the Property Council counted 151 shopping centres nationally. Their combined shop space alone totals 183 hectares. Australian companies such as Westfield own almost all our centres, with the notable exceptions of the Palm Shopping Centre and Ngai Tahu's Tower Junction mega-centre, both in Christchurch. Then there are the big boxes: 87 Warehouse stores, 43 Warehouse Stationery stores, 38 Briscoes stores.
Retail's biggest concentration of power lies in our supermarket chain duopoly. Foodstuffs, a privately owned New Zealand co-operative, gives us New World, Pak'N Save and Four Square and claims 54 per cent of the supermarket market. Progressive Enterprises, owned by Australian's second-biggest retailer, Woolworths, gives us Foodtown and Woolworths and claims the other 46 per cent market share.
We spend $11 billion a year at the two supermarket groups - nearly $1 in every $10 spent overall. Is all this just the latest phase in retail's inevitable evolution? A bargain-basement boon for low-income shoppers?
Or is it a retail cancer poisoning our small businesses, our towns, our land, increasingly bleeding profits out of New Zealand and turning the screws on local suppliers?
Warren Snow managed the Tindall Foundation, The Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall's charitable arm, until he grew deeply disillusioned by the Red Sheds' impact.
Now he heads sustainable-development group Envision that helps small businesses fight back. "We have allowed a destructive model of retail sprawl to crawl over the land, where mega-retailers battle amongst themselves for market share by selling ever-cheaper, non-repairable, unrecyclable, sweat-shop-made junk that all ends up in our landfills. Cheap junk for quality of life - what a bargain!"
And it's no thanks, he says, to the Resource Management Act and Environment Court, where the parties with the deepest pockets tend to win protracted legal wrangles.
Meanwhile, main streets that used to be the heart of their community, where shopkeepers were in the same sporting clubs and school committees as their customers, where locals could get most of their daily needs, are now colonised by some mix of bargain-bin stores, takeaways, bric-a-brac shops and cafes for tourists and chain stores. (At least chain franchises retain a kind of local ownership, Snow adds.)
We've already seen the first wave of casualties from The Warehouse revolution, he says. But wait, there's more. "Buoyant farming and tourism of the last few years have stopped many town centres from declining into dead ghost towns, but if these twin pillars collapse for any reason, there will be a second wave of small business closures... in a long-term Wal-martisation (read pauperisation) of the New Zealand economy."
He's turning his attention to helping local retailers "claw back business that the big guys took from them" by pushing their advantages: their profits go back into the community, they participate in the social life of the community, they know their customers' needs, and they can provide genuine service and product back-up.
Laila Harre, head of the National Distribution Union, believes the jury's still out on the impact of big retailers on local economies. But it's a different story for suppliers. "As retailers become bigger, they're dictating terms of supply in a way that's unprecedented." Most pressing, she argues, is the threat our supermarket duopoly poses to New Zealand food producers. Harre is worried that we're underestimating it.
Woolworths Australia is particularly aggressive when it comes to driving down wholesale prices, she says. Local producers who can't weather the squeeze on their profit margins lose out. And it goes wider. "If we can't produce for the domestic market, we won't have the base for export."
Harre says we're a way off the kind of food-plus-general-retail domination of United States titan Wal-Mart.
The Warehouse Extra, which includes a supermarket, is a baby next to the Wal-Mart. But a step in that direction looms in the shape of either Woolworths Australia or Foodstuffs buying a controlling share in The Warehouse. Both supermarket chains have sought Commerce Commission clearance to make their bids, and the authority has promised a decision in coming weeks. Harre adds that if either gets the go-ahead, this would quash the threat to the duopoly.
There's speculation that Wal-Mart may get a foothold in New Zealand through buying parts of the Coles Group, the remnants of Coles-Myer, Australia's biggest retailer, which would mean more profits going overseas. The group is Kmart's parent company.
Wal-Mart has been widely attacked for shutting out unions, crushing local stores, playing hardball with suppliers, paying low wages and providing poor working conditions - all criticisms vehemently denied by the company. Says Harre, "If Wal-Mart gets a stake in New Zealand through Kmart, then I think we need to be very afraid."
