Big box stores

One of the most common ways to criticize "liberals" is to find an ideal they support and then point out an every day action that makes them hypocritical (this is also a very common reaction to finding out someone is a vegetarian). For example, most liberals are pretty anti-"Big box store" (the most notorious being WalMart). But at the same time, if you look through their house, they will probably have products bought from a major chain.

I definitely fall into this category. I haven't been to a WalMart in years. But this weekend I shopped at Ikea. And I've often shopped at Target or Home Depot or Costco other super stores that do nothing but cause horribly congested traffic, encourage lots and lots of oil use, encourage minimum wage (or below minimum wage) jobs, etc.

Sometimes it's hard not to go to one of these stores. For example, we wanted to buy some patio furniture. We didn't want anything fancy, and most importantly, we were on a budget. Ikea was the perfect solution. To find such furniture at a local store would have taken many hours of exploration and probably would have involved more money. We didn't want to put that much effort into it.

If there were a local furniture store in my neighborhood I could depend on, I would choose that over Ikea. But there's not. But maybe there isn't because they couldn't compete against Ikea and Crate and Barrel and all the various other chain furniture stores. So you end up with a chicken and egg problem, where an individual store would have to charge more for their product because they won't sell as much as a chain store, but no one will shop at these individual stores because the chain stores are much cheaper.

I'm not sure what the answer is to this situation. I have a feeling that individual store benefits society more than the chain store (though I'm far from educated in economics and haven't researched this thought all that much), but I'm not sure if that's a realistic ideal to have.