One minus one = zero. Home Depot opened its doors this week in the town of Clinton, Mississippi. The new store in Clinton, however, caused another Home Depot store in nearby Jackson to close. The new store is larger, the old store is now empty, and may sit on the market for years. The manager of the new store says Home Depot will have 200 jobs at the new store, of which 100 are the people who already had jobs at the old Home Depot. The Clarion-Ledger newspaper, which reported this story, failed to estimate how many jobs at existing home improvement stores were lost when Home Depot first came in, or how many would lose their jobs due to the new, larger store. The newspaper quoted one shopper in Clinton as saying, “I can run over here and not go through the maze over there (at the former south Jackson location).” No one in Jackson was asked how they felt about having a dead store in their community, not to mention the lost property tax revenue.
Here are the real by-products of this Home Depot musical chairs: The community of Jackson gets an empty store and less revenue. The city of Clinton gets some revenue that would have gone to its neighboring town. Smaller stores continue to lose jobs and get put out of business. Total “new” job creation will be almost zero, because another Home Depot does not expand the retail pie. Does this sound like economic development to you?
