Bread & Puppet and a lawyer for a Dollar General developer are sparring over a YouTube video of a faux boxing match.
The Town of Hardwick is cast as the hero who defeats an oversized, grim-faced store executive, in the two-minute satirical skit, “Dollar General vs. Every Town in Vermont,” recently performed at Bread and Puppet’s farm in Glover.
In the video of a “boxing match” between locals and the giant retailer, the Town of Hardwick character knocks the Dollar General figure to the ground and mutely suggests a “Boycott.”
Alan Biederman, an attorney based in Rutland who’s representing a Dollar General developer in environmental court, wrote a letter chiding Bread and Puppet for the performance.
Biederman said he likes art, he likes theater, and he likes Bread and Puppet — even though he doesn’t always agree with the theater troupe’s messages. What concerned Biederman about the skit, he said in an interview, was the implication that towns opposed Dollar General. He asserts that it’s only a few individuals in those towns who object to the retail developments. (The letter, he says, does not represent the views of the Zaremba Group LLC, an Ohio-based developer that builds many Dollar General and other chain stores around the country.)
“The town did not oppose the permits,” Biederman said. Towns like Hardwick have issued building permits to Dollar General, he said. “If you want to say the people of Vermont oppose it, you don’t have to be right if you’re expressing an opinion,” Biederman said. “But the towns are actually entities.”
Biederman also complains in his letter that the theater troupe ought to consider satirizing “the elitist wealthy people who don’t want the ‘Dollar General types’ in their downtowns.” In an interview, Biederman said opposition in Hardwick is not a function of elitism.
“Many of them [elitist wealthy people] haven’t a clue what it is like to want to save money on gas and toilet paper or soap and moved here from San Francisco or Marin County or New Jersey and within a couple of years want their new town to look like a postcard when local working folks are just trying to save a buck,” Biederman wrote. “They don’t want any of those poor working folks who need to save money coming into their village centers. Maybe Bread and Puppet could occasionally satirize those folks.”
Abutter Merrill Chapin says storm water from the parking lot will eventually end up on his land. He and his 83-year-old mother live across the road from the proposed construction site on property that includes a Class II wetland.
Chapin said he can’t imagine shopping at the Dollar General store, but he wouldn’t mind it in another place. When he needs something, he waits to buy the item at a yard sale or for castoffs from a family member or a friend.
“I live on less than $5,000 a year. I understand how hard it is,” Chapin said. “To buy a plastic Tupperware container for a dollar, I just don’t see that as saving money. There’s a whole other mindset to saving money.”
Rose Friedman, a Bread and Puppet board member, forwarded an email exchange with Beiderman to VTDigger and other news outlets Thursday morning. Friedman is one of a small group of Hardwick residents who have banded together to appeal the town Development Review Board’s permit. They filed suit in the state’s environmental court because they say the development would cause harmful flooding to the nearby Cooper Brook. All but one have since pulled out of the litigation, after the developer agreed to adjust some storm water management plans.
Chapin, who is not giving up on the case, and the former appellants say they’re also pursuing other options to prevent the Dollar General from moving into town, at least in its current location.
The store is one of six new Dollar General locations pending around the state, according to company spokesman Dan MacDonald. Twenty stores already are operational. Dollar General representatives say the company has complied with local regulations.
Dollar General has received a conditional permit from the town of Hardwick’s Development and Review Board to build a store on the outskirts of the town, but a group of residents have been fighting the development since June 2013. Their environmental appeal appears to be disintegrating, but their opposition to the project is not.
MacDonald said the company thinks of each retail outlet as “your neighborhood general store.” While only about 25 percent of the products actually sell for a dollar or less these days, the model is designed to help people in underserved communities like Hardwick, save time and money on things they need to buy most often, he said.
The publicly traded company operates more than 11,500 sites around the country. Dollar General was started by a functionally illiterate Kentucky man and his son in 1939, MacDonald said, and the company supports education and literacy efforts in communities where Dollar General stores are located.
Bread and Puppet is not impressed.
“(W)ithin two miles of the proposed Dollar General site in Hardwick, there are at least a dozen stores where residents can buy the same items that DG sells,” Peter Schumann, Bread and Puppet founder and director, wrote in response to Biederman.
“Will these businesses be destroyed? Will those jobs, most of which pay better than the Dollar General pays its employees, be lost?” Schumann asked. “Corporations like Dollar General don’t represent the working poor and they don’t do anything to change opportunities for the working poor.”
“We want to work collaboratively with the local community to put a business in that will create jobs, and will serve the community with great products at low prices,” MacDonald said.
He predicts that when the store opens, it will start with a mixture of part-time and full-time employees, some of whom will make minimum wage and all of whom will be invited to participate in the company’s “career culture” for advancement.
UPDATE: This article was updated at 10:35 a.m. on Sunday, August 24, 2014.
