Part 4 (1/2)

No Choice

Wal-Mart greeter with the human touch. The citizens of Warrenton, Virginia, aren't buying it.

Chapter Six.

Brand Bombing Franchises in the Age of the Superbrand MTV is a.s.sociated with the forces of freedom and democracy around the world.

-Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone, owner of MTV, October 1994 There isn't a lot of angst, it's just unbridled consumerism.

-MTV CEO Tom Freston describes the content on MTV India, June 1997 The branded multinationals may talk diversity, but the visible result of their actions is an army of teen clones marching-in ”uniform,” as the marketers say-into the global mall. Despite the embrace of polyethnic imagery, market-driven globalization doesn't want diversity; quite the opposite. Its enemies are national habits, local brands and distinctive regional tastes. Fewer interests control ever more of the landscape.

Dazzled by the array of consumer choices, we may at first fail to notice the tremendous consolidation taking place in the boardrooms of the entertainment, media and retail industries. Advertising floods us with the kaleidoscopic soothing images of United Streets of Diversity and Microsoft's wide-open ”Where do you want to go today?” enticements. But in the pages of the business section, the world goes monochromatic and doors slam shut from all sides: every other story-whether the announcements of a new buyout, an untimely bankruptcy, a colossal merger-points directly to a loss of meaningful choices. The real question is not ”Where do you want to go today?” but ”How best can I steer you into the synergized maze of where I I want you to go today?” want you to go today?”

This a.s.sault on choice is taking place on several different fronts at once. It is happening structurally, with mergers, buyouts and corporate synergies. It is happening locally, with a handful of superbrands using their huge cash reserves to force out small and independent businesses. And it is happening on the legal front, with entertainment and consumer-goods companies using libel and trademark suits to hound anyone who puts an unwanted spin on a pop-cultural product. And so we live in a double world: carnival on the surface, consolidation underneath, where it counts.

Everyone has, in one form or another, witnessed the odd double vision of vast consumer choice coupled with Orwellian new restrictions on cultural production and public s.p.a.ce. We see it when a small community watches its lively downtown hollow out, as big-box discount stores with 70,000 items on their shelves set up on their periphery, exerting their gravitational pull to what James Howard Kunstler describes as ”the geography of nowhere.”1 It is there on the trendy downtown main street as yet another favorite cafe, hardware store, independent bookstore or art video house is cleared away and replaced by one of the Pac-Man chains: Starbucks, Home Depot, the Gap, Chapters, Borders, Blockbuster. It is there inside the big-box retail outlets each time a magazine is taken off a shelf by a manager mindful of his bosses' corporate definition of ”family values.” You can see it in the messy bedroom of a fourteen-year-old Web master who has just had her fan page shut down by Viacom or EMI, unimpressed by her attempts to create her own little pocket of culture with borrowed snippets of trademarked song lyrics and images. It is there again when protesters are thrown out of shopping malls for handing out political leaflets, told by the security guards that although the edifice may have replaced the public square in their town, it is, in fact, private property. It is there on the trendy downtown main street as yet another favorite cafe, hardware store, independent bookstore or art video house is cleared away and replaced by one of the Pac-Man chains: Starbucks, Home Depot, the Gap, Chapters, Borders, Blockbuster. It is there inside the big-box retail outlets each time a magazine is taken off a shelf by a manager mindful of his bosses' corporate definition of ”family values.” You can see it in the messy bedroom of a fourteen-year-old Web master who has just had her fan page shut down by Viacom or EMI, unimpressed by her attempts to create her own little pocket of culture with borrowed snippets of trademarked song lyrics and images. It is there again when protesters are thrown out of shopping malls for handing out political leaflets, told by the security guards that although the edifice may have replaced the public square in their town, it is, in fact, private property.

A decade ago, any attempt to connect the dots among this mess of trends would have seemed strange indeed: what does synergy have to do with the chain-store craze? What does copyright and trademark law have to do with personal fan culture? Or corporate consolidation with freedom of speech? But today, a clear pattern is emerging: as more and more companies seek to be the one overarching brand under which we consume, make art, even build our homes, the entire concept of public s.p.a.ce is being redefined. And within these real and virtual branded edifices, options for unbranded alternatives, for open debate, criticism and uncensored art-for real choice-are facing new and ominous restrictions. If the erosion of noncorporate s.p.a.ce explored in the last section is feeding a kind of globo-claustrophobia that longs for release, then it is these restrictions on choice-restricted by the same companies that promised a new age of freedom and diversity-that are slowly focusing that potentially explosive longing on the multinational brands, creating the conditions for the anticorporate activism that will be explored later on in the book.

Constant Cloning There is a distinctive quality to many of the chains that have proliferated during the eighties and nineties-Ikea, Blockbuster, the Gap, Kinko's, the Body Shop, Starbucks-which sets them apart from the fast-food restaurants, strip malls and m.u.f.fler joints responsible for the sixties and seventies franchise sprawl. They don't flash with the garish, cartoonlike plastic yellow sh.e.l.ls and golden arches; they are more apt to glow with a healthy New Age sheen. These crisp royal blue and kelly green boxes snap together like pieces of Lego (the new kind that can make only one thing: the model fire station or s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p helpfully pictured on the box). The Kinko's, Starbucks and Blockbuster clerks buy their uniform of khakis and white or blue s.h.i.+rts at the Gap; the ”Hi! Welcome to the Gap!” greeting cheer is fueled by Starbucks double espressos; the resumes that got them the jobs were designed at Kinko's on friendly Macs, in 12-point Helvetica on Microsoft Word. The troops show up for work smelling of CK One (except at Starbucks, where colognes and perfumes are thought to compete with the ”romance of coffee” aroma), their faces freshly scrubbed with Body Shop Blue Corn Mask, before leaving apartments furnished with Ikea self-a.s.sembled bookcases and coffee tables.

The cultural transformation these inst.i.tutions have effected is familiar to everyone, but there are few helpful statistics available on the proliferation of franchises and chains, largely because most research on retailing lumps franchises in with independent businesses. A franchise is technically owned by the franchisee, even if every detail of the outlet-from the sign that hangs out front to the precise temperature of the coffee-is controlled by a head office hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Even without industry-wide figures, it's undeniable that something very dramatic has happened to the face of retail this decade. Take Starbucks, for instance. As recently as 1986, the coffee company was a strictly local phenomenon, with a handful of cafes around Seattle. By 1992, Starbucks had 165 stores with outlets in several U.S. and Canadian cities. By 1993, that number had already gone up to 275, and in 1996, it reached 1,000. In early 1999, Starbucks. .h.i.t 1,900 stores with outlets in twelve countries, from the U.K. to Kuwait.

Blockbuster, another of the distinctly nineties chains, has enjoyed an even more dramatic expansion rate over precisely the same time period. In 1985, Blockbuster was a lone video store in Dallas, Texas. It was bought by waste-management czar Wayne Huizenga in 1987 and by 1989 there were 1,079 stores. In 1994, the year Huizenga sold Blockbuster to Viacom, there were 3,977. By early 1999, the number had reached 6,000, distributed over twenty-six countries, including 700 outlets in the U.K. alone.

Similar patterns can be tracked for the Gap (and its holdings Banana Republic and Old Navy) and the Body Shop, which averaged between 120 and 150 store openings a year through the mid-eighties to the present. Even Wal-Mart didn't truly find its feet as a retail powerhouse until the late eighties. Although the first Wal-Mart outlet opened in 1962, the superstore model didn't take off until 1988 and it wasn't until 1991 that Wal-Mart-by then opening 150 discount stores a year-surpa.s.sed Kmart and Sears to become the most powerful force in American retailing.

This growth spurt was brought about by three industry trends, all of them dramatically favoring big chains with deep cash reserves. The first is price wars, in which the biggest megachains systematically undersell all their compet.i.tors; the second is the practice of blitzing out the compet.i.tion by setting up chain-store ”cl.u.s.ters.” The third trend, to be explored in the next chapter, is the arrival of the palatial flags.h.i.+p superstore, which appears on prime real estate and acts as a three-dimensional ad for the brand.

Price Wars: The Wal-Mart Model In mid-1999, Wal-Mart had 2,435 big-box discount stores in nine countries, selling everything from Barbie Dream Homes to Kathie Lee Gifford skirts and handbags to Black & Decker drills to Prodigy CDs. Of those stores, 565 were ”Supercenters,” a concept that combines Wal-Mart's original discount model with full-service grocery stores, hair salons and banks, as well as 443 Sam's Clubs, which offer even deeper discounts for bulk purchases and big-ticket items like office furniture. (See Table 6.1 Table 6.1 and and Table 6.2. Table 6.2.) The recipe that has made Wal-Mart the largest retailer in the world, hauling in $137 billion in sales in 1998, is straightforward enough. First, build stores two and three times the size of your closest compet.i.tors. Next, pile your shelves with products purchased in such great volume that the suppliers are forced to give you a substantially lower price than they would otherwise. Then cut your in-store prices so low that no small retailer can begin to compete with your ”everyday low prices.”

Because everything about the Arkansas-based retailer is premised on achieving an economy of scale, an average Wal-Mart store measures 92,000 square feet, not including the requisite substantial parking lot. Since discounting is its calling card, Wal-Mart must keep its overhead down, which is why the lots for its windowless stores are purchased on the edges of towns, where land is cheap and taxes are lower. Every year of Wal-Mart's expansion, its new stores have grown bigger in size, and many of its original, comparatively modest discount outlets have been converted and expanded into superstores, some as large as 200,000 square feet.

Another key element in keeping costs down is that Wal-Mart only opens outlets close to its distribution centers. For this reason, Wal-Mart has spread like mola.s.ses: slow and thick. It won't move into a new region until it has blanketed the last area with stores-as many as forty in a hundred-mile radius. That way, the company saves money on transportation and s.h.i.+pping costs, and develops such a concentrated presence in an area that advertising its brand is barely necessary.2 ”We would go as far as we could from a warehouse and put in a store. Then we would fill in the map of that territory, state by state, county seat by county seat, until we had saturated the market area,” Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton explained. ”We would go as far as we could from a warehouse and put in a store. Then we would fill in the map of that territory, state by state, county seat by county seat, until we had saturated the market area,” Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton explained.3 Then the company would open up a new distribution center in a new region and repeat the process. Then the company would open up a new distribution center in a new region and repeat the process.

After Wal-Mart began in the U.S. South, plodding slowly through Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Louisiana, it took a while before Wall Street and the Eastern-based media grasped the magnitude of Sam Walton's project. For this reason, it wasn't until the early nineties, three decades after the opening of the first Wal-Mart, that opposition to the big boxes began to mount. The argument against Wal-Mart's retail style-by now almost as familiar as Wal-Mart itself-holds that bargain prices lure shoppers to the suburbs, sucking community life and small businesses out of the town centers. Smaller businesses can't compete-in fact, many of Wal-Mart's compet.i.tors claim they pay more for their goods wholesale than Wal-Mart charges retail.

By now, there have been several books written about the effect of the big boxes, most notably In Sam We Trust In Sam We Trust, by Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Ortega. As Ortega notes, Wal-Mart is not alone in its ”size matters” approach to retailing-it is simply the leader in an exploding category of big-box retailers who use their clout to wrangle special treatment. Home Depot, Office Depot and Bed, Bath & Beyond, which are often grouped together in pumped-up strip malls called ”power centers,” are all known in the retail industry as ”category killers” because they enter a category with so much buying power that they almost instantly kill the smaller compet.i.tors. reporter Bob Ortega. As Ortega notes, Wal-Mart is not alone in its ”size matters” approach to retailing-it is simply the leader in an exploding category of big-box retailers who use their clout to wrangle special treatment. Home Depot, Office Depot and Bed, Bath & Beyond, which are often grouped together in pumped-up strip malls called ”power centers,” are all known in the retail industry as ”category killers” because they enter a category with so much buying power that they almost instantly kill the smaller compet.i.tors.4 This retail style has always been controversial and was responsible for the first anti-chain movement, which arose in the 1920s. As discounters like A&P and Woolworths proliferated, small merchants tried to make it illegal for chains to use their relative size to extract lower wholesale prices and drive down retail prices. The rhetoric of the time, as Ortega points out, bears a striking resemblance to the language of the gra.s.sroots opposition groups that have sprung up in dozens of North American towns when the pending arrival of a new Wal-Mart outlet has been announced.5 On the legal front, charges of monopolistic practices have been cropping up with growing regularity, and not just against Wal-Mart. In September 1997, for instance, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that Toys 'R' Us was guilty of illegally pressuring manufacturers not to supply popular toys to other chains. Because Toys 'R' Us is the largest toy retailer in the world, the manufacturers agreed; and consumers' options were reduced dramatically, along with their chances to comparison shop. ”Many toy manufacturers had no choice but to go along,” said William Baer, director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Compet.i.tion when the case was decided.6 This was precisely the type of situation the FTC was hoping to avoid when, in 1997, it blocked a planned merger between two huge office-supply chains-Staples and Office Depot-stating that the consolidation would hurt compet.i.tion. This was precisely the type of situation the FTC was hoping to avoid when, in 1997, it blocked a planned merger between two huge office-supply chains-Staples and Office Depot-stating that the consolidation would hurt compet.i.tion.

Beyond sp.a.w.ning the category killer, Sam Walton's legacy has had other, further-reaching effects. In many ways, it was the inhuman scale of the big boxes and their accompanying sprawl-the streets without sidewalks, the shopping centers only accessible by car, the stores the size of small hamlets with all the design flair of toolsheds-that set the stage for the other significant retail trends of the decade. Discount stores were great for saving money but not for much else. And so, as the big boxes expanded into seas of concrete on the edge of town, they generated a renewed hunger for human-scale development; for the old-fas.h.i.+oned town square, for public gathering places that allowed both large meetings and intimate conversation; for a kind of retail with more interaction and more sensory stimulation. In other words, they laid the groundwork for Starbucks, Virgin Megastores and Nike Town.

Where big boxes used their size to move previously unimaginable amounts of product, the new retailers would use their size to fetis.h.i.+ze brand-name goods, placing them on a pedestal as high as Wal-Mart's discounts were low. Where the big boxes had swapped a sense of community values for a discount, the branded chains would re-create it and sell it back-at a price.

Cl.u.s.tering: The Starbucks Model ”A Comforting Third Place” is the phrase Starbucks uses to promote itself in its newsletters and evangelical annual reports. This is not just another nons.p.a.ce like Wal-Mart or McDonald's, it's an intimate nook where sophisticated people can share ”coffee...community...camaraderie...connection.”7 Everything about New Age chains like Starbucks is designed to a.s.sure us that they are a different breed from the strip-mall franchises of yesterday. This isn't dreck for the ma.s.ses, it's intelligent furniture, it's cosmetics as political activism, it's the bookstore as an ”old-world library,” it's the coffee shop that wants to stare deep into your eyes and ”connect.” Everything about New Age chains like Starbucks is designed to a.s.sure us that they are a different breed from the strip-mall franchises of yesterday. This isn't dreck for the ma.s.ses, it's intelligent furniture, it's cosmetics as political activism, it's the bookstore as an ”old-world library,” it's the coffee shop that wants to stare deep into your eyes and ”connect.”

But there's a catch. The need for more intimate s.p.a.ces designed to tempt people to linger may indeed provide a powerful counterpoint to the cavernous big boxes, but these two retail trends are not as far apart as they appear at first. For instance, the mechanics of Starbucks' dizzying expansion during the past thirteen years has more in common with Wal-Mart's plan for global domination than the brand managers at the folksy coffee chain like to admit. Rather than dropping an enormous big box on the edge of town, Starbucks' policy is to drop ”cl.u.s.ters” of outlets in urban areas already dotted with cafes and espres...o...b..rs. This strategy relies just as heavily on an economy of scale as Wal-Mart's does and the effect on compet.i.tors is much the same. Since Starbucks is explicit about its desire to enter markets only where it can ”become the leading retailer and brand of coffee,”8 the company has concentrated its store-a-day growth in relatively few areas. Instead of opening a few stores in every city in the world, or even in North America, Starbucks waits until it can blitz an entire area and spread, to quote the company has concentrated its store-a-day growth in relatively few areas. Instead of opening a few stores in every city in the world, or even in North America, Starbucks waits until it can blitz an entire area and spread, to quote Globe and Mail Globe and Mail columnist John Barber, ”like head lice through a kindergarten.” columnist John Barber, ”like head lice through a kindergarten.”9 It's a highly aggressive strategy, and it involves something the company calls ”cannibalization.” It's a highly aggressive strategy, and it involves something the company calls ”cannibalization.”

The idea is to saturate an area with stores until the coffee compet.i.tion is so fierce that sales drop even in individual Starbucks outlets. In 1993, for instance, when Starbucks had just 275 outlets concentrated in a few U.S. states, per-store sales increased by 19 percent from the previous year. By 1994, store sales growth was only 9 percent, in 1996 it dipped to 7 percent, and in 1997 Starbucks saw only a 5 percent sales growth; in new stores, it was as low as 3 percent. (see Table 6.3 Table 6.3) Understandably, the closer the outlets get to each other, the more they begin to poach or ”cannibalize” each other's clientele-even in hyper-caffeinated cities like Seattle and Vancouver people can only suck back so many lattes before they float into the Pacific. Starbucks' 1995 annual report explains: ”As part of its expansion strategy of cl.u.s.tering stores in existing markets, Starbucks has experienced a certain level of cannibalization of existing stores by new stores as the store concentration has increased, but management believes such cannibalization has been justified by the incremental sales and return on new store investment.” What that means is that while sales were slowing at individual stores, the total sales of all the chain's stores combined continued to rise-doubling, in fact, between 1995 and 1997. Put another way, Starbucks the company was expanding its market while its individual outlets were losing market share, largely to other Starbucks outlets (see Table 6.4 Table 6.4).

It also helped Starbucks, no doubt, that its cannibalization strategy preys not only on other Starbucks outlets but equally on its real compet.i.tors, independently run coffee shops and restaurants. And, unlike Starbucks, these lone businesses can only profit from one store at a time. The bottom line is that cl.u.s.tering, like big-boxing, is a compet.i.tive retail strategy that is only an option for a large chain that can afford to take a beating on individual stores in order to reap a larger, long-term branding goal. It also explains why critics usually claim that companies like Starbucks are preying on small businesses, while the chains themselves deny it, admitting only that they are expanding and creating new markets for their products. Both are true, but the chains' aggressive strategy of market expansion has the added bonus of simultaneously taking out compet.i.tors.

There have been other, more brazen ways in which Starbucks has used its size and deep pockets to its compet.i.tive advantage. Until the practice began creating controversy a few years back, Starbucks' real-estate strategy was to stake out a popular independent cafe in a well-trafficked, funky location and simply poach the lease from under it. Several independent cafe owners in prime locations are on record claiming that Starbucks went directly to their landlords and offered to pay them higher rental payments for the same or adjacent s.p.a.ces. For instance, Chicago's Scenes Coffee House and Drama received an eviction notice after Starbucks rented a s.p.a.ce in the shopping complex where it was located. The coffee chain attempted a similar maneuver with Dooney's cafe in Toronto, though Starbucks claims it was the landlord who made the initial approach. Starbucks did gain control of Dooney's lease but the community protest was so strong that the company ended up having to sublet the s.p.a.ce back to Dooney's.

These cutthroat real-estate practices hardly make Starbucks unique as a developer: McDonald's has perfected the scorched-earth approach to franchising, opening neighboring franchises and mini-outlets at gas stations until an area is blanketed. The Gap has also adopted the cl.u.s.ter approach to retailing, brand bombing key neighborhoods with multiple outlets of the Gap, Baby Gap, Gap Kids, Old Navy, Banana Republic and in 1999 Gap Body stores. The idea is to make Gap's family of brands synonymous with clothing in the same way that McDonald's is synonymous with hamburgers and c.o.ke is synonymous with soft drinks. ”If you go to a supermarket, you would expect to find some fundamental items. You would expect to find milk: nonfat, 1 percent, 2 percent, whole milk. You would expect dates to be fresh.... I don't know why apparel stores should be any different,” says Mickey Drexler, Gap CEO.10 It's fitting that Drexler's model for the Gap's ubiquity is the supermarket, since it was the first supermarket chains that pioneered the cl.u.s.tering expansion model. After A&P launched its ”economy stores” in 1913 (the prototype of the modern supermarket), it quickly opened 7,500 outlets, then closed half of them after saturation had been achieved and many compet.i.tors were forced out of business. It's fitting that Drexler's model for the Gap's ubiquity is the supermarket, since it was the first supermarket chains that pioneered the cl.u.s.tering expansion model. After A&P launched its ”economy stores” in 1913 (the prototype of the modern supermarket), it quickly opened 7,500 outlets, then closed half of them after saturation had been achieved and many compet.i.tors were forced out of business.

The Gap welcomes these comparisons with c.o.ke, McDonald's and A&P, but Starbucks, because of the nature of its brand image, strenuously rejects them.11 After all, the Gap's project is to take a distinctive product-clothing-and brand it so completely that purchasing it from the Gap is as easy as buying a quart of milk or a can of c.o.ke. Starbucks, on the other hand, is in the business of taking a much more generic product-a cup of coffee-and branding it so completely that it becomes a spiritual/designer object. So Starbucks doesn't want to be known as a blockbuster, it wants, as its marketing director Scott Bedbury says, to ”align ourselves with one of the greatest movements towards finding a connection with your soul.” After all, the Gap's project is to take a distinctive product-clothing-and brand it so completely that purchasing it from the Gap is as easy as buying a quart of milk or a can of c.o.ke. Starbucks, on the other hand, is in the business of taking a much more generic product-a cup of coffee-and branding it so completely that it becomes a spiritual/designer object. So Starbucks doesn't want to be known as a blockbuster, it wants, as its marketing director Scott Bedbury says, to ”align ourselves with one of the greatest movements towards finding a connection with your soul.”12 Yet no matter how urbane the original concept may have been, the business of chains has a logic and a momentum of its own, having very little to do with what it sells. It breaks down each of a brand's elements-no matter how progressive and homespun-into a kit of easy-to-a.s.semble bits and parts. Just as the chains snap together like Lego, each chain outlet is made up of hundreds of its own snappable parts. Within the logic of chains, it matters little whether those snappable parts are a McDonald's deep frier and a Hamburglar mannequin or the ”four elemental icons” that form the building blocks for each Starbucks store design: ”Earth to grow. Fire to roast. Water to brew. Air for aroma.” A clone is a clone, whether it is molded in the shape of an arch or a peace symbol, and its purpose is still replication.

This process is even more apparent when the chains expand on the global stage. When retailers move outside their countries of origin, Starbucks-style cl.u.s.tering melds with Wal-Mart-style price wars to create a kind of ”bulk cl.u.s.tering strategy.” To keep prices low in a new market, chains like Wal-Mart, Home Depot and McDonald's must carry with them their trump card of being volume buyers; and in order to have the market clout to get lower prices than their compet.i.tors, they can't dribble into countries one store at a time. Instead, it has become a favored expansion tactic to buy out an existing chain and simply move into its stores in one dramatic entrance, as Wal-Mart did when it bought out 120 Woolco stores in Canada in 1994 and when it purchased the Wertkauf GmbH hypermarket chain in Germany in 1997. Similarly, when Starbucks moved into the U.K. in 1998, it acquired the already existing Seattle Coffee Company and retrofitted its 82 stores as Starbucks outlets.

For national companies looking to avoid becoming the prey of the global giants, it has become an increasingly popular strategy to initiate preemptive mergers of their own between two or more large national brands. In the name of nationalism and global compet.i.tiveness, they consolidate, lay off staff and mimic American retail formulas. Not surprisingly, they generally end up transforming themselves into copies of the global brands they were attempting to block. That's what happened in Canada when fear of Wal-Mart prompted the country's oldest department store chain, the Hudson's Bay Company, to buy Kmart Canada, fold it in with Zellers, lay off six thousand workers and open several lines of big-box discount outlets: one for furniture, one for home and bath and one for discount clothing. ”Wal-Mart executed better than either Kmart or Zellers. By merging the two operations, we're going to learn how to execute better,” said George h.e.l.ler, president of Kmart.13 Selection versus Choice The combination of the big-box and cl.u.s.tering approaches to retailing is having a transformative effect on the retail landscape. Though they represent very different retail trends, the combined effect of the Wal-Mart and Starbucks models has been to gradually erode the market share of small business in what was one of the few fields remaining where independent operators stood a solid chance of competing head-to-head with multinationals. With the chains able to outbid smaller compet.i.tors for s.p.a.ce and supplies with barely a second thought, retail has become a battle of the big spenders. Whether they are using their clout to drive prices down to impossibly low levels, to keep them artificially high or simply to seize near monopolistic market shares, the net effect is the same: a retail arena in which size is a prerequisite and small companies can barely maintain a toehold. Like sumo wrestlers, the compet.i.tors in this game must push the limits of their weight category; bigness begets bigness.