In fact, a large Tesco serves as a host for smaller venders to sell their ware along the sidewalks and outside the doors, where high-volumes of potential customers move by. Out in villages and even around city blocks where large Tesco or Big C stores cannot reach, local businesses can fill a niche - and while they may not be as cheap as Tesco or Big C, they are certainly more convenient.
But a careful examination of big-retailers as they exist in the West can still be helpful for Asia - and looking at the solutions being pursued by people who seek to subvert these entrenched monopolies can serve as blueprint for Asia to follow, skipping the decades of hollow, unsustainable consumerism large supranational bodies like ASEAN seem poised and eager to usher in.
Originally published on LocalOrg, this article, "Decentralizing Big-Retail" shows how people are reclaiming their communities from large corporate monopolies and special interests, by leveraging education and technology. As a result, wealth redistribution is accomplished through local entrepreneurship, not populist handouts or increased wages for laborers.
For Thailand particularly, where self-sufficiency is promoted at the highest levels of its ancient institutions, the ideas being pursued and implemented across the West would be a perfect fit for the intermediate and advanced stages of the Thai "self-sufficiency economy." These solutions include local hackerspaces, localized education, local agriculture (including urban agriculture), and even local auto-manufacturing (one example is in fact taken from Thailand's own, 999 Motorsports).
Read "Decentralizing Big-Retail" here, on LocalOrg.
