Is small and local enough to succeed?

Portland State’s new recreation center will open this coming year. A big question posed to ASPSU was how to carry out one of their campaign platforms of “building a sustainable future” in regards to the new building. And I am writing to tell you that amid temptations to do otherwise, they have been doing it the right way thus far by trying to find businesses that will be successful on campus. Let me temper this by saying, let’s not get carried away.

ASPSU wants to make sure the businesses that will be, well, doing business in the new building will fit certain criteria: be local, sustainable, small and ethical.

According to student senator Heather Spalding, who is part of leading this charge, ASPSU has been successful in those areas. She said they got cooperation from the administration to allow only businesses that were “locally owned, smaller corporations” and had “better practices” to occupy space in the recreation building located on Sixth Avenue, where the MCAT building used to be.

And Spalding said she’s pleased with the current way it looks in regard to who’ll be in the building, saying that part of their plan is to keep a “local, community-feel,” about the campus.

Well I love local, and I like conserving our resources. And a community feel is a worthy goal. The “better practices” she spoke of mainly meant that the companies are not selling us sweatshop goods.

And then I asked her if she thought the businesses (whose names she couldn’t share at the time) were going to be successful.

I love that she said yes. I suspect she’s right, too. In a land where people carry their fabric Whole Foods bags with pride, as if it were a Coach or Gucci purse, PSU students and residents surely will patronize a new locally owned, sustainable, ethical, small business.

But I will only continue to support this idea as long as it will remain viable, marketable and fair. That said, what if one of the new rec-center businesses decides it will be better for business to grow, and moves its headquarters out of state? And then let’s say they sell us goods not made in Oregon.

Would we kick them out? That wouldn’t be fair, would it? It’s PSU’s prerogative to choose whomever it wants to fill the spots in the building, but I don’t want to see us push someone out because they grow. The point of business is to succeed, and companies shouldn’t be faulted for doing just that.

I’m not saying we would kick them out, but I would rather not see them smeared like we’ve smeared poor old Starbucks. Well, they’re not going to be poor, and they’ll be around as long as coffee beans grow, but the company has been called evil at worst, and often unethical at best, regarding its buying practices for third-world coffee.

But according to The Seattle Times, they paid an average of $1.43 per pound of coffee in 2007, which is 17 cents more than the price required to get the watchdog Fair Trade stamp (www.coffeeresearch.org).

I think they’ve been smeared (and you hear it all the time) just because they’re a successful big business. And they’re big because consumers like their coffee.

Finally, there has been discussion that there may be a Retail Advisory Council soon to be formed as a permanent institution advising PSU’s administration on what businesses would be good and representative of our growingly sustainable campus.

So, to the new council: We ought not prevent a good business that makes good products ethically, employs local residents and deserves to grow and succeed from occupying PSU space. Even if it’s really big.

You don’t have to like big, just don’t unblinkingly equate them with the bad. It’s simply not fair to penalize good and decent people for succeeding. Stay on that path, ASPSU, and we can make sustainability a reasonable, pro-business, pro-PSU goal.