David vs. Goliath.

Big box developments have sparked debate among small business owners in communities across the North.

Rather than run for cover with the recent blitz of big box development in Sudbury, Peter Stefanuto is holding his own. The owner of the east-end Home Hardware store is determined to carve out a strong niche for himself, using a high level of service as his competitive edge and keeping a keen awareness of what his role is in an ever-changing retail marketplace.

"Our whole store is service, service, service," says Stefanuto of his half-dozen fulltime employees Who have almost as many years on sales floor as he has.

The 7,500-square-foot franchise he has owned for more than two decades is dwarfed by the gargantuan 113,000-square-foot Home Depot outlet on the Kingsway sitting atop a rocky ridge overlooking his Second Avenue store.

When his mega-store neighbour opened in the spring, Stefanuto was prepared to take a beating at the cash register, but says he experienced no decline in customers. He even believes there have been a few more customers.

Instead of attempting to go head-to-head with the hardware giant, Stefanuto says he just keeps doing the little things right, and stocking the store with the convenience items that have kept him in business for 26 years.

The arrival of power shopping has ignited a debate replayed in every community across North America. The question of whether big box development guts downtowns and hurts existing retailers in the grab for consumer marketshare is in debate.

The evolution of the Kingsway-Barrydowne intersection into a super-centre began six years ago with a rezoning to permit a straight commercial shopping centre on a 15-acre property. With the popularity of these new-format centres, came three graduated phases of development with Costco, Chapter's and a Silver City multi-screen theatre in the late 1990s.

Tired of hearing about Sudburians spending their retail dollars at the power-shopping centres in Barrie, city leaders embraced big box shopping, passing an official plan amendment to allow these developments to be located in light-industrial/service commercial areas.

Once players like Costco appeared on the scene, the city began actively marketing adjoining surplus properties and soon Home Depot came into the picture.

"The mayor (Jim Gordon) has been very vocal in becoming a retail hub in northeastern Ontario," says Sudbury's planning director Bill Lautenbach, and big boxes are an integral part of that strategy.

But these developments have not gone up without a fight. Concerned citizens, downtown merchants, local retailers and service unions have challenged the validity' of the city's zoning procedures through the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) and questioned whether Sudbury can support hundreds of thousands of square feet of retail space with out creating some casualties.

The latest fight is a 228,000-square-foot development with a Wal-Mart anchor and several smaller tenants earmarked for the city's south end. The application is on' hold pending an OMB hearing set for May 2002.

The city maintains the downtown merchant must reposition themselves as niche marketers, a term that is a tired cliche to John Rutherford, owner of a convenience store and a popular Durham Street news stand, Black Cat Too.

No stranger to OMB hearings, Rutherford, who sits as a secretary on the downtown's metro centre association, calls the city's planning process a "fiasco" that follows the marching orders of the politicians eager to bring in new business instead of following good planning principles. The manner in which surplus city property is being developed at the expense of infilling existing commercial property is a long-standing issue that has "embittered" many people, he adds.

Rutherford says there have never been any proper impact studies by the city to determine the size of the footprint these large-scale retail developments leave in the business communit, based on retail cash flows and income levels.

He remembers a mid-1970s survey indicating 35 per cent of area retail sales, goods and services came from the downtown. He now estimates that figure has dropped to 10 to 15 per cent "at best."

"I hear from experienced property managers saying these developments are going to be a tremendous reckoning one of these days, possibly resulting in a scaling back of these big box stores after small retailers have gone out of business, says Rutherford.

Sudbury city councillor Ted Callaghan is quite familiar with these pitched battles fought on a project-by-project basis in other Canadian communities and the doomsday scenarios of how these centres "below everything away" in the small business community.

When big box developers arrived on the scene in Sudbury's pre-amalgamation days, city councillors realized if they rejected these stores, they could easily set up shop in outlying communities like Chelmsford or in the Valley East. And the tax dollars from these centres would flow into some other municipality's coffers.

"And I grew sick and tired of people telling me they're going to Barrie to shop at Costco," says Callaghan. "These (developers) do extensive market studies and this is the central location with a catchment area of Parry Sound in the south, Timmins in the north, and Sault Ste. Marie and North Bay in the west and east."

Callaghan says the more progressive minded downtown merchants acknowledge small and independent businesses have to change their attitude and make the adjustment into specialty markets.