Wal-Mart pushes back on food costs - goes local

I had an email into Wal-Mart about the question of fuel costs and local buying. Here is a link from CNN that speaks to the retailer's efforts in buying local to squash costs, among other strategies. From the story:

Go locovore. Wal-Mart has been going green, but not entirely for the reasons you might think. By sourcing more produce locally - it now sells Wisconsin-grown yellow corn in 56 stores in or near Wisconsin - it is able to cut shipping costs. "We are looking at how to reduce the number of miles our suppliers' trucks travel," says Kohn. Marc Turner, whose Bushwick Potato Co. supplies Wal-Mart stores in the Northeast, says the cost of shipping one truck of spuds from his farm in Maine to local Wal-Mart stores costs less than $1,000, compared with several thousand dollars for a big rig from Idaho. Last year his shipments to Wal-Mart grew 13%.

In fact, it's the small suppliers that are feeling the pain from Wal-Mart's pushback the most. Bushwick has seen its costs rise 10% over the past year, but has passed only half that amount on to Wal-Mart and its other retailers. For consumers who are having a hard time paying $3.80 for a gallon of milk, however, without those measures that sticker shock would be a lot worse.