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I grew up in the poorest county in my state. It was an hour to anywhere. There were no bookstores, no movie theaters, no fast food restaurants, nothing but cows

I grew up in the poorest county in my state. It was an hour to anywhere. There were no bookstores, no movie theaters, no fast food restaurants, nothing but cows for miles. There wasn't even a public library. It might be true that in an area with established retail, Walmart tends to put those businesses out of business. But in areas like my hometown, those businesses were already out of business. We used to have a little Sears store. It had a few things in stock, but mostly it was a place you could walk into, peruse the Sears catalog, and order with free shipping. It went out of business years before Walmart got to town. There was, at some point, a small department store as well. It had been boarded up in the 1970s. Literally the only businesses in town that survived through the 1980s were the feed store, the gas station, the pharmacy, and an independent grocery store. The grocery store went out of business when Food Lion came to town, and nobody cried because Food Lion had a much wider selection of food products. I think Walmart is a very mixed bag. But we aren't poorer because of Walmart.

MrSkelter 2y ago
Your anecdote isn’t really an argument. The fact that “people didn’t cry” when a business arrived is totally meaningless when it comes to assessing the impact of a business and its model on a community. Walmart pay subsistence wages and below. They survive via exploiting governmental support for low income individuals while funneling profit to their billionaire owners. When they become a major part of the local economy the locals lose out.
jjeaff 2y ago
We had 2 grocery stores and I think Walmart put one of them out of business. However, the selection was much larger and it was a boost to local businesses because fewer people needed to travel to the next town over for supplies after Walmart came to town. It also employed significantly more people. I'm no fan of Walmart and their cut throat practices, but it hasn't been all bad for everyone.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Ha ha, so Walmart made your neighboring communities poorer.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    If you count total wealth rather than median income probably, since before the wealth stayed in the community with the locally owned shops and after Walmart moved in the wealth gets extracted away from the community.
bluGill 2y ago
That is my memory of Walmart coming to town as well: good riddance to those overprice stores with bad service and poor selection that we only went to because driving to the big city mall where we could get reasonable prices took time and so it was a big event that took most of your Saturday, while we could get into them quickly (if they had what we really needed) Farmers and rural dwellers everywhere made regular trips to the largest city near them (sometimes a two hour drive) just to get selection. Mail order only filled some of that need (online is just mail order on the internet)
- highcountess 2y ago
  I think both of you have a perspective that is well into a more advanced phase of a degenerative process than you or even most people realize, i.e., you describe a phase when the cancer had already been eating its way through the economy, as evident by the closing of local and legacy retail stores and collapse of community economies from early onset symptoms of cancer that were dismissed like saying “just feeling down” or “just a bit of a lump” or “I’m just tied”, or even worse, “it’s healthy capitalize competition to compete with the subsidized de facto slave love of China”. What Walmart represented was really just a kind of acceleration of the cancerous growth and metastasis throughout the body of the economy, spreading to the bloodstream. The likes of Amazon only made things that much worse, a far more aggressive and parasitic malignant cancer, or maybe even HIV of humanity that spread even faster and harder, and was able to even overcome foreign immune systems that had previously been able to hold the Walmart cancer at bay. I fully understand why people would see Walmart coming to a town that was likely also suffering as an early indicator and outlier to the de-industrialization /globalization that wouldn’t impact more consequential lower-middle class until a bit later and would largely be experienced as benefits by the upper middle class that you also likely occupy now and for a while now. For context, this same process seems to be unfolding at an even more rapid pace in Germany right now as the industrial small business base is being massacred and that will have the same kind of devastating effects on the dependent small, family owned businesses and retail companies that have been a moat to the likes of Walmart, Amazon, and even by extension, the Ubers and Food delivery services and digital services that serve a deracinated and shattered population in the USA currently.
zikduruqe 2y ago
Are you me? Growing up, the nearest Walmart launched about 17 miles south of the town I lived in, and we slowly saw a drop in stores locally. Then the interstate was completed about 5 miles west of our town, then all the "tourist" traffic bypassed our town. There is basically nothing left of my little hometown anymore.
- GlenTheMachine 2y ago
  In my case the interstate was put in 30 miles north of town before I was born. In the 1960s the town had been an active town due to being near the intersection of two major state roads, and actually had three large motel complexes at that intersection. But the interstate put them out of business.
bl4kers 2y ago
Your town seems to prefer short-term gains over long-term sustainability. You might not be poorer but Walmart could be keeping folks stagnant. If they extract all wealth then the well runs dry.
deleted 2y ago
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MrSkelter 2y ago

Your anecdote isn’t really an argument. The fact that “people didn’t cry” when a business arrived is totally meaningless when it comes to assessing the impact of a business and its model on a community. Walmart pay subsistence wages and below. They survive via exploiting governmental support for low income individuals while funneling profit to their billionaire owners. When they become a major part of the local economy the locals lose out.

jjeaff 2y ago

We had 2 grocery stores and I think Walmart put one of them out of business. However, the selection was much larger and it was a boost to local businesses because fewer people needed to travel to the next town over for supplies after Walmart came to town. It also employed significantly more people. I'm no fan of Walmart and their cut throat practices, but it hasn't been all bad for everyone.

JKCalhoun 2y ago
Ha ha, so Walmart made your neighboring communities poorer.
- Jensson 2y ago
  If you count total wealth rather than median income probably, since before the wealth stayed in the community with the locally owned shops and after Walmart moved in the wealth gets extracted away from the community.

bluGill 2y ago

That is my memory of Walmart coming to town as well: good riddance to those overprice stores with bad service and poor selection that we only went to because driving to the big city mall where we could get reasonable prices took time and so it was a big event that took most of your Saturday, while we could get into them quickly (if they had what we really needed) Farmers and rural dwellers everywhere made regular trips to the largest city near them (sometimes a two hour drive) just to get selection. Mail order only filled some of that need (online is just mail order on the internet)

highcountess 2y ago
I think both of you have a perspective that is well into a more advanced phase of a degenerative process than you or even most people realize, i.e., you describe a phase when the cancer had already been eating its way through the economy, as evident by the closing of local and legacy retail stores and collapse of community economies from early onset symptoms of cancer that were dismissed like saying “just feeling down” or “just a bit of a lump” or “I’m just tied”, or even worse, “it’s healthy capitalize competition to compete with the subsidized de facto slave love of China”. What Walmart represented was really just a kind of acceleration of the cancerous growth and metastasis throughout the body of the economy, spreading to the bloodstream. The likes of Amazon only made things that much worse, a far more aggressive and parasitic malignant cancer, or maybe even HIV of humanity that spread even faster and harder, and was able to even overcome foreign immune systems that had previously been able to hold the Walmart cancer at bay. I fully understand why people would see Walmart coming to a town that was likely also suffering as an early indicator and outlier to the de-industrialization /globalization that wouldn’t impact more consequential lower-middle class until a bit later and would largely be experienced as benefits by the upper middle class that you also likely occupy now and for a while now. For context, this same process seems to be unfolding at an even more rapid pace in Germany right now as the industrial small business base is being massacred and that will have the same kind of devastating effects on the dependent small, family owned businesses and retail companies that have been a moat to the likes of Walmart, Amazon, and even by extension, the Ubers and Food delivery services and digital services that serve a deracinated and shattered population in the USA currently.

zikduruqe 2y ago

Are you me? Growing up, the nearest Walmart launched about 17 miles south of the town I lived in, and we slowly saw a drop in stores locally. Then the interstate was completed about 5 miles west of our town, then all the "tourist" traffic bypassed our town. There is basically nothing left of my little hometown anymore.

GlenTheMachine 2y ago
In my case the interstate was put in 30 miles north of town before I was born. In the 1960s the town had been an active town due to being near the intersection of two major state roads, and actually had three large motel complexes at that intersection. But the interstate put them out of business.

bl4kers 2y ago

Your town seems to prefer short-term gains over long-term sustainability. You might not be poorer but Walmart could be keeping folks stagnant. If they extract all wealth then the well runs dry.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]