Discussion for article #236826
Fulton, Texas was a little town with a thriving main street - barber shops, cafes, drug store, etc.
Walmart came in and the residents were thrilled. Then Walmart offered everything including hair cuts, and every store on main street closed.
Within a handful of years, the Walmart closed, and now everyone was forced to drive to the next-nearest Walmart, some 30+ miles away, for everyday items.
This is the result of a deliberate strategy Walmart waged in the 80s and 90s - opening stores knowing they would be closing every other one within 5 years or so once they had killed off all local competition. 60 Minutes did an expose on this many years ago.
A couple of small towns saw it coming and tried to stop Walmart coming in, and were sued.
10 Likes
Mal-Wart.
1 Like
Our Town mates with The Last Picture Show.
PS: Well-written, evocative article.
12 Likes
Workers in the Fort Stockton store, along with Wal-Mart employees across the country, will be paid a minimum of $10/hour by February 2016. But the lure of the nearby oilfields, where hourly wages start at around $20 an hour—or double that, depending on the job—makes a job at Wal-Mart a difficult sell. Employee turnover is high, and this particular store is known for impossibly slow-moving lines. “With the oilfields nearby, it’s hard for them to keep people,” Arna McCorkle, the executive director of the Fort Stockton Chamber of Commerce, told me. “I think they’re doing the best they can with what they have.”
There’s a solution for this. Pay more. Respond to the market.
Those of us waiting in line shifted from foot to foot, companionable in our shared frustration. We murmured complaints, looked at the time on our phones, discussed leaving but didn’t leave. After all, there was nowhere else to go.
Never mind. If you can give crappy service and still retain customers, you need not pay more.
3 Likes
But the store still exhausted me, with its combination of abundance and cheap plastic, nothing seeming to cost what it was worth.
I found this sentence puzzling. Does “nothing seeming to cost what it was worth” mean the items were more expensive than expected, or less? And how is that exhausting?
I think the author means that the sheer scale of the abundance of goods available was so overwhelming that it was difficult to encompass without experiencing a sensation akin to exhaustion. And “nothing seeming to cost what it was worth” seems to allude to the fact that it is difficult to understand how a product which presumably passed through human hands, processing by machine, and a combination of shipping and trucking to make it to the Wal-Mart shelf was priced as if it had simply been plucked from a field next door with no effort whatsoever.
2 Likes
I remember the fights against Walmart.
They were a lot like the fights against TPP. All the money and power ended up winning. Come to think of it, Walmarts involved in TPP, too.
2 Likes
Really good article, and really accurate too. I may be based out of Dallas, but I do a lot of driving through Texas, and a lot of the towns you drive through consist of a McDonalds and a Walmart and that is it. Maybe a Brookshire Brothers if the town is lucky.
Walmart doesn’t have to be a bad thing (although it often is). I started spending a lot of time in the town of Hutto, TX in 2002. At the time the population was 1,200 and the meeting place for everyone was a Sonic across the street from the one high school. Then the Walmart opened in 2003. Today Hutto has a population of almost 20,000. That is a population increase of 1,667% in thirteen years. They are expecting a population of 40,000 by 2020 and 60,000 by 2030. I am not kidding, it went from cornfields and nothing to a Walmart, to strip centers, new schools, and actual town center. The place has exploded.
I’m not foolish enough to believe the Walmart caused the population growth. I am betting Walmart anticipated the growth and got in while the getting was good. I honestly don’t understand how Hutto grew so rapidly, but I am glad for the people who live there that it did. I’m sure it has something to do with the new SuperHighway 130 tollroad they built nearby, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out why.
1 Like
If you’ve ever seen the show American Pickers, it displays the result of the Walmartification of America regularly.
Two antiques and collectibles pickers drive around the USA into small towns looking for stuff.
A constant theme is showing small towns with their entire historic business districts boarded up. Inside the buildings there is sometimes valuable old stock, or collections of things the building owner has hoarded.
Quite often they meet families that were in business - hardware, dry cleaning, clothing, hats, shoes, general stores, auto sales, motorcycle sales, auto repair, etc. When discussion comes to what put them out of business the answer is always the same “Big Box Stores.”
If you were to look into it, I’m confident that outside of every one of those sad towns there is either a Walmart (or Home Depot, etc.) … or a vacant building where one WAS before it closed to force the townspeople to drive to the one 2 towns over. And in every one of these towns they talk about how the younger generation is forced to leave the area in search of opportunity.
Walmart killed small town America… yet small town America still loves Walmart.
5 Likes
it is quite the coincidence! I know Frank Fitz. Before moving last fall I lived just a few blocks from him and his store in tiny Savanna Illinois. Just to get an idea of the area, we had the only stoplight in the entire county.
But you are right, I have seen these small boarded up towns all too often.
1 Like
I was already concerned when shopping centers and malls replaced down-town; suddenly the commons was in private hands. If you want to promote your club, promote a cause, or promote a candidate, you need the owner’s permission. Wal-mart continues that trend to an even greater extent – one family across many counties and states that can choose not to allow you to voice your opinion in the “town square”.
That’s a lot of power in very few hands.
2 Likes
It’s not just the sheer amount of stuff: it’s the sheer ugliness of most of it. Clothing, furniture, home decor. It doesn’t matter what it is: it’s all plug ugly. Whatever can be made ugly they are willing to sell. I just find it so depressing to go there that the only time I do is when we are traveling and there are no other options.
As for the organic section, the last one I checked out–and I think it was Fort Stockton–was the most pathetic collection of wilted produce I had seen in the last twenty years. It took up about a foot wide swath of the already sad produce section. Every time Consumer Reports writes about supermarket quality Walmart comes in dead last. There’s something about Walmart that is symbolic of how badly we treat people who aren’t rich in the US: it’s not just the pay; it’s also the giant P for poverty that they might as well brand every piece of clothing with.
4 Likes
I’d say it was the new road, which opened up access.
1 Like
The public commons has been reduced to consumption.
Just as while we were once a society and a community, we are now an economy, and while once citizens, now we are consumers.
2 Likes
Agree, the mall destroyed downtowns, and their sense of community, which also included the post office, museum, courthouse, town square, playhouse, nightclub, etc.
And Walmart replaced quality and brand loyalty with loyalty to low prices.
But Hutto was already on US-79, which was a major artery between Austin and East Texas. It isn’t like Hutto was difficult to get to, or even out of the way, being only about 45 minutes from Austin. SH-130 has the highest numerical speed limit in the nation (85 mph) because it is a bypass for people who want to go around Austin on their way south on I-35. Plus it is a toll road, meaning it costs you extra money to get on and off, so you aren’t going to be stopping there for errands.
Maybe you are right, maybe it is that SH-130 opened up access to people who want to work in San Antonio but live in Hutto (home of the fightin’ hippos!). But I can’t figure out why SH-130 would cause a town to explode like that. Either way, Rick Perry and his buddies are making a lot of money off that tollroad.
Maybe the toll road connects employment centers to an adjacent bedroom community.
1 Like
I think by far the greatest impoverishment Walmart inflicts is with the inferior quality of their cheap shit. My avatar is a tribute to them, a pair of multitool pliers I broke by the strength of my own grip. And I’m no Hercules. I boycott. Them for their abysmal quality control. Also, I tried boycotting them for political reasons once, but all the remaining local merchants had "I stand with Scott. Walker. Signs in the window. So to heck with them as well.
1 Like
Boy, you have that right. A few years ago I unintentionally offended a guy by bad mouthing Walmart, explaining how they killed the small towns and challenging him to go there and pick up any small appliance that wasn’t made in China.
I’m a bit of a hypocrite though, I can turn left at the highway and drive 17 miles to Walmart for groceries, or as I occasionally do, I can turn right and drive 11 miles to a tiny mom and pop grocery store that usually has what I want. If I need a fan or a coffee maker there’s really only one place to go. When I need building supplies I can drive 50 miles to Lowe’s or pay double at the local hardware store.
Good article.
3 Likes