I can’t imagine a WalMart being a good thing in downtown Oakland. First off, it’s too big. Just the sea of parking lot alone would be a large chunk of downtown, and they’d have to knock down a lot of most likely historic buildings. Secondly, I can’t imagine Chinatown, which is largely independent grocers selling excellent produce at cheap prices, surviving the onslaught. That’d be a sad, sad thing to lose.
I can. The patrons of Chinatown grocers are probably looking for different produce than WalMart sells, and are also probably willing to pay a bit more for it, too. Maybe all the grocers won’t survive, but the good ones will.
But let’s suppose for a moment that they don’t. What’s the alternative? If more people want to shop at WalMart, why should your tastes determine which stores stay open instead of theirs?
BTW, I agree that it would be a sad thing to lose, too, but so were all the buggy whip stores that went out of business when horses were no longer used for transportation. Things change.
It’s not my taste, it’s the vitality of the city. There are businesses that can and do kill cities. Sometimes, these are even businesses that people may want very badly, but will still hurt the long-term vitality of the city. When planning cities, you have to think in terms of decades. It’s been a long struggle to recover from the planning mistakes of the past, and the inner city is on it’s way up. It’d be a mistake to rush in to something that huge in search of a quick fix.
And frankly, right now, the inner city is one of the last bastions of the American dream. It’s one of the few places where it’s possible to open a small business. In the last decade, we’ve seen downtown Oakland’s empty storefronts turn in to a city of small businesses and artist (Oakland has more working artist per capita than anyplace west of Manhattan). We’ve seen it’s denizens turn in to small business owners, who are deeply invested in their community. WalMart isn’t going to run a neighborhood watch program. WalMart isn’t going to take measures to keep the streets clean, or give micro-loans to fledgling businesses. One of the reason’s why Chinatown is such a bustling place is that the merchants there work together. They all benefit from a thriving area full of interesting shops and restaurants. They all benefit from having a safe, attractive neighborhood. And they work together to fund each other’s ventures and to help each other’s businesses through hard times.
But WalMart benefits from having a desolate shopping district with few options. WalMart benefits from having a poor transit system that traps low-income workers and consumers in one place. WalMart benefits from having unsafe streets where people are scared to venture out.
Do you have a cite for that? I only ask because I still see plenty of small businesses opening in the suburbs.
Marc
I got it from living three years in downtown Baltimore. Which, I understand, is a paradise compared to, say, Detroit.
Why would a Wal-Mart in an inner-city neighborhood need a parking lot? Their customer base would live within walking distance.
Why?
Bidness is bidness and all, but the problem I have with Wal-Mart is that (as stated in the NPR report) 4 out of 5 small businesses in the immediate vicinity are driven out of business when they come to town. Not only that, they also drive their suppliers out of business with their draconian price reduction demands. In a perfect, amoral market-economy sense, we say “so what?”. However, there is more to life than low prices for customers and profits for WalMart’s stockholders. Those 4 out of 5 extinct businesses and hounded-out-of-business suppliers are more American jobs down the drain, the destruction of the social fabric of communities, and a cheapening of the American Way. WalMart is a very shitty employer, so the jobs they create do not begin to replace what they destroy, monetarily or otherwise. It’s very much like cutting down old-growth forest and replacing it with monoculture pulpwood forest.
Doesn’t the grocery store get full dollar reimbursement for food stamps spent on groceries. Why would this not be profitable to Walmart? Isn’t a dollar a dollar?
I live in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood that’s about 85% white. The shoppers at the supermarket two blocks from my house are predominantly black. Why? It’s the closest supermarket to many predominantly-black inner city neighborhoods where there’s no supermarkets. They drive or take public transit three or four miles to shop there.
Folks in the inner city might not have that much disposable income. Still, the collective disposable income of … oh, 100,000 poor inner city residents may be about the same as that of 30,000 middle class residents. There are also many middle-class African-Americans that live in the inner city; some out of a sense of duty or obligation, some because they feel comfortable there. There are few retail outlets available to serve them, aside from small bodegas (often owned by families that don’t live in the area, and employing few who really do live in the community) and specialty retail businesses that won’t be in competition with Wal-Mart (urban clothing stores, etc.) If someone living in the 'hood wants a Chinese DVD player, a Chinese desk lamp, or a set of Chinese bed sheets, and they can afford it, they usually won’t go without. They just now schlep to the suburbs.
I’m definitely not a Wal-mart fan, but I applaud their move to the 'hood. I just hope the site planning and architecture of the stores respects their urban setting, and doesn’t follow a suburban model - the battleship grey box placed hundreds of feet behind a large parking lot. I also hope they don’t depend on corporate welfare, prying costly economic development incentives out of their host communities.
The point is, people who draw food stamps are unlikely to have much total purchasing power. And Wal-Mart merchandise is not quite as cheap as their advertising suggests. (We’ve had Pit threads on their practice of having a big “sale” that leaves prices substantially unchanged or even higher.)
Because nobody goes out on a nice stroll to WalMart. People are more likely to want to get their shopping done quickly in one reliable place when they don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods. Unlike the suburbs, where that has always been a virtue since getting anywhere requires car travel, the cities still have a “walking around” economy. You go to a baker (or more likely Pananderia) to get your bread, you go to the butcher to get your meat. It’s not like the suburbs where you load up your car and the streets are fairly empty. In cities the streets are lively, which is a huge part of how small businesses stay in business. I think most people around here do have cars, but prefer not to use them if possible.
Street crime is one of things that would push people to chose WalMart over the current way to do things. WalMart. If people aren’t comfortable on the streets, they aren’t going to be patronizing their local businesses. And they have to buy stuff somewhere, and thats where WalMart with it’s seas of parking and big lights and promises that you’ll never have to shop anywhere again comes in.
They must have some suppliers or they wouldn’t have anything on their shelves.
WalMart is tough at the bargaining table with their suppliers. What is your proposal to change that practice? Do you have some legislation in mind? If so, what? Or are you thinking of boycotts?
Saying that shareholders don’t run the company is exactly the same thing as saying that voters don’t run the government. True at a simplistic level but ultimately wrong.
If they can get a place to build a Wal*Mart along with a parking lot I say let them try. However I wouldn’t support it if they had to use eminent domain to force the sale of adjacent properties, and I just don’t see where there would be that many places you could buy that many adjacent lots together from willing sellers. Let alone holders of historical properties.
In fact, one reason Wal*Mart might want to not move into the inner city is somewhat related to that point: higher prices and regulations. Property taxes are certainly higher, for one. For two, they’d have to buy property and in even the most run-down neighborhoods properties sell for more than the empty land Wally World is used to building Megalomarts on.
So I think it would be very good for them from a demand side, for reasons other poster have already put. And I don’t think it would be as disastrous as some others have opined, I just don’t want the government to HELP walmart at the explicit expense of small businesses (that happens enough as it is.) I do think though that without government intervention Mall*Wart will find it hard to turn as big a profit from inner-city stores as it does from the ones in Sprawlsville.
To say that voters don’t run the government is ultimately right in any republic larger than a city-state (and in most republican city-states, too).
There are areas of Baltimore in which $1200* will get you a three-bedroom rowhouse. Sure, it’ll probably need lots of work but it’s a home.
*That’s not per month.
Well, I wouldn’t begrudge the residents of a city from setting zoning laws, so in that sense I’m with you. But I’m not sure there is some absolute, objective set of parameters that will define a successful city. BTW, when you say “the inner city is on it’s way up”, which inner cities specifically are you talking about? When people tack “inner” onto “city”, I think it usually means “poor and minority, especially African-American”. At any rate, I’m trying to figure out if you’re talking about Oakland in particular or every “inner city” in the counry.
You’ll need ot back that up with some statistics. I think you’re making a wild extrapolation from what you happen to being seeing in front of you right now.
Cite on the streets issue? And how many of these mom and pop stores give “micro-loans” to fledgling businesses?
That makes no sense at all. If WalMart is in the city, then it damn sure is going to want a safe neighborhood, othewise people won’t go there.
Here’s the problem I have with most of the criticisms thrown at WalMart in this (and he other WalMart related) thread(s). The only way to “fix” the problem people are bringing up is thru legislation, which will probably make things even worse. If you don’t like WalMart, boycott it. Organize the biggest boycott you can, but don’t try to legislate it out of business. It’s easy to criticize WalMart, but I haven’t seen anyone answer my questions about what they would do to change things. Frankly, I can’t stand WalMart and never shop there. But I’m not about to enforce my own personal tastes on the rest of my community.
Actually, like I said before IMO the only way to have Wal*Mart in the inner city is through government intervention, which I oppose. While I don’t think legislation to prevent this would “make things worse”, I don’t think it would help things any, and using market forces to solve a market problem in this particular instance would seem like a good solution to things.
Mostly I’m talking about Oakland, because thats what I know. All inner cities are not the same, and I think it’s kind of silly to talk about them as if they were. Furthermore, I think it’s kind of silly to talk about the economics of a particular place if you’ve never been there (and I’m not saying this is you, but I’m sure plenty of these poster’s experience with the inner city comes from newscasts and movies),
I do exactly what I do now- expect my city planners to do their job and vote for people with an interest in keeping this city a wonderful place to live. If they build a toxic waste factory or high-security prison downtown, it’s not my responsibility to boycott it- it’s my responsibility to keep that from happening in the first place. I’ve read that in many cities, it’s become profitable from a tax perspective to tear down buildings and turn them in to parking lots- I’m not gonna support that, even if that does happen to be the most economically successful model for the property owners. Once again, it’s not about tastes, it’s about economics. The city will never compete with the suburbs playing the suburb’s games. If it is to succeed, it has to embrace what makes it special. And that is not WalMart.