Is Walmart a destroyer of small town America? I've seen it in disparate areas of the country in my auto travels this year. Wooster, Ohio. Easton, MD. Eastern North Carolina, dozens of towns along RT. 258 made desolate by strategically placed WalMarts in bigger towns like Greenville. Fishing for opinions and information.

As a tree lover I find it funny that Walmart says it gives to the environment. I bet they have cut down millions of trees for Walmarts all over the world.

Yes, they do ruin downtowns!

And your travel related question is?

I think so-and as to travel---as I travel across the country I am seeing the landscape change from small town squares and downtowns to little towns full of for rent and sale signs and a big ugly Wallmart with a huge parking lot.Driving through rural Illinois one time, noticing in all the farms and fields-a Wallmart looming on the horizon.

Shane, there are probably better forums to ask your question but, to respond to Paul's query just above, there is a travel component to all this.

Part of the joy of travel is seeking out the different and unusual. Speaking for myself, I travel to learn and to broaden my horizons. One of the downsides of America in the last decades of the the 20th Century was the national proliferation of "big box" chain stores, of which WalMart is just one example. WalMart does to small towns what Home Depot does to the local hardware store and Borders does to the neighborhood book seller, just to choose two examples. Because they're ubiquitous, they become numbing, and make areas look alike that ought to have distinction.

But you can't legislate WalMarts out of existence. Paris and Rome, for example, legally forbid hypermarkets (roughly akin to WalMarts) from within their city boundaries. Their goal is to preserve the small shops that give those cities their character. But what do residents of those cities do? Flock in their cars to the hypermarkets that lie just outside the city limits.

Now the court square's just a set of streets
That the people go round but they seldom think
Bout the little man that built this town
Before the big money shut em down
And killed the little man
Oh the little man

Alan Jackson - "Little Man"

Bingo, Neal. With a wife and 3 kids, I do all my travel by Honda van. Driving through downtowns made desolate by Walmart is part of my travel experience.

"made desolate by Walmart"?

Huh?

Don't you mean made desolate by Walmart's customers? Let's not pretend this is the fault of ole Sam- no, it's the fault of every customer who wants a large selection of bottom-end products at low prices.

I agree with Larry. If people wanted the mom-and-pop stores downtown, they would buy at them and not go to Walmart.

Read Bill Quinn's "How Wal*Mart is Destroying America" to get a picture of the negative influence WalMart has on the country. And don't think I'm some way-out socialist. I have views that would make Rush "The Motor Mouth Pumpkin Head" Limbaugh blush. But my days at worshipping at the false altar of absolute laissez-faire capitalism ended when I grew up. Wal*Mart is a corrosive influence to the small town and to the environment as well. If you want confirmation of the damage Wal*Mart does, call the city offices of Nowata, Oklahoma. Wal*Mart moved into Nowata, drove out of business the small town shops, built a super-Wal*Mart in Bartlesville, boarded up the Nowata Wal*Mart, and has left Nowata with almost zero corporate property tax base for the town. That's desolation ... and mean. Gives honorable businessmen a bad name.

Shane, you've now had your opportunity to climb up on a soapbox and preach to the masses. Thank you for illuminating us. But at this point I now throw my lot in with Mr. Rabe: this ain't a dump-on-the-godless-corporate-soul-destroyers forum, it's a travel forum. Time to move on.

Of course we are the makers of our own undoing. Blame WalMart if you like, but blame also Ford, Exxon, RCA, Key Bank, Congress, your school teachers and Ike for enabling a prosperous, mobile, acquisitive global society where obtaining stuff as cheaply as possible (stuff including plane tickets, gallons of gas, and other "travel" items) is given priority over character, tradition, history, or community.

Depending on State law, most local governments support big box retail not for the property taxes they generate, but for the sales taxes they produce, or the State income tax generated through the creation of the jobs. Believe me, when you're a local government leader faced with rising costs and chronic taxpayer revolt, having Wal- or K-Mart sniffing around your edges is an intoxicating prospect.

On the other hand, many small merchants have found they can compete by stocking items not available at the big boys, or emphasizing customer service. Smart merchants can compete, evidence the many towns where big-box retail has actually helped downtown redevelopment, through forcing the merchants to act smart, sometimes for the first time in years. It's not entirely a lose-lose scenario.

John is right -- how many of us complainers have Wal*Mart stock (safely within our 401K mutual funds)? hmmmm....

It's not just the WalMart customers (although I agree that we need to do more on our own to keep small business afloat)--WalMart has a very aggressive, take no prisoners, legal team. What small towns go through trying to keep WalMart out is horrendous, even if the majority of the townspeople don't want Big Sam and his Big Box in town. The lawsuits can cripple a smalltown budget, which is why more than a few have caved rather than keep up the fight. Vancouver, WA, (which isn't a small town but still couldn't afford the legal assault) tried to fight off WalMart and eventually had to give in. And as the French say, "apres moi, le deluge." Now the east side of Vancouver has turned into Big Box country, with nightmare traffic jams, loss of small businesses (except chiropractors, you can still find one on every corner) and so on. Shane, if you want more information, contact The Columbian newspaper in Vancouver, WA.
WalMart as whole illustrates many of the bad things about American consumerism--an emphasis on quantity over quality. Most Americans have closets bursting with not terribly attractive, not well fitted clothes made by cheap labor. It's the fast food concept applied to clothing and housewares.
Yes, this is a travel issue as well as a political issue.

I read very recently that the island of Barbados has approved and will soon have a WalMart...I can't remember which New York City newspaper this item appeared in, but it was only in the past few days.

It's not hard to make the link between the growth of suburban sprawl and the lack of connection most of us feel with our communities.

I travel all over the U.S. on business and over the past 10-20 years many of the cities and towns have begun to look exactly alike and without soul.

I humbly submit that WalMart (and any of the big chain stores) does not do anything to destroy small towns. It's the PEOPLE that destroy small towns!
Suppose that WalMart opens a store on the outskirts of town, and nobody goes there to shop. Then it would be WalMart that's driven out, not the small shopkeepers. But the vocal minority (and it must be a minority, must it not, else there wouldn't be a problem?) seems to love bashing big business, even though the problem (as they seem to think it is) is precipitated by their friends and neighbors. So stop whining and expecting the government to fix the situation. As far as I can tell, the various local governments are representing their constituencies very well, as evidenced by the support these stores receive once they're built.

Les- I hearby banish you from this forum. You make far too much sense.

I encourage those who are whining about Walmart to read your post over and over again until they finally get it.

Well Les and Larry, what's your response to the people who DIDN'T want a WalMart in their town but were forced to accept one in light of an endless legal battle that would have crippled the community's limited budget? That's the "the people", that's WalMart shoving its store down the people's throat. And even if the small town inhabitants DON'T shop there (they don't), the clueless hordes come from towns up the road, clogging up local streets (WalMart promises that won't happen but it usually does) and causing ongoing traffic jams for the neighborhood.

I heard that Vermont has enacted legislation that prevents WalMart from expanding into that state. Is that right?

Something else that you might not know about WalMart: I don't think they own the property their stores are located on. Basically, they come in, establish the store, use up the building, then about 10 years later, move on to a new location in town, leaving the owners of that shopping center holding the bag. Think about it. How many "old WalMart" shopping centers do you know of? In my tiny town, there are 2. KMart, however, is still in the same location. We're too small for a Target.