Great Lakes Green Pages

A lot of people hate Wal-Mart for various reasons.  I understand that.  They were famous for civil-rights violations, racism, gender bias, and other unfortunate blights under the direct orders of perma-southerner founder Sam Walton.  After his death and a major regime change, the company started cleaning up its act.  But truly, these things are not the main reason people hate Wal-Mart.

For years the mega-store would come into a small town, build their gargantuan behemoth, sell at rock-bottom prices which would then force little mom & pop operations to go belly-up.  So evil.  Although this seems to be the epitome of business models celebrated in the eighties, the constant loss of smaller venues began to rattle people, to their core.  Grass roots action groups formed and many citizens started to gather to protest at potential building sites, saying “not in our town, Wal-Mart!”  And good for them; this is America and what’s more American than protesting?

Let me shed some personal insight into how Wal-Mart and their corporate brethren choses potential sites.  In the early eighties I worked for PayLess Drug Stores, the largest independently owned and operated drug store chain in the U.S. at the time (it has since been swallowed up by Rite Aid).  I worked in the construction/real estate development department.  The modus operandi for the development department was to scout out a town, suss out how many operating pharmacies are located there and then start drawing lines to and from each one.  At each intersection of lines, property was scouted to build a new strip mall, usually featuring a local grocery store alongside the drug store, but many times it only had a drug store anchor.  Then a slick salesperson would sidle up to one of the pharmacists at one of the local drug stores; maybe take them to lunch or dinner; buy them some gifts and tell them how great working for PayLess would be.  You see, a state only issues so many pharmacy licenses per year, and it’s easier to get an already licensed pharamacist to come to work for your store.  Once the pharmacist has taken the bait, then you can build your store with complete confidence the other store will have to close.  You can’t call yourself a drugstore if you don’t have a licensed pharacist on site.  Same Evil as Wal-Mart.

Later in my career I designed a grocery store for a woman who had just stepped down as the head of real estate development for Starbucks.  Guess what story she told me?  Starbucks would send out scouts into a neighborhood to see how well other coffee shops were doing.  Once they drew their connecting lines, they’d know just where a new store could be located.  If the existing shops were too far apart, Starbucks may even try to take over the existing stores instead of locating between them.  Pure evil, huh?

A person recently suggested we shop at Target instead of Wal-Mart.  As SNL’s Seth and Amy used to say, “Really?”  Here’s another personal tale:  A few years ago I was working for an architecture firm who was doing a design for a strip center in Chili, New York (pronounced Shy-Lye).  The center was going to be placed on a wetlands, and the developer was willing to purchase double the amount of replacement land that would then be converted into wetlands.  Don’t get me started about whether or not newly created wetlands are as affective as existing ones.  This story is really about how the residents of Chili went to the first public meeting and asked their councilpersons why a this location was so special; couldn’t the center be placed closer to town so the scenic wilderness and wetlands could be preserved?.  The representative from Target announced clearly (and I wildly paraphrase): “don’t mess with us or you won’t get a Target in your town at all!”  To which the citizens of Chili simply said, “fine, we don’t want you anyway.”  Supposedly this surprised and angered Target, but to my knowledge no Target has been built in Chili, New York to date.  I don’t know if Home Depot, who was also to be in this center shared a similar fate.

I guess the moral of these stories is that pretty much all big corporation with ideas of expanding into untapped territories follow the same path that Wal-Mart is constantly blamed for.  Does it make it right?  I don’t know.  Perhaps the little mom & pop stores who have all that quaintness and down-home good feeling are actually guilty of overcharging their customers so they just can’t compete with the buying power of a mega-chain.  Maybe we shouldn’t be patronizing any chain at all?