The Death of a Small Town

 Wal-Mart puts its foot in the door in a small town in northern Wisconsin

  

Some say Americans have a love/hate relationship with Wal Mart. Wal Mart is the largest retailer in the world, the largest private employer in the United States.  Wal Mart annual sales are almost three hundred billion dollars.  Wal Mart alone buys more than twenty billion dollars a year in merchandise from Communist China. Through large purchasing power Wal Mart offers low prices in the United States.  But others claim Wal Mart devours smaller, downtown merchants and contributes to suburban sprawl. A small community in northwest Wisconsin Spooner faces efforts to build a Wal Mart Super Center on the outskirts of town.  Nick Vander Puy from the Superior Broadcast Network talks with several key players in the controversy.

 

 

    To listen to a five minute live stream broadcast click here
 

 

To Learn More About the Impact of Wal-Mart on Small Towns click here

Downtown Spooner Wisconsin is a kind of Lake Wobegone.  Across the street is the Red Cross pharmacy, the Hardware Hank and Northwinds book store,  there’s the Buckhorn Tavern, some furniture shops, go two blocks the movie theater.  It’s a  short stroll to the public library. 

 

A popular downtown store for outdoor folks is Spooner Outlet.. It’s the place to find quality outdoor gear.  You can get flannel shirts,  leather and rubber boots, and sporting goods. Check out the big open shelves…they’re stacked with camouflage, blaze orange, and some dark green wool pants. You can get tip ups for ice fishing. Spooner Outlet is  one of those wonderful Wisconsin places…especially the day before deer season.

Roger and Bruce Charron, two brothers,  operate  this store. For almost half a century Spooner Outlet has thrived in downtown Spooner.

Roger Charron.

“One of the most gratifying things of my job  is when I’m one aisle over from a a tourist, even local people shopping at my store, and when I hear them say, and I hear this several times a year, this is my favorite store to shop in, or I hear the guest that they bought, now I know what you mean you had to bring me to this store, that’s another reason I work here to know I’m bringing something valuable to the community.”

Last month Charron gave some emotional testimony, denouncing the Washburn County board for secretive , closed door meetings with Wal Mart. 

 

Charron is concerned. An Ohio State University national study shows when Wal Mart builds near a small  town 17-60 per cent of the local businesses go belly up.

 

After getting a financial diagnosis from his accountant Charron is frightened. 

 

The  accountant says, if Wal Mart builds near Spooner, and Spooner Outlet loses thirty  per cent annual sales, at best Charron’s got four years left in business.

 

“And that is my main concern that when I’m all said and done I don’t want to be lying in bed late at night ten years after I’ve closed up everything knowing I have debts I can’t pay off.”

 

For their part Wal Mart sees itself as a free market, capitalist success story.

 

Roderick Scott is a paid community relations specialist for Wal Mart. Scott evaluates Wal Mart’s impact on building a Super Center in Spooner.

 

“It’s a gain, it’s a net gain.  Obviously, many communities  throughout the country have whole departments dedicated to economic investment and we want to make an economic investment in this community.  And the other thing is we have a dedicated customer who shops at our store religiously, why shouldn’t we give them an opportunity to shop at our store.”

 

But some critics like James Howard Kunstler implicate Wal Mart and other big box stores, for driving poor land use planning, suburban sprawl, , and the cheap oil,  easy motoring way of life. The high- consumption culture.

“That’s a issue that you have to address to someone else.  If you want to talk about the war in Iraq that someone else’s issue, if you want to  talk about oil consumption that’s someone’s else’s issue, that’s not us.  We’re trying to make our trucks more efficient, and give people an opportunity to shop in their community so they don’t have to drive across God’s creation and burn up a lot of gas.”

 Millions of low income Americans shop at Wal Mart for survival.  At a recent Spooner Planning Commission meeting Kim Chapman from Trego presented a petition with more than sixhundred names supporting Wal Mart.

“Well, in this county a lot of people are low income and they don’t make a lot of money and it’s very affordable and the prices around here are higher.”

But Roger Charron from Spooner Outlet says with Wal Mart coming things do not bode well for downtown.  Charron says, like a forest fire, Wal Mart creates it’s own climate.

“It will like a fire, as fire sucks in oxygen, this will suck in the sales from everything around it, which is a store like mine, a store like my neighbors, the hardware stores, the drugs stores, the grocery stores.” 

Charron counts the casualties in Spooner.

 “And just with any other downtown  in the United State we’re going to see ghost town, a virtual ghost town.”

I’m Nick Vander Puy for the Superior Broadcast Network. 

For more information about the resistance to the proposed Spooner Wal-Mart click here

The following statements are from the Wal-Mart Movie web site (click here to see more facts)

Some Facts on Wal-Mart's Impact on Local Business

"Wal-Mart's influence begins before a store even goes in." - Los Angeles Times

  • When Jon Hunter applied for a business loan for H&H Hardware (presumably against the equity on the building that he had been paying on for the past 15 years), the bank actually de-valued Hunter's property, specifically citing Wal-Mart as a factor:
    "I put this business plan together that with the help of hard, different hardware organizations and people and I went to several different banks to check on some funding. And, ah,when I got an appraisal on my, on the business and, and the buildings, you know, the appraiser actually came in and de-valued the building. Here I figured it would be appreciating, after, like ten years, and he came in with a lower value and I questioned him, said, "How can this be?" I say, you know, "With inflation and, the economy's not great but it still should be at least holding its value." And he said, "No," he said, ah, "Any time a Wal-Mart's coming in to a town they, they knock the values down because sooner or later there's going to be a bunch of empty buildings and none of them are going to be able to sell."
    This shows that there is a recognition by market forces that Wal-Mart has a negative effect on local businesses in surrounding areas.

     
  • To say that Wal-Mart wipes out ALL existing businesses is of course ridiculous, and we do not make that point in our film. Businesses close for a number of reasons; the point we are making in the film, a point that is supported by a wealth of evidence present and not present in the film, is that Wal-Mart, in the final equation, hurts rather than helps these businesses in the struggle to remain open and competitive.

    As Greg LeRoy, author of the recent book     "The Great American Jobs Scam," puts it, "Just because there are more places to shop does not mean people have more money to spend." Several studies, including those presented at Wal-Mart's own recent economic conference, affirm that Wal-Mart does not create new economic activity, but merely captures existing sales from businesses in the town and the surrounding areas. These effects are also not immediate, but build up over a length of time.

     
  • Consider the following findings from existing academic studies that have studied Wal-Mart's effect on local markets:

     
    • A study of small and rural towns in Iowa showed lost sales for local businesses ranging from -17.2% in small towns to -61.4% in rural areas, amounting to a total dollar loss of $2.46 BILLION over a 13-year period.


 

WISCONSIN: 1,252 WAL-MART Employees and Dependents on BadgerCare
  • "The biggest employer of BadgerCare recipients was Wal-Mart, which had 809 of its employees and 443 of employee dependents enrolled in the state program in April. Providing health care for those 1,252 people costs Wisconsin about $2.7 million a year; Wal-Mart turned a profit of $10.3 billion in 2004."
  • Source: Stacy Forster, "Big Companies Fill BadgerCare Rolls," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 24, 2005

Wal-Mart Documentary web site (click here to see more facts)

Ohio State University Extension did a study about Wal-Mart and posed the question "Just what are the local costs and benefits of a Wal-Mart store opening up in a community and how are they distributed across the different groups in the community? " To view the study click here

Norway dumps Wal-Mart stock

The huge fund that's meant to preserve Norway's oil wealth for future generations is pulling out of shares that don't meet the government's ethical standards. Among them is the Wal-Mart discount store chain.

To read the full story click here

 

To Download This Wal-Mart Story as an MP3, click here


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