Wal-Mart-onomics

My town is essentially a big-box store town. 2 Wal-Marts, 2 Lowes, a Home Depot, a Target, a Barnes and Noble (mall store), a Belk's (mall store), a Sears (mall store), a Penney's (mall store), a Books-A-Million, 2 K-marts.

We also have a few of the older stand-alone clothing stores, hardware stores, and variety stores.

Our downtown (Court Street) is dead, but it wasn't killed off by Wal-Mart or the mall; it was killed off by the growth pattern of the city. Most of the new houses were not convenient to downtown. Now Old Jacksonville has the lowest population density of any of the wards of the city. Retailers don't locate there because there is not a large enough customer base, unless the business caters to the lawyers and others that work around the court house. It is significant that the restaurants in the downtown area are open for breakfast and lunch, but not for dinner; there are simply too few people in the area after the court closes for the day.

Wal-Mart is blamed for ruining downtown and killing off the locally-owned (Mom and Pop) stores. But that is blaming the symptom for the disease. Sam Walton was not a visionary who invented something that never would have been though of if he had not thought of it. He was a visionary because he thought of something that inevitably was going to happen first. If it hadn't been Wal-Mart, it would have been Smith-Mart, or Jones-Mart, or Someonelse-Mart. Whoever thought of the idea, and had the energy and skill to push to push it through, could have done what Sam did.

Globalization is real, and among its effects we must count the increasing effectiveness of large-scale retailers in taking advantages of it. Wal-Mart and Target and Best Buy can can afford to hire people to scour the world for the best prices and the cheapest shipping, to bring things to the US from China, India, Indonesia, and the other industrializing countries.

But that may be changing.

As the Internet becomes more pervasive, and as businesses become more adept at using it, smaller retailers may discover that they can do the things Wal-Mart does. While Pop tends the counter, Mom may be on the net negotiating with a factory in Shanghai. Because they cannot buy in the bulk of a Wal-Mart, they may not get quite the price of the big boxes, but they can get close enough that their advantage in a closer, less crowded location, better service, and a willingness to cater to the needs of individual customers will give them a secure customer base.

Finally, not everyone shops at Wal-Mart for price alone. The only time I shop at Wal-Mart, almost everything else is closed. When I need something at the last minute for a trip that starts at 5:00 a.m., I buy it from Wal-Mart or, too often, I can't get it at all. I go to Wal-Mart faute de mieux--for the lack of a better alternative.