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Remember this is being published by Bezos. It's a great tactic to frame the closing of these stores as afflicting the poor and downtrodden. Woe to the wretches
by oniMaker 11y ago
Remember this is being published by Bezos. It's a great tactic to frame the closing of these stores as afflicting the poor and downtrodden.
Woe to the wretches wrought by way of Walmart. But wait! Perhaps there is a way they can be saved, all without leaving the comfort of their homes...
- chris_wot 11y agoYou are seriously heartless. Many small communities utterly rely on buying groceries. Can you imagine not having anywhere to buy food and having to drive 3 hours just to get it? Walmart drove into these small communities, destroyed the smaller stores, then realised after deliberately making either a loss or tiny profits it wasn't economically viable, then buggered off. I think the only lesson I can see in this is that small communities should always oppose multinational retailers when there is a local option. Even if they have to spend a few dollars more. Otherwise, they'll be left with nothing.
- orf 11y ago> Can you imagine not having anywhere to buy food and having to drive 3 hours just to get it? But why wouldn't smaller stores open again now walmart is gone? Edit: Say what you want about them being mom & pop stores that somehow cant start up again, if it takes 3 hours to drive to a shop and back there is a market opportunity. People will pay more for groceries when it doesn't involve a 6 hour round trip. I thought the idea of Americas great free market is that this void would be filled?
- theklub 11y agoI smell a startup opportunity.
- tw04 11y agoBecause the people that were running them and just barely getting by likely don't have the funds to open a new store. A lot of these places the building/infrastructure was just handed down generation to generation. Once it goes under, there's nothing left to start it back up.
- heurist 11y agoThat's why banks offer business loans.
- ghaff 11y agoAnd they won't make those loans in the absence of a viable business plan. (Plus, this isn't Silicon Valley. The prospective business owner is almost certainly going to need to put some of their own money in.) A lot of dying ex-resource extraction towns just don't present much of a business opportunity for anyone. I also suspect that a lot of readers here don't appreciate that really long drives to get to a "real" store is not that unusual across fairly large swaths of the US.
- coldtea 11y agoTry getting a business loan as e.g. a poor southerner ex-Walmart employee to open a new grocery store in Indianola, MS or Forkland, AL or tons of even smaller places...
- akilism 11y agoWith what capital? More likely that these old mining towns and more rural communities wont exist in a few generations. With younger people moving to the cities to find whatever work they can.
- Terretta 11y agoThe old mom and pops bootstrapped organically, grew both inventory and the know how to stock it over decades, in lockstep with the community. Today, takes a big start cost to go from zero to viable, and the lack of intuitive mom and pop know how is a risk too. In these locations, that startup money itself will be risk adjusted, so expensive.
- ant6n 11y agoWouldn't the people who worked at that recently closed buy'n'large store know about this?
- eropple 11y agoThe knowledge you are referring to was never there in the first place. Large chains have largely centralized inventory management and the actual stores are little more than distribution centers and cash tills. And, even was that knowledge and capability there, the bigger problem remains that the invisible hand doesn't make the necessary capital to open a grocery store (and both its inventory and its plant assets) appear from nowhere. This is one of the trap corners that the unfettered free marketeers of the world would pretend don't exist, but they do and they're ugly.
- a3n 11y agoThere's probably a lot of truth in what you say. But, the economy abhors a vacuum, and there will either be "something" that starts up, or in some cases not and those towns may die. The dead towns will have a complicated story that in many cases will probably include the death of local businesses by Walmart. If I ran 7/11 or Shell, I might be thinking about how to put in gas 'n goes with a somewhat larger retail footprint, a larger percentage of life groceries than potato chips. That would have the backing of a large corp, so the first yearly lack of profit wouldn't kill mom and pop's retirement, and comes with knowledge of running the outlet and managing supply lines. Bonus, you're gonna gas up before you make that three hour grocery run, maybe what they have at the gas station is good enough, or reduces the number of trips you need to make.
- 11y ago
- maxxxxx 11y agoOpening a store is not exactly cheap. There are no VCs that will front you the money but you have to risk your own.
- oniMaker 11y agoWhat does that have to do with my short analysis of Amazon's tactics? It's rude to call someone heartless without basis in fact.
- xpda 11y agoIf people in a community have to drive three hours for food, then there will be enough demand that someone will open a grocery store. When there's an economic vacuum left by a closing superstore, other, possibly smaller, stores will come back and fill it. It's simple economics. When a company such as Walmart opens or closes a large store, there seems to be a mass of news articles explaining how the opening or closing is destroying the community. When a large store comes in, people rarely consider that the new jobs will have benefits and advancement opportunities not found in the traditional mom-and-pop stores. When a large store closes, people rarely mention that it will leave room for new mom-and-pop stores to open. The fact is, large stores have a pluses and minuses. Their opening or closing is more a result of local economic conditions than the cause.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoHave you considered the possibility that this analysis is over-simple and serves a particular narrative.
- striking 11y agoHave you considered making a more thoughtful reply, one that actually challenges the comment you're replying to?
- brational 11y agoIn the real world, you have edge cases where the supply/demand curves run out of room and no one has any capital left to open a grocery store.
- bluejekyll 11y agoThis is the thing that I keep thinking about. If Walmart comes in and essentially extracts the wealth of the community (profits of the store) and then leaves, how long does it take for that community to recover? How long before they can actually afford to invest in more stores to fill the gap?
- coldtea 11y ago
- Outdoorsman 11y ago>Can you imagine not having anywhere to buy food and having to drive 3 hours just to get it?< That's a very real and serious problem for low-income and fixed-income consumers...many of whom are forced to shop wherever they reasonably can... There are many "food deserts"--areas where it's difficult to buy affordable good quality food--in the U.S., especially in sparsely populated urban and rural areas... It's true that if the need (demand) is great enough in an area a retailer of some sort will probably eventually open shop to fill the void...waiting for that to happen can be very painful for the poorest consumers... The best hope for communities abandoned by Wal Mart may turn out to be franchises related to the "dollar store" concept... How Dollar Stores Were Planted in the South and Bloomed... http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-dollar-stores-were-planted-in-the-south-and-bloomed-around-the-us http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-dollar-stores-were-... Dollar Stores: Big Business, Rock-Bottom Prices... http://tedium.co/2016/01/19/dollar-stores-analysis/ http://tedium.co/2016/01/19/dollar-stores-analysis/
- grecy 11y agoGood old propaganda. Too bad they won't do a piece on what happens in a small town when Walmart opens. In mine multiple campgrounds and small locally owned small businesses closed down. Not to mention the workforce is all people from out of town now earning a pittance, living on government assistance.
- oniMaker 11y agoMany articles have been written by many outlets over the past decade on exactly that topic. Here's one by The Post, for example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/wal-mart-vs-target-and-wages-and-small-businesses/2013/12/06/c63492be-5c63-11e3-be07-006c776266ed_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/wal-...
- bobby_9x 11y agoreally? The small shops in my town could barely afford to pay employees minimum wage and their goods were much higher priced. Walmart gave more people jobs at a better wage and reduced the costs of most goods for everyone. I looked at their average wages on payscale.com (hard to libk from my phone) and the max for most positions is close to $15/hour. The minimum is above minimum wage. Almost anyone can do these jobs and they are hardly a ’pittance’.
- gamblor956 11y agoI looked at their average wages on payscale.com (hard to libk from my phone) and the max for most positions is close to $15/hour. The minimum is above minimum wage. That's only been true within the last one or two years as Walmart attempted to avoid further labor-related litigation and unionization efforts. Prior to that, Walmart payed local minimum wage and frequently stiffed workers for time spent checking in and and out shifts.
- driverdan 11y agoWhy would a Walmart put campgrounds out of business?