Prepare to be Wal-Marted
The Ottawa Citizen - Oct 27, 2005
Don Sawyer
Exiled From Main Street
Americans have been sold on the idea that no cost is too high for low prices, and small towns are being gutted.
Have you ever heard "Wal-Mart" used as a verb? Neither had I before I stopped by mother's home town in rural Alabama last October. From my visits as a child, I remembered Grove Hill as a bustling small town, the busy commercial centre spread out around the square in front of the courthouse. There was the newspaper office on one side, lawyers' offices, Deaver's Cafe, the hardware and feed stores, a huge drugstore (with a real soda fountain), and of course the Piggly Wiggly grocery store that sold wonderful local sausage that would burn the skin off your tongue if you weren't careful.
But it had been almost 20 years since I had been back, and the town looked little like I remembered it. The courthouse was still there (with the Civil War memorial in the square), but virtually every business was gone. The empty stores were boarded up and looked on the deserted street like blind eyes. Only the Piggly Wiggly survived, reduced to a few aisles of dusty cans and some wilting produce.
"What in the world happened to town?" I asked my aunt, who had lived there all her life.
"Oh," she said. "The downtown was Wal-Marted about 12 years ago. Everyone shops out on the highway near Jacksonville now." She sighed. "Sad, isn't it? But what can you do?"
Our visit to Grove Hill was toward the end of a four-week trek through the U.S. Our trip took us through nine states and the District of Columbia. We intentionally stayed off the interstates and travelled through dozens of bypassed towns, small cities and major metropolises. From Crowley, Louisiana, to Lexington, Kentucky, to Detroit, we saw the same desolation over and over again -- shuttered, empty downtown cores surrounded by concentric circles of ghastly malls filled with cheap metal pre-fab buildings, fast-food restaurants and chain motels. The public space of the downtown had been replaced with cavernous warehouses devoid of natural light and strip malls without sidewalks.
We realized that a new term had been coined: "historical district," a euphemism for what had been the commercial centre of the community only a decade or two before. These "historical districts" often featured elegant, graceful brick buildings, many more than 100 years old, along a main street of established trees, broad pedestrian walkways, frequently facing leafy squares with empty benches and green boulevards. Now most of the businesses are gone -- the pharmacies, furniture and grocery stores, the hardware stores where you could buy five nails, the bakeries -- stores that made a commercial centre a community.
There is little debate about the cause of the demise of the American small town -- Wal-Mart and its cronies have sold Americans on the idea that no cost is too high for low prices, and that only their gigantic warehouses can provide the rock-bottom price we seem to crave. There is also little debate that the shift in merchandising has had devastating effects on small towns whenever Wal-Mart and its ilk show up. In the first decade after Wal-Mart arrived in Iowa, the state lost 555 grocery stores, 298 hardware stores, 116 drug stores and nearly 300 apparel stores. And, interestingly, counties where new Wal-Marts have appeared experience higher poverty rates than other U.S. counties.
All is not lost, of course. If you Google "stop Wal-Mart," you will find around 17,000 sites identified (including www.lawmall.com/wal-mart, which provides 26 pages of references and legal advice on how to "stop Wal-Mart from expanding and destroying your community"). From Inglewood, California, to Chicago and New York City, community members are beginning to organize to keep the big- box stores out of their towns.
And Canada is beginning to catch on as well. After Wal-Mart closed its Jonquiere, Que., store earlier this year, shortly after the workers voted to become the first unionized Wal-Mart in North America, other communities began to take a longer look. In June, Vancouver council rejected a proposed Wal-Mart in its city, and, after months of grassroots resistance, the Campbell River council, in front of a packed house of 400 cheering Wal-Mart opponents, unanimously rejected Wal-Mart's bid for rezoning to allow the construction of a mammoth store in that city. (Using a new tactic, Wal-Mart had negotiated an arrangement with the local native band, as it has also done in Salmon Arm, B.C., apparently in a bid to avoid the need for municipal approval -- and municipal taxes.)
But the question is, does it matter? Is this alarm really warranted? Does the shift of commercial activity from a downtown core to outlying sprawls of retail boxes and parking lots have any social impact?
Coincidentally, while I was visiting family in Detroit, the Free Press ran a series of essays titled "Why is America Angry?" (Interestingly, while there was great debate about the answer, no one questioned the premise that America is angry.) While speculation ranged from the increasing elusiveness of the "American Dream" to traffic jams, a remarkable consensus emerged: America is angry because Americans have lost a sense of community. The hearts and souls of American cities and towns had been sacrificed for cheap prices, easy car access, and speed. Americans had moved to bedroom communities where people slept but where no one actually worked, shopped and lived.
In short, Americans have lost a sense of place. There was a feeling of rootlessness, emptiness, and disconnectedness. People were frustrated and pissed off. But they didn't know exactly why, or where to direct it.
The death of the downtown is a key contributor to this sense of anomie and alienation. The downtown is the heart of any community. When it begins to die, the entire town begins to psychologically and socially wither.
Think about it. The downtown is an integral part of who we are as a community. It's the local office-supply store owner staying open until 6:30 at night, helping a customer get material ready for a workshop the next day. It's local grocery-store employees openly weeping because a customer of 30 years has died of cancer. It's the liquor store calling you Saturday morning to tell you a wine you like is in.
No, shopping is far more than simply purchasing items at the lowest possible cost. It is a statement about the kind of community we want, the kind of society we want. On the one hand there is the Wal-Mart vision of an impersonalized, underpaid, aesthetically grating big-box society. On the other there is the vision of commerce as a social exchange, an extension of people knowing, caring and interacting with one another. An exchange that strengthens us all collectively and individually.
I know which I prefer. And every purchase I make is going to be a conscious act that puts my money where my mouth is. Shopping as a political act? Whether we like it or not, it is anyway. Let's put our beliefs and values ahead of discounted Chinese lawn rakes.
Don Sawyer is a writer and educator living in Salmon Arm, B.C. He immigrated from the United States 35 years ago.
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