Wal-Mart Discount Stores are Taking Over Small-Town America

Are Wal-Mart Discount Stores good for small communities, or are the so-called Wal-Mart “Super Centers” really just proverbial wolves in sheep’s clothing? Wal-Mart stores may claim to help small-town consumers by selling goods for less money because they supposedly help us save money to use for other things. Wal-Mart stocks their shelves with a high volume of goods on a continuous basis and it seems like they always have what a consumer is looking for, even groceries and food, in the case of the Super Centers, which combine a discount grocery store with a discount store to form a combination “Super Center.” Aren’t Wal-Marts really just taking away from “Mom and Pop” shops and your local grocery, hardware, and general stores by making discount stores so readily available to customers in a convenient venue, like the all-encompassing, one-stop discount store that Wal-Mart has become? There is really another side to this story. Wal-Mart may not be what it seems. It may hurt us more than help us in the end:

With gross annual sales of over $67 billion per year and more than 50,000 stores in America alone, Wal-Mart is one of the bigge

I will quote Wal-Mart’s chief executive officers now and they have been known to say some very interesting things.

st corporations and chain of discount stores in the United Sates. Wal-Mart opens a new store once every two weeks in small communities and large urban cities across the United States, however, are these stores truly benefiting these communities or are they really wrecking havoc (Norman 63)?

It seems to me that Wal-Mart’s officers and executives have always talked about the big job and scholarship opportunities that they have created for their communities, especially in smaller towns. However, statistics don’t lie. They typically are creating 250 minimum wage jobs per store location that only pay as little as $6.00 to $8.00 per hour in most cases and many jobs may be only part-time, or less than 20 hours per work week. Wal-Mart also supposedly has a scholarship program set up, but nowhere in the books or articles that I read did I see that they have done anything to live up to the promise of helping eligible kids and workers in a positive way (Buckman 47). Do you know anyone that got a Wal-Mart scholarship from working there? I certainly don’t, and I have talked to a lot of Wal-Mart customer service representatives and stockers while I researched this essay and not one person said that their employer, Wal-Mart, helped them academically. They put their people through training, but its not college work or college credit by a long shot. Wal-Mart doesn’t pay for people to better themselves through higher learning (Buckman 47).

Do you want to beat Wal-Mart by keeping it from invading small towns like Pittsburg and making their downtown business community and shopping malls into a perpetual ghost land since everyone and their brother shops at Wal-Mart instead and local businesses are going out of business left and right because of Wal-Mart stranglehold on the economy in Pittsburg?

If I look at the facts, Wal-Mart Super Centers are not good for small communities in terms of helping them prosper and helping workers better themselves (Buckman 46). I will be sure to only shop at small businesses that are locally owned, like the family-owned drugstore down the street, or the little mom-and-pop general store around the corner. Wal-Mart stores financially drain small towns dry and leave them for naught and then the towns’ former landmark businesses simply become barren wastelands (Buckman 47). You can fight the building of new Wal-Marts, too.

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