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

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).

I decided to look at the fine print when it comes to Wal-Mart’s aggressive ad campaigns and luring tactics to attract customers from other stores, including grocery stores, hardware stores, and five and dime general stores. This is especially true in towns of under 30,000 people, like in a town called Pittsburg, Kansas in southeast Kansas, which is a college town and houses two Wal-Marts. I have been to the Wal-Mart stores in Pittsburg. One of the stores is a Super Center and it just opened four months ago. It seems to me that Wal-Marts in the town of Pittsburg, Kansas don’t just earn money; they steal it from other businesses outright. The Wal-Mart way of beating the competition is to “choke smaller businesses by offering a wider variety of consumable and non-consumable products and goods at a more competitive, or cheaper, or discounted, price” (Norman 54).

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 f

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