With 269 Stores Closing, Is this the Beginning of the End for Walmart?

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/02/27/269-stores-closing-beginning-end-walmart

Not all the news has been bad, though. While the opening of a Walmart is often highly destructive, its closure can have significant upside—at least over the long-run, and sometimes immediately. An independent grocery store in Winters, Texas, was only a day away from closing for good when Walmart announced it would vacate the town. The store’s staff quickly moved to restock the shelves. The 42-year-old locally owned Norm’s Grocery in Seligman, Missouri, got a similar last-minute reprieve. And in Mansfield, Arkansas, a new pharmacy is on the way now that Walmart is pulling out.

For small towns especially, the economic advantages of having a locally owned grocery store instead of a Walmart are profound. Studies have found that about 85 percent of the dollars that flow into the cash registers of a Walmart store leave the community. Independent businesses recirculate a much larger share of their revenue locally, and recent scholarship has concluded that communities with more locally owned businesses have faster income growth and lower rates of poverty.

And yet, city officials continue to bet on Walmart. Perhaps no city felt as burned by the company’s pullout as Washington, D.C., which agreed in 2012 to let Walmart build three stores in more well-to-do areas so long as it also built two stores in low-income neighborhoods. Now with three of those five stores open—you can guess which ones—Walmart said that it was dropping plans to build the other two, as part of its broader reconfiguration. At one of these shunned locations, the city has already razed a rundown but active shopping center of mostly locally owned businesses to make way for Walmart. Today there’s nothing there but a dirt lot.

In reviewing the situation, the Washington Post’s editorial board opted not to blame Walmart for its bait-and-switch, or even to blame city leaders, who were so in-the-tank for the company that they ignored warnings from activists (including me) and failed to get the deal in writing. Instead, the Post had the audacity to blame D.C. residents for not subjugating themselves sufficiently. “Has the District created an unstable business environment in which employee pay, benefits and work conditions are decided by popular whim, with little regard for the realities of the business world?” the editorial board declared.

[monicaangela]

1. After increasing their

minimum wage for some of their workers, they have started eliminating stores...that should make profits for the family remain the same or maybe even better and give them and opportunity to figure ways to compete with Cosco the other big box store that is cleaning their clock.

[Downwinder]

2. No. Just adjusting for the cuts in SNAP. Notice

they are mostly in low income areas.

[TreasonousBastard]

3. More whining...

"Local stores" might be better overall, but they often pay less and have even fewer benefits than Wal-Mart. And they might not be better overall with higher prices and limited selection. Depending on the specific location, it may be difficult to get any decent stores in there at all.

Far worse is a large chain store closing because of lost sales to Amazon and other online retailers who bring absolutely nothing to the local area.

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. There really needs to be distinction between city Wal-Marts and rural Wal-marts

and same for Amazon sales.

Most of Alabama is made up of very small rural towns, 40 to 50 miles apart.
These towns have under 5,000 population each.
Unemployment is chronically high.
Wal-mart usually does not have much competition as far as groceries go. Usually there is one per county.

Living in one of the small towns as I do, I would love to see a Trader Joe's here, and a Costco, since it is a 232 mile round trip to city stores.
And takes a full day coming and going since half the drive is on 2 lane country roads.
Figure 20.00 in gas.
So, online options are pretty important, and actually result in significant savings.

I do not know where the stores are that Wal-Mart is gonna close. If it is a city, even a small one, most people will have other options.

[TreasonousBastard]

8. Rural areas like yours are a different situation...

I'm in what used to be rural, but is now suburban, even though we still have some farms left. We just got a Costco and the
Wal-Mart moved down the road to double in size, but Trader Joe's and the upscale malls are still about 40 miles away.

Groceries? A&P went belly up so their huge Waldbaum's store here went, to much grief, but we still have lots of grocery options from Aldi and some regional chains to Target and Wal-Mart. We have had a BJ's for a while, and loads of delis and convenience stores.

Yeah, an enormous percentage of the population lives in various degrees of "shopping deprived" areas where it's tough for us in more populated areas to understand, much less to pontificate upon.

[2naSalit]

9. I have a similar drive to big bix stores

but I still will NOT shop at Wlmart, even if I go with someone else, I won't buy anything there. The same cities I go to also have Costco and some other places I'd rather get most of my stuff and I get the rest of my perishables in the nearby town at a sometimes more reasonable price.

[Dawgs]

5. Brand-new store just completed near us. N/t

[subterranean]

6. Not a fan of Walmart, but it had a positive effect in my area.

Walmart opened two stores in Bellevue, WA a few years ago. In both cases, they moved into buildings that had sat vacant for years. One of them was in a shopping center where a K-Mart had closed a decade earlier and was never replaced. There were smaller, locally owned shops, but with no anchor store, the large parking lot was usually deserted. After Walmart moved in, other stores and restaurants opened there too, and now the shopping center is thriving.

[1939]

7. I believe that most of the stores Walmart is closing

are their failing experiment with small convenience sized stores.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

10. No. Possibly a plateauing. Not the beginning of the end.

They tried and failed to compete with Dollar General, which I now see popping up everywhere.