Sign of the End of Days? WalMart seeks to open in Boston

If they put it right on the Common, imagine all the cost savings for not having to keep the park up any more!

You know what WOULD be cool? If Target or Wal-Mart built a scaled-down urban store right downtown. They could sell only things that can be carried home. There's a Target in downtown Minneapolis that's smaller and right on a walkable downtown street, and it's pretty awesome. I think there are other urban Targets too. Don't think Wal-Mart has done this yet.

It could get some of the "flee the city at 4:59 p.m." crowd hanging around a bit and shopping in the city, and possibly bring in some of the Dorchester/Hyde Park/etc. crowd who hop in the car and go to the burbs for all their shopping/entertainment.

(If it were Wal-Mart who opened this sort of thing, I think they'd need to rebrand a little though to be successful with consumers like myself. I'm pretty anti Wal-Mart largely because of the business model of building giant warehousey stores with sprawling parking lots out front and paying no attention to promoting walkable and sustainable neighborhoods. I would have no problem shopping sometimes at a business owned by Wal-Mart if it were a branch of Wal-Mart that was opening downtown/walkable stores, since I'd be supporting business figures for something I agreed with a bit more, instead of just Wal-Mart. I'd have no problem adding to their overall profits if there were also figures breaking down how regular Wal-Mart is doing versus, uh, Small-Mart. And yes, I fully admit there being some brand/image elitism here; I would not become a Wal-Mart shopper, but would become a Small-Mart shopper provided they called it something cooler. And got rid of the giant signs about falling prices.)

There already is a Target in the South Bay Shopping Center.

Besides low prices, they offer "one stop shopping". A "normal" Wal-Mart usually has groceries, electronics, clothing, housewares, auto supplies, a pharmacy, and a little bit of everything else.

Compared to a Target, their prices, selection, and product range are pretty much neck-and-neck. Wal-Mart tends to beat Target in food sales though. Here's a good article from last year's Time Magazine comparing the two.

I suspect Berkeley and his group would support a Wal-Mart in Allston. I'm completely serious. His rationale for the group's opposition to the pizza place on Western Ave was that they didn't want more restaurants in the neighborhood, but that they wanted retail.

I bet you that if Wal-Mart bought a tract at Western Ave and the Birmingham Parkway and built a store there, they wouldn't have one peep of opposition from the ABA.

Create the kind of not-quite-fulltime jobs that swell the rolls of the food stamp program. That's the main reason I would never shop at Wallmart

Look at the studies. The net effect of a Walmart is often a loss of income to the surrounding community, between the public assistance the employees need, the other businesses going out of business, and the concessions Walmart extracts from desperate local governments.

Assume that these "good prices" means local customers no longer shop at other stores where prices were higher for the same goods. That also means that they are going to pay less in sales tax. That means lower tax revenue. In fact, the only way sales tax revenue would go up would be by drawing in more customers than would have shopped for those same products within your commercial zones anyways. Why would anyone outside of Boston go downtown to get to a Wal-Mart? They already have a Wal-Mart north (Lynn), south (Quincy), and west (Framingham) of the city.

These "good prices" also come at a cost to the undiscerning customer. The products are usually inferior to their more expensive counterparts. Not only is it a "worse" product in terms of quality, but also usually in longevity too. If you spend $10 on that $20 shirt, but you have to replace it twice as fast, you haven't really saved anything at all.

"Creating jobs" is great in theory but it depends on the kind of job created. Part-time labor means someone isn't getting paid enough to live off of it and it usually means they get no employer health care. At the same time, these jobs are likely coming at the expense of other local retail. That's a negative effect on the job level and flattens any positives. Also, unlike non-union companies, like Toyota, where employees get packages competitive with their GM union counterparts, Wal-Mart is more anti-union because it would force them to do better for their employees. Instead, they do poorly by their non-management workforce...and use that as a way to save money to further cut pricing ("yay, this TV is dirt cheap...wait, did that employee just give me tuberculosis?").

Finally, Wal-Marts often draw in a lot of customers. That's extra traffic and other public utility cost. They also use meetings like the ones they're having now with officials to make it seem like cake and pie for them to come here. Then, as Stevil likes to rail against, they get sweetheart deals for the cost of moving in. They get tax discounts and matching efforts from the city to reconfigure whole roadways. That's all cost that comes out of all this "tax revenue" they're generating.

There's also ancillary costs mentioned in the review I linked to in another post. Local companies hire local tax attorneys and other needed consultants to help run their businesses. Wal-Mart does all of that in Arkansas. As they run other companies out of business, these other service industries suffer locally as well.

So, that's just a few reasons why a thinking person would be opposed to a Wal-Mart. The better question is were you thinking deeply at all?

Why do they choose to do so? Because they're either too poor, stupid, or uncaring to consider the ramifications of doing so.

Why do you think Wal-Mart would be such a boon for the city?

Hope you like Boston. Kinda funny- but saw a big white caddy with an Arkansas plate yesterday in downtown Boston.