Wal-Mart has recently announced its plans to open stores in the blighted neighborhoods of urban centers reports Ylan Q. Mui in "Wal-Mart to Enter Urban Markets," reported today in The Washington Post. Wal-Marts attempts to open urban stores have been met with strong resistance in the past, especially from small business owners who felt they would not be able to compete with the mega-store.
To fight the backlash oft associated with the opening of a new store, Wal-Mart is pursuing a new strategy of growing "opportunity zones" alongside its new stores. In the words of Wal-Mart chief executive H. Lee Scott Jr., the zones would "help small businesses withstand competition with Wal-Mart by teaching them how to do business with the company, offering grants to benefit communities and featuring small businesses on radio ads played inside the store, among other things."
Excuse me if I sound a little skeptical, but Wal-Mart is going to help its competitors by teaching them to do business with Wal-Mart? What exactly does this mean? Are they going to "teach them" how to not sell the products that Wal-Mart sells? Teach them how to deal with not being their own bosses? Teach them how to become niche stores that Wal-Mart will then put out of business 5 years later when it exapnds into different product lines?
That said, though I enjoy Wal-Mart bashing as much as the next person, I think it's important to look at the possibilities this new expansion would bring to people living in Detroit (if Wal-Mart chooses to open a store here). The first thought is, more jobs closer to home. Not that these new jobs will come with health insurance or be far beyond minimum wage, but they do offer a steady form of employment for many people who previously had to travel outside of the city for work. The second benefit is the increased access to cheaper commercial goods and food that comes with larger stores and has evaded most inner-city citizens for a long time. However, unless WalMart opens up a fruit and vegetable section, it seems that it will be bringing the same junk food people can currently buy in bodegas and corner stores, albeit at a better price. Finally, there isn't much small business to be put out of business. Maybe this will bring more economic growth opportunity than it will stifle. Maybe.
~bEckY
Anant Gariola commented on my last post, "You make some good points, but something I never really understood was how after all the corruptions scandals, after being in Time magazines worst 4 mayors in the U.S. Kwami got re-elected? I am by no means (at all) an expert on race relations or racial politics but is the point you're trying to make that Kwami is no better or worse then any white mayor, its just that because he is black he doesn't get a break?"
Those are some good questions and I might have answers...to some of them. I think that the reason why Kwame Kilpatrick got re-elected is very different from the reason why he gets so much crap from white suburbanites. Kwame got re-elected for many of the same reasons that Marion Barry (so near and dear to my heart from my hometown in DC) got re-elected. He is a man of the people. While many people from the suburbs (and from Northeast DC) could not understand how a man who ran a blatantly corrupt government and was caught in a cocaine racket (televised for weeks after the scandal) during which he exclaimed, "Goddamned bitch set me up!" could possibly be re-elected. But he was.
Possibly because he wasn't a tool like many thought the always bow-tied Mayor Anthony Williams to be. He did his own thing and the people of DC (who are, as a general rule, screwed over in many ways) liked that he wasn't taking shit from larger political pressures.
I guess the point that I was trying to make is that by no means would I consider Kwame to be a good mayor. But look at what he has to work with: A bankrupt city with an powerful history of racial tensions, boom and bust job markets, awful schools and a nonexistent regional government with a habit of supporting suburbs and new infrastructure rather than supporting the city and updating the old. I imagine that there are some worse mayors with better towns, and probably some equally bad mayors with equally bad towns (though they are probably on a smaller scale).
Finally, the fact that many suburbanites believe a main reason for Detroit's downfall was the "driving out" of white people--as if it is the fault of the black people who were unable to move out of the city that all the white people left (and as if the only problem was white people leaving)--rather than the public policy that perpetrated an unbalanced/unfair housing market and encouraged racism along with numerous other economic factors (like partial abandonment by the auto-industry), gets me a little upset. Sorry about the run-on sentence.
What do you all think?
~bEckY