[Wally_Kalbacken]

In the late 90's I made the colossal blunder of taking a consulting position with a company located in a small town in South Central Wisconsin - a town of ~11,000 in population. It was an extreme bit of culture shock - particularly when I saw some of the old plodding retail stores that just kept going because the town was too small to get a major retailer like Wal-Mart. Inferior, stale goods at extremely high prices were being offered to the public by small retailers in that town.

Wal-Mart should be viewed essentially as a tax cut. Whereas small retailers used to make high margins on everyday items - Wal-Mart is blowing these things out at much lower prices, and much lower margins. Sustained by one of the most impressive and efficient  logistics networks going - Wal-Mart is sharing the excess profit, which formerly went to the local grocery or office supply store, with consumers. If the logic that returning money to taxpayers is justified by the contention that they know how to spend their money better than the government is at all valid - then Wal-Mart is just fine.

I hear the bitching and carping in small towns that seems to come from he local Jaycees/Kiwanis or Chamber of Commerce when a Wal-Mart is proposed. It's just the death wheeze of an old and inefficient scale/way of doing business. That's a good thing.

 

[rellimpank]

--exactly. Amusingly, along that line, my sister works part-time for the C of C in a somewhat larger than 11000 pop Milwaukee suburb.

The official position of the chamber was "keep Walmart out" of course. In the meantime, my sister would almost always see someone from her area at the nearest Walmart, 15 miles away---