Put Wal-Mart On-Line, Off Sacred Ground

It’s not every day that someone like me wants to wish Wal-Mart well, but that day has come. The giant store chain, known for emptying out Main Streets all over America, is going on-line. As a result, shoppers will be able to order Wal-Mart stuff from their computers at home.

Americans interested in preserving their downtown commercial districts should rejoice. Wal-Mart going virtual. That means not actual. What an attractive idea.

Wal-Mart’s talent for hunting old town centers still gasping with life is well-known. First it buys a field on the outskirts. Then it covers the property with acres of asphalt for parking. Then it drops a big ugly warehouse-type building in the center. Within the box, shoppers can find an array of goods, from shampoo to curtains, at popular prices.

Before you know it, the snoozy mom-and-pop stores that have been on Main Street forever are history. Consumer dollars leave town for Bentonville, Ark., where Wal-Mart keeps its headquarters.

Little towns from Belle Fourche, S.D., to Eufala, Ala., to Scotts Bluff, Neb., have waged mostly unsuccessful battles against Wal-Mart’s intrusions. Occasionally, the giant retailing chain loses, as in the case of Bath, Maine, and Greenfield, Mass. More often it prevails, as in Steamboat Springs, Colo.

However, few people are aware that Wal-Mart employs an elite unit assigned to locate sites of great importance. These employees are professionals not content to settle for any old piece of meadow on the edge of town. They look for special situations - land that has historical or cultural significance.

In something of a coup, the chain has found George Washington’s boyhood home near Fredericksburg, Va. This is the farm where Washington cut down the cherry tree, if he really cut down the cherry tree.

Historians and environmentalists have objected to Wal-Mart’s plans to pave over Washington’s boyhood farm. However, a store spokeswoman helpfully explains that if Wal-Mart does not put a store on that commercially zoned acreage, someone else will. And to soothe local feelings, the discounter will place a Colonial-style facade on the box.

Wal-Mart has already managed to insert a big store among the historic plantation homes of Natchez, Miss. To the consternation of local preservationists, the discount store had chosen 24 prime acres in a cultural center of the pre-Civil War aristocracy. A turn-of-the-century Colonial revival house and an old hardwoods forest had to go. Downtown Natchez was none too happy about it either.

In New England, Wal-Mart has bravely announced that local protests would not deter it from building a store at the fringes of the historic town of Sturbridge, Mass. In North Plymouth, Mass., the chain leveled a hill where the venerable Loring Library once stood. The 1899 clapboard library building, now in three pieces, waits for town officials to find a new location.

Wal-Mart has demonstrated a special flair for finding sites sacred to American Indians. One, in Paso Robles, Calif., contained the remains of an ancient Chumash village and burial grounds. In an act of great beneficence, the discount chain preserved a 1-1/2-acre knoll. The sacred spot above the Salinas River is easy to find because it is encircled by a mall parking lot. In return, Indian activists agreed not to halt the project if more bones were found elsewhere on the property.

The chain has built a store on an important 9,000-year-old archaeological site in Oxford, Maine. And it holds an option to buy 35 acres of Leeds Flats, a pre-Revolutionary War campground in New York State’s Catskill Mountains. The property contains artifacts from the trade between the Dutch colonists and Mohican tribe.

Is this column just another unfair example of Wal-Mart bashing? Perhaps. The stores are no uglier than those of other discount chains.

The objections stem more from Wal-Mart’s treason of marketing itself as a repository of small town values as it destroys small towns. You know, the paid professional people greeters, the ads portraying its workers as local business people rather than as low-paid part-timers working for a large corporation. It’s gotten hard to take.

All I can say is that Wal-Marts on-line are preferable to Wal-Marts on the ground. Better that folks abandon their downtown merchants in the privacy of their own homes. Therefore, good luck to Wal-Mart in its new venture.

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