In recognition of the season, let’s start with a bit of music — the tune is that old favorite, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” OK, all together now:
Oh you better watch out; You better not buy;
Get ready to fight, and I’ll tell ya why,
Wal-Mart is acomin’ to Town.
They’re buyin’ up land and…...”
“Whoa, whoa! Wait a minute! Coming to what town?”
Fairhope.
“Can’t be. A few months ago I read in the paper (ed: not Lagniappe, one of those other local papers) that Wal-Mart said they had no immediate plans to build another store in Baldwin County — it was back in August — a big company like that can’t change its plans that fast, can it?”
Hey, where you been? Haven’t you seen the video or the books about how Wal-Mart sneaks in, builds a store, hires people at starvation wages with no benefits and nukes the downtown? What does “No immediate plans,” mean to folks like that? Anything they want it to mean.
If you’re both highly technical in usage and very literal, that statement is perfectly accurate: The Wal-Mart Community Relations guy didn’t have a roll of building plans in his hands at the very moment he spoke did he? See, Wal-Mart was perfectly forthcoming and perfectly misleading.
Yup, no matter what they said in August, the super-sized, big box retailer has now announced it is planning to build another store in Baldwin County and right at the edge of Fairhope. The wheels are turning. Wal-Mart is in the process of buying out the 99-year lease a local family holds on a 50-acre tract at the intersection of Alabama 181 (formerly County Road 27) and County Road 48.
The Fairhope Farmers’ Market is there now. It’s Single Tax Colony land, hence the lease. Although the location is outside the City of Fairhope, it is within its “permitting jurisdiction.” This doesn’t mean Fairhope can stop the project, as city attorney Tut Wynne told the city council at their last meeting.
The situation, as Wynne described it, is that the land is un-zoned and unincorporated. Unless there are violations of the building approval regulations and ordinances, they can proceed, regardless of the council’s wishes. He added that there is every sign Wal-Mart is carefully complying with all the details of the permitting process.
Wynne pretty much closed the door to blocking the move by re-zoning. In his opinion, there is not enough time to complete a re-zoning action at the county or state level to stop Wal-Mart.
This isn’t stopping local citizens and Fairhope business owners from collecting signatures of residents in the unincorporated areas around the city. This campaign is aimed at getting the county to change all the surrounding zoning to residential. If this happens before Wal-Mart gets the permits to start construction, it will require a re-zoning request to allow commercial use.
The approval process would then provide the opportunity to keep Wal-Mart out of the Fairhope area. Page and Palette, the downtown Fairhope bookstore, appears to be “Stop Wal-Mart” Headquarters. There is a re-zoning petition form in front of the cash register and copies of “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” prominently displayed.
The coffee house co-located with the bookstore features showings of an accompanying video of the same title and with the same theme: Wal-Mart moves in and kills the established businesses, destroys the traditional downtown and creates a visual and economic wasteland — all this while providing few benefits or even a living wage to their employees. What’s really scary is if you are a direct competitor of Wal-Mart, especially if they’re right next door — or even down the street a ways. Wal-Mart sells at low prices and to preserve an acceptable profit margin, it has to get what they are selling at the lowest possible cost.
The enormous buying power of the retail giant forces suppliers to give price breaks that are unavailable to nearly anyone else. Maybe Target can get them, but not a mom and pop store over on Main Street, or in this case, Fairhope Avenue. Wal-Mart doesn’t make a lot of money on each sale, but those little percentages do mount up when there are millions of transactions. If you’re going head-to-head with Wal-Mart, you have to consider it is possible, even likely, that they are selling (and making a small profit) at a lower price than what you have to pay your wholesaler for the identical item. Grim stuff.
There is another side to Wal-Mart and its impact on the local community. It provides broader access to employment and additional opportunities for building a career — not just spending a working lifetime as a sales clerk in a family-owned store. Although low wages and minimal benefits are an issue, the average hourly wage rate at Wal-Mart is well above minimum wage and benefits are better than what most retailers offer.
For a person looking for work, comparisons are local, not national. Although Wal-Mart is not as generous as its direct competitor, Cosco, Cosco is not in the local labor market. From a sales perspective, even Wal-Mart’s detractors agree that the company usually offers lower prices than available anywhere else — and to them that is a problem. But these low prices are opportunities for a better quality of life for many shoppers.
Their dollars go further. They can afford to buy more at Wal-Mart and sometimes that little bit extra is enough to cover their basic needs or maybe even provide a few luxuries. Louis Mapp, a civic-minded and very generous supporter of his community noted this in several letters to local newspapers (ed: again, not us). He described the forces working to keep Wal-Mart out of the Fairhope area as taking an “elitist” position and disregarding the value that the store will bring to many local residents.
The fight has just begun and it’s too early to call. Right now I’d put the Big Box Boy ahead of the Resolute Retailers, but it’s no slam-dunk. And for all of you who still have shopping to do, remember our little jingle and have a Merry Christmas. (I can say that here, can’t I?)
Contact Pete Gleszer at jubilee@lagniappemobile.com.
Archives
Jubilee
