Is Keeping Wal-Mart Out of a Community 'Class Warfare'?
The controversial use of eminent domain to keep Wal-Mart out of Hercules, CA is criticized as a means of keeping lower-income shoppers away.
"The town of Hercules, California, has upscale aspirations and its vision of the good life rules out a Wal-Mart store.
Similarly, three Maine towns are considering a "box-free" zone to prevent Wal-Mart from opening in an area of coastal New England known for its colonial charm, an idea mirroring wealthy and quaint Nantucket's recent ban on chain stores.
The city council of the mixed-race bedroom community of 23,000 east of San Francisco voted this week to invoke eminent domain to block Wal-Mart Stores Inc. from building a 99,000 square foot (9,200 sq meter) store near the town's waterfront.
Wal-Mart is no stranger to hostility. In a garden variety instance of opposition fueled by union activism, officials in Oakland, California, another San Francisco Bay area city, had tried to bar big-box retailers altogether because Wal-Mart aimed to enter their market.
Wal-Mart faces a different and more confounding source of anger in Hercules -- a 'class war,' according to Roger Pilon, a legal affairs specialist at the libertarian Cato Institute. 'The people in Hercules are coming across as looking down their noses on those who shop at Wal-Mart, as not wanting 'those people in our neighborhood,'' Pilon said.
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Wal-Mart and Class War
Cato Institute should be an expert on class war, but in this case, they are obviously wrong.
Anyone who has looked at the long series of battles to stop Wal-Mart knows that people oppose Wal-Mart because it destroys historical town centers, generates more traffic regionally, and paves over large areas of land with parking - not because low income people shop there.
Needless to say, Cato Institute does not consider Wal-Mart's low wages and inadequate benefits to be a form of class war. That is the free market at its best.
Charles Siegel
Are they?
Quote from a Hercules resident about Wal-Mart in on of the Chronicle stoies about this issue:
'"I don't want to have anything ghetto around me and my family,'' said Monique Howell, 25, who 18 months ago paid $652,000 for a two-story Craftsman-style home where she lives with her husband and infant son.'
Also this tidbit:
"The city then commissioned an economic analysis that concluded Wal-Mart would not serve the needs of Hercules residents and instead would draw lower income residents of surrounding cities. Wal-Mart serves shoppers with a typical annual household income of less than $50,000, the report said -- far less than the average of nearly $90,000 in Hercules."
Sounds like it's at least an issue with this Wal-Mart. Also, I'm sure the 10,000 people that applied for jobs at the Oakland Wal-Mart must have been put off by their low wages and inadequate benefits.
Here's a link to the story:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/22/MNGO6IVUTP1....
Ricardo
Assertions of 'Class Warfare' in support of Big-Box Development
One might as readily (and with as much or as little evidence) assert that proponents of Wal-Mart are motivated by nothing more than devotion to Mammon...