Retrograde retail: there’s weakness in numbers.

Some businesses just fail to quit, though it’s not necessarily from lack of trying.

And if all the negatives in that sentence dilute the denotation, that might be the whole point…at least when the businesses in question are former retail leviathans like Kmart and Sears.

I’ve written about both chains many times in the past on this blog, but little to nothing since 2010 or so.  Truthfully, neither has changed much.  The two brand names, formerly separate companies but merged since 2005, continue to hobble along, shedding a few of the most underperforming stores each quarter, while even the ones that linger still leave onlookers scratching their heads.  How do these retailers—now essentially one company called Sears Holdings Corporation—manage to stay in business?

To a certain extent, they employ the Star Trek mantra: going where no man has gone before…or, to be frank, where no one else is willing to go anymore.  So they aren’t exactly doing it boldly.  Kmart’s approach (which I blogged about four years ago) frequently involves lingering in early automobile-oriented suburban areas that peaked in the late 1950s—the point in time when Kmart was still a juggernaut for discount shopping.  However, these aging suburbs, which typically offered the coveted homeownership ideal to an emergent middle class within a car-dependent milieu, are no longer so savory.  Check out the surviving few Kmarts in Indianapolis, from the blog post above.  Generally speaking, these areas have declined enough economically that the robust Walmart won’t touch them.  In Kansas City, the formerly thriving Bannister Mall area began to tank in the 1990s; today, it represents one of the largest expanses of blighted suburban retail I have ever seen anywhere, featured in this prominent post.  But, as of the fall of 2012, the Kmart at Bannister survives…pretty much the only well-known sign amid the retail wreckage.  (Well, that and the notorious Burlington Coat Factory, but that’s another story.)

Then there’s Sears, whose brand image isn’t quite as weak these days as Kmart, mainly because it still clings to its aggressively middlebrow origins, a contrast from the always low-budget offerings at Kmart.  (Though Kmart has managed the more effective viral commercials in recent years.)  The department store remains a staple at most middle-class malls.  But enclosed shopping malls ain’t what they used to be, for the most part, and if a mall is starting to show weakness in the form of diminishing occupancy levels, it’s often safe to guess which area will get hit the hardest.  That’s right—the Sears wing.  I blogged about it awhile ago, at the primarily successful Castleton Square Mall in Indianapolis, where vacancy was low throughout this super-regional shopping hub…except for the hallway leading to the Sears.

Meanwhile, Cortana Mall in Baton Rouge took the ailing Sears corridor to a whole new level.  My first trip to Cortana in December 2005 confronted me generally busy shopping center, even though locals had longed viewed Cortana as the “other mall” in Baton Rouge, at least since Mall of Louisiana opened in 1997 in a more affluent part of town.  In 2005, most of Cortana flourished (perhaps due to the holidays), except for the hallway leading to Sears, which was overwhelmingly populated with local, mom-and-pop tenants…the type that pervade a struggling mall.  Jump ahead to April 2010—the time of my blog article—and Cortana was peppered with vacancies throughout the structure, while the Sears corridor was dead as a doornail.  Pretty much no inline tenants left, except for Sears.  Even in the most vibrant of malls, the Sears wing tends to host the highest concentration of off-name retailers, clearly suggesting that 1) national brand names don’t want to lease space close to Sears, and 2) mall management, desperate to maintain good occupancy rates, must lower the cost of leasing space, consequently attracting retailers who cannot afford the higher costs in the corridors leading to Macy’s or Dillard’s.  Thus, Sears gets the off brands…when it’s lucky.

A recent trip to suburban Detroit revealed another example of an anemic shopping hub anchored by Sears, but this time within a different typology.

 

Sure, it doesn’t really look that different from your typical Sears in a mega-mall.

But it’s a freestanding Sears—formerly a mainstay of American retail but now relatively uncommon.  It is untethered to any larger mall; no other department stores are nearby.  While the standalone Sears might still occasionally splay out along the highway in the purlieus of a small city (under 25,000 people, for example) the one in the photos below is anything but rural.  It’s in Lincoln Park, a blue-collar inner-ring suburb belonging to Detroit’s “Downriver” communities, which is the local term for the extensive concatenation of municipalities that band along the Detroit River as it eventually distends into Lake Erie.  A fully built-out suburb that exploded after World War II, Lincoln Park is also surrounded in almost all directions by other tightly packed suburbs from more or less the same time period.

Freestanding Sears operations made sense in large towns or small cities surrounded by farmland, since those settlements didn’t necessarily have the trade area to support a regional mall.  But Lincoln Park can claim hundreds of thousands of people within a 10-mile radius.  Perhaps, because of this, one could speculate that this particular Sears serves as a more effective anchor than others: not only does it serve a huge trade area, but it isn’t competing with other, more robust department stores like Macy’s.

Such a guess would be wrong.

This is the remaining strip mall attached to the Lincoln Park Sears.  In the first photo, the edge of the Sears portion is partly visible on the far left.

It’s almost completely vacant, with the exception of a Dollar Tree and an outparcel Big Boy restaurant.

Predictably, a shopping plaza such vacancy levels won’t shell out the cost for basic common area maintenance; drivers have to proceed with caution to avoid huge potholes or neglected debris.

Does Sears Holding Company, parent of Sears and Kmart, know something the rest of us don’t?  Both chains are born from major Midwestern urban centers—Sears from the Chicago area, and Kmart from metro Detroit (in Troy, MI, just 25 miles northeast of Lincoln Park) but customers in their home states aren’t showing any greater loyalty to their brands than they are anywhere else.  The business expansion practices that impelled these brands to stretch from coast to coast may very well be doing them in; most Midwesterners don’t even know the brands came from their part of the country.  Compare this to southern department stores Dillard’s and Belk, which are still mainstays south of the Mason-Dixon and have ever so slightly begun to expand, though never to the ubiquity of the two former titans above.

I will be amazed if this Lincoln Park Sears is still operating two years from now.  Beyond that, I see only two other plausible courses of action: the company sheds virtually all of its locations outside the Midwest and concentrates its energy by reinvigorating loyalty in its region of origin (which happens a lot with restaurant chains); or, it folds altogether as a brick-and-mortar entity and becomes an online wraith, akin to the formerly pre-eminent but now essentially defunct Montgomery Wards (as Wards.com) and Service Merchandise.  It’s not exactly boldly going anywhere, but the cybermarket offers the best chance scoping fertile pastures when finicky customers reject all but the choicest grapes on the vineyard.

A signal to retreat to the suburbs? Too late.

Scattered throughout various locations throughout the City of Detroit, one is likely to run into this sign.

It may be unusual in almost any other urban area, but not the Motor City.  In due time, the city could end up removing this traffic light at the intersection of Peterboro Street and Second Avenue altogether.  It stands just a little over a mile from Campus Martius Park, this absolute center of downtown.  But why would the City’s Department of Public Works consider removing a traffic light in an area so close to highest concentration of jobs and workers?

It’s not rocket science.  This intersection no longer endures the volume of traffic to justify a stoplight.  Or, at least, the City is pretty sure it doesn’t.  Curbed Detroit featured an article on this assessment much earlier in the year.  In many regards, it’s not too surprising, given the hierarchical importance of these two streets.  Second Avenue would most likely qualify as a collector, an intermediate street that does not provide the length or support the volume of vehicles that a more prominent arterial would (such as Woodward Avenue).  Meanwhile, Peterboro Street is little more than a local road, just four blocks in length and not intended to handle any major traffic beyond access to residential quarters.  The Google Map below better demonstrates this relationship.

 
Detroiters know that Second Avenue is hardly a street on par with Woodward, just three blocks to the east; it terminates just a few blocks to the south, at Temple Street and Cass Park.  And Peterboro, the cross street, is only four blocks long.  Considering the built environment in the area today, its hard to conceive of a time when the density of commerce and vehicles was ever enough to warrant a stoplight here.  But, in many regards, that is the marvel of Detroit.  Here’s a clearer view of the intersection looking northward down Second.

One could make excuses for the general feeling of emptiness, considering that I took these pictures in the late afternoon on a Saturday.  But judging from the absence of major buildings flanking either side of Second Avenue, is there any reason to believe these lanes (all one-way northbound) are ever congested?

Historically, one of Americans’ favorite gripes about their respective cities is the snarling traffic problem, indicative of streets that no longer have the capacity to handle the vehicles that pass through.  However, even the pro-car stalwarts (and the Motor City has more than its share) would have to argue that Detroit’s roads suffer the opposite capacity issue.  Simply put, these streets don’t handle nearly the magnitude of traffic for which their designers originally anticipated and intended.

Both Michigan DOT and Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) offer reports on Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) counts.  SEMCOG, with a smaller geographic focus, also seems to offer much greater detail in its AADT research.  For example, this table provides the AADT for Peterboro Street west of Second Avenue, part of the intersection featured in the above photographs.  At 380, the number doesn’t seem that high even without a comparative context.  After all, this is only a mile from the absolute center of Detroit, and much less from what would generally pass at Detroit’s downtown.  Compare it with the AADT of other street segments of this very minor street and its clear that only two intersections involving Peterboro can even expect 1,000 cars to pass by in a 24-hour period.

But it gets worse.  Compare this with an intersection between a collector and an arterial a quarter-mile closer to downtown, for example:

This photo looks eastward on Temple Street at the point where Second Avenue terminates, visible on the left, with the mammoth Masonic Temple immediately behind it.  Just in the distance are two more intersections with stoplights.  The purple circles in the map below indicate the locations of stoplights on Temple.

It amounts to one of the most excessive traffic light schemes I’ve seen in any major city center.  Because the two segments of Second Avenue are non-contiguous, they cannot share a stoplight.  However, in this instance, not only is the traffic volume insufficiently heavy to demand stoplights, but the flow of the traffic further weakens the need.  In the photo below, I’m standing between the two intersections (represented by the purple circles to the left and center on the map), looking eastward.

This stoplight regulates traffic on a segment of Second Avenue that is just one block long and only one-way northbound.  Thus, the light exists only for vehicles leaving Second Avenue onto Temple Street; cars along Temple can't do anything.  Why isn’t a stop sign sufficient?

The other intersection (the farthest purple circle on the left) is even more unnecessary.  

The stoplight directs traffic between Temple and Second, but yet again, Second is a one-way northbound street.  Thus, a stoplight exists only for vehicles leaving Temple to turn onto Second; no cars can legally travel the other direction.  Since westbound cars on Temple only need to turn right to enter onto Second, they would not need traffic regulation under any circumstances.  The stoplight only regulates cars turning left—no other purpose.  If these were high-traffic streets, some other form of management might be useful.  But remember what Second Avenue looks like:

Not just a yawning chasm of unused pavement, but a one-way yawning chasm.

I will concede that the Masonic Temple, as a performing arts venue and meeting space, can bring reasonable crowds when a show or indoor festival is in town.

But in a city with numerous magnificent theaters, the Masonic Temple doesn’t really dominate the scene.  It rarely hosts an event more than three nights a week, and while these can get crowded, does a street really need stoplights for just a few hours here and there?  After all, whether urban, suburban, or rural, one typically expects at least a little bit of traffic bottlenecking when a major show lets out.

I’m hardly an advocate for high-speed traffic flow as an easy remedy, especially in urban settings where numerous pedestrians could be present.  But the conditions for motorists along this stretch of Temple Street are almost comparable to waiting in line for a ride at Disneyworld.  Cars along Temple Street lurch only 100 feet from one stop light to the next, while waiting for absolutely nothing.  The lights aren’t timed to expedite flow, so it is common for a car to stop at all three intersections represented by the purple circles.  Worst of all: these lights are not under any study for removal…yet.

This predicament may seem minor in a city that has lost over two-thirds of its population since its peak (and is continuing to hemorrhage in most neighborhoods), but it is an inevitable consequence.  The lower east side of Detroit, home to some neighborhoods that have lost over 90% of the population from the 1950 peak, has none of these “removal” signs.  No decommissioned stoplights planned, although the condition of stopping at lights for no reason is ubiquitous on that side of town.

As a result, the fact that the Department of Public Works’ Traffic Engineering Division is assessing the possibility of removing traffic lights seems like lemonade out of lemons.  Not only is it good for people getting around by car in the Motor City, who won’t suffer the inefficiency of stopping at lights that no longer need to exist (a Pareto optimality under just about any argument that comes to mind).  The win-win resolution prescribed here may seem out-of-touch with the broader concerns of job loss and concentrated poverty, but any bankrupt city that needs to divest of some of its most fulsome assets (and their associated operational costs) will inevitably have to confront the phenomenon of traffic management in an environment that no longer handles much traffic.  Even if the City sells its tri-color portfolio to fast-growing metros that need them, it will probably only amount to a drop in the bucket when it comes to reducing some of the catastrophic debt.  But this strategy is both relatively easy to implement and unlikely to generate the sort of controversy that one might expect from, say, stripping the Detroit Institute of Art of its collection.  One final aspiration: that the Department devises a tactic so that a single “study for removal” doesn’t cost more than the value of the intersection’s stoplights themselves.

Grow quickly. Live better.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, from the perspective of urban sociologists and planners, at least, major discount retailers such as Walmart have thrived on the destruction of commercial activity in traditional town centers.  No doubt my assertion borders on exaggeration, but it would have to, considering I’ve cribbed Jane Austen’s famous (and equally ironically hyperbolic) first seven words to Pride and Prejudice, in which a man’s search of a wife sets a blithe tone for much of what follows.  By contrast, the unceasing diatribes against Walmart from urban advocates are rarely whimsical.  And while not every high-profile writer/blogger on urban affairs excoriates Walmart, the general tenor of the discussion ascribes much of the decline of downtown retail to the much-maligned megachain.  After all, virtually every freestanding small city in America over 20,000 people that is not part of a larger metropolitan agglomeration can claim a Walmart, perched at the edge of the municipal limits.  And yes, the burgeoning of Walmarts does more or less coincide with the near abandonment of historic, pedestrian-scaled main streets in favor of car-oriented commercialization consolidated into big-box department stores.

But did a corporation—or the corporation—really cause all this?

If the average American consumers genuinely cared enough about Main Street or the courthouse square, wouldn’t they have shunned this commercial cataclysm before it radically altered the entire landscape?  Wasn’t it the consumer that ultimately fueled Walmart’s meteoric growth, by opting for the convenience of everything under one roof, abundant free parking, and (perhaps the most objective factor) those famously low prices?  Some might argue that I’m unreasonably throwing Walmart a bone, since the folks at the boardroom table clearly knew what would happen to Main Street, as department-store big-box shopping encroached on communities that commercial developers had previously perceived as too modest in size to support this retail typology.  And, yes, I recognize the firm’s historic opposition toward unionization, its eventual reneging on a long-standing “Made in America” pledge, and even the management of logistics/merchandising favoring the automatization of functions that once provided communities with stable jobs.  Maybe I am cutting Walmart some undeserved slack.  But I also think the corporation’s biggest critics fail to recognize that Walmart didn’t become a leviathan overnight, any more than these towns devolved from flourishing to failures with the flick of a light switch. 

My own articles on main street America have explored the topic routinely.  But it took a visit to Bentonville, Arkansas to develop a more nuanced understanding of Walmart’s approach to community engagement right at the belly of the beast.

My suspicion is that, until probably around the year 2001, 98% of Americans hadn’t heard of this well-scrubbed little municipality in the northwest corner of the state, just a stone’s throw from the rugged topography of the Ozarks.  Even today, if people are familiar with the town, it is only because it hosts the corporate headquarters for the world’s largest retailer.  And there’s nothing wrong with this seemingly simplified association: after all, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone in Bentonville who would argue that the city is better known for something else.  But what sort of impact has Walmart’s presence exerted on what otherwise would likely be a nondescript, mid-southern county seat?

Not surprisingly, the influence has been formidable.  I mention the year 2001 because, upon publishing the results of Census 2000, the nation learned that the Northwest Arkansas Metropolitan Statistical Area (consisting of the primary cities of Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville) had become the sixth-fastest growing region in the nation.  While a Census update isn’t the sort of news item that necessarily grabs the public by its lapels, it can flirt salaciously with the unconscious and, eventually, through mimetic repetition, penetrate to the conscious.  With each passing year, Bentonville has grabbed the headlines more often, as decisions from the Wal-mart Stores, Inc. Home Office exert a greater impact on the global economy.  I would hesitate to assert that the name “Bentonville, Arkansas” is common knowledge to the same level that a similarly-sized city such as “Beverly Hills, California” might be, partly because the similarities between these two places basically stop there.  But its star is rising on both the national and international horizon, since many of Walmart’s foreign retail ventures have proven just as successful as their domestic efforts.  And Bentonville, predictably, has enjoyed its share of the region’s growth: at over 35,000 people in 2010, it more tripled its population since the 1990 census, and, as recently as 1960, it was a quiet village of barely 3,500 people.

The impact on this growth is obvious, particularly when viewing the street configuration.

The shift from a conventional grid to a more hierarchical arrangement is conspicuous and unsurprising.  The oldest part of the city adopted the grid, which was customary for shaping virtually all communities in the 19^th and early 20^th century.  Yet 80% of Bentonville’s city limits (which extend in all directions beyond the boundaries in the image above) fits the more expansive, automobile-oriented configuration, in which streets curve and wend, sometimes into hairpins, sometimes into full loops.  Often they terminate as culs-de-sac.  For a municipality that remained a modest village until the 1950s, this growth pattern is normal and broadly characteristic of numerous Sunbelt communities.  Thus, the city of Bentonville has decentralized considerably in the last fifty years, in addition to hosting the global headquarters to the retail behemoth most regularly flagged as the culprit in expediting the demise of downtowns.  Given these two factors, one prevailing question remains: what on earth does its beleaguered town center look like?

Chances are, you’d be as surprised as I was.

It looks terrific.  Nearly 100% occupancy, clean sidewalks, a well-manicured streetscape.  And virtually of all the retail mix—from bike shops to brasseries, yoga studios to yogurt cafes, tea rooms to trattorias—caters to an upmarket clientele, suggesting that the leasing rates are fairly high.

The culminating attraction, however, is the humble storefront that spawned it all:

Sam Walton’s original five-and-dime now serves as the Walmart Visitors’ Center and a mini-museum, with interactive exhibits and the recreation of a soda fountain.

These pictures date from a summer festival on the central square, taken a few years ago, in 2010.  Though they are obviously a bit faded by now—not all of the visitor attractions were open yet during my visit—I can say with a fair amount of confidence that downtown Bentonville is even stronger today.  After all, most estimates show the city has continued to grow another 10% since the 2010 Census results, and, considering that it was demonstrating considerable resilience during the peak of the Great Recession, the downtown is likely only to build on a momentum it had established long before the bubble burst.  A detractor might challenge my assertion by arguing that I captured the city during an atypically vibrant time, when out-of-towners had flocked to the city for the summer celebration on the courthouse square.  But how could the downtown support a high concentration of restaurants, cafés and boutiques if it weren’t lively during the other times of the week as well?

The fact remains that downtown Bentonville boasts a number of civic associations that have worked tirelessly to boost its cachet, including Downtown Bentonville, Inc, a nonprofit association that promotes, attracts investment, and plans activities for Bentonville’s historic downtown, as well as the Bentonville Merchant District, which seeks to attract upscale traveling merchants through the provision of Class A office space and furnished loft-style apartments close to the city center.  The city also has a Convention and Visitors Bureau and a Chamber of Commerce.  These organizations have no doubt worked tirelessly to re-centralize investment in Bentonville’s small downtown, even as the vast majority of the population growth over the last two decades has taken place in the purlieus.  By most metrics, their efforts have paid off.  But plenty of other similarly sized cities can claim the same business associations without these results; I blogged about Jefferson City, Missouri earlier this year, a small city whose civic leaders have collaborated to promote the downtown.  However, the results in Jefferson City, while palpable, have been much more modest than Bentonville—and it is nothing less than the state capital.

Bentonville is simply part of a region that is enjoying a persistent economic boom.  The other primary cities in this unusual metropolitan area—Rogers, Springdale and Fayetteville—are also growing like mad.  It doesn’t hurt that the region is home to two other nationally prominent companies: Springdale’s Tyson Foods, the world’s largest meat producer, and trucking giant J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc., based in the town of Lowell, which abuts Rogers.  But the real cog in the wheel remains the world’s largest retailer, headquartered in Bentonville, and I still suspect the corporation and its numerous investments has more to do with downtown’s vibrancy than the tourist bureau.  Walmart undoubtedly prefers to associate its name with a municipality that enjoys a profile of prosperity and high quality of life; the company will do what it takes to maintain that image within Bentonville.

So what is the visual evidence that this isn’t just a run-of-the-mill boomtown?  Beyond from the picture-perfect courthouse square, the air of plentitude permeates the city.

However, it isn’t just the park spaces that distinguish the more recently developed outer reaches of Bentonville; all the spaces in between have received above average treatment as well.

So a city street has sidewalks.  Big deal, some might say.  But it is out of character for low density, hierarchical, auto-oriented development in the South to make any concession for pedestrians, let alone a full network of sidewalks along all of the major streets.  Compare Bentonville to just about any other city in Arkansas (outside of the Northwest) and you’d be hard pressed to find sidewalks on any arterial or collector roads beyond the historic original street grid.  Both the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Planning in Bentonville have determined that core pedestrian access remains critical, even when the development pattern is sparse, in keeping with the preferences of the majority of people who settle in this part of the country.  The former of the two aforementioned departments reveals that it has conceived network of parks, greenways and biking trails rivals that of a community three times its size.

Meanwhile, the latter-mentioned planning department has several aces up its sleeve as well.  While it isn’t unheard of that a city might support a 76-page Bicycleand Pedestrian Master Plan, a Smart Growth Guidebook, or a Traffic Calming Guidebook, it certainly places the city well outside the bell curve when juxtaposed with its peers.  After all, even the neighboring city of Rogers (pop. 55,000) shows no evidence that its planning department has the resources even to conceive of such initiatives.

The aforementioned features are hardly likely to elevate anyone’s pulse; they aren’t exactly competing with Manhattan’s High Line for infrastructural innovation.  And it’s unreasonable to surmise that Walmart had any real influence on what remain purely publicly owned assets.  But one structure in Bentonville is likely to turn the head of even the most skeptical coastal snob: the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

The structure was not complete when I visited Bentonville in 2010, but it opened to the public in late 2011, and made international headlines for both its novelty (first major American art museum to open in 50 years, and the only one in an over 100-mile radius) as well as its magnitude (over 200,000 square feet of space on 120-acre grounds and a collection valued in the hundreds of millions).  The striking edifice reaches Bentonville courtesy of internationally recognized Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie.  Perhaps most importantly though, it is resolutely the vision of Alice Walton, daughter to founder Sam Walton and heiress to his fortune.  In one of many interviews she offered at the time of the museum’s opening, Walton, who has been an art collector most of her life, acknowledged that she wanted to make a difference in this part of the world by bringing “something we desperately need”.  She contributed over $300 million to the project, built on family land.  Admission to the museum is free, but because of its destination status, visitors will typically linger, travel the grounds, shop, buy a meal.  A Huffington Post article from the museum’s infancy concluded that the museum would skyrocket past its estimated 250,000 first-year visitors, based on the success after just three months open to the public.

If Crystal Bridges Museum lives up to its promise as an attraction of national or even international caliber, Bentonville clearly needs the tourist infrastructure to support those visitors.  But it would appear it already has it.  Just down the road, in neighboring Rogers, an Embassy Suites Spa and Convention Center flanks one side of the interstate; the Pinnacle Hills lifestyle center sits on the other.  And, earlier this year, the sleek 21c Museum Hotel, famous for the prominent positioning of contemporary art, opened right off of Bentonville’s courthouse square - only the third of its kind in the country.  (Louisville and Cincinnati claim the other two.)  Many of the amenities that have sprouted across Northwest Arkansas over the last twenty years are in keeping with a metropolitan area of nearly a half million people; of course it has a mall, convention center, and a seasonal symphony orchestra.  But while growth trajectory of the metro might resemble that of Phoenix or Las Vegas, no single municipality has spawned everything here in Arkansas.  As of 1950, only college town Fayetteville had even 10,000 people.  The other towns—Lowell, Rogers, Bella Vista, Johnson, Springdale, and of course Bentonville—were isolated villages that boomed simultaneously, swelling their incorporated boundaries until they touched one another.  As a result, Northwest Arkansas may be the country’s youngest conurbation: a 35-mile string of small cities—a microlopolis.  (The only comparable phenomenon I can think of domestically would be the Texas border towns along the Rio Grande, but even Brownsville and McAllen were more than villages fifty years ago, and they’re big cities over 100,000 people now.)

The rapid ascension of these communities into a regional economic powerhouse—with the amenities one might from a single, medium-sized city—may very well neatly manifest the multiplier effect.  But it still doesn’t explain how Bentonville, the epicenter of Walmartlandia, has managed to hold its own with a lively downtown, when plenty of other fast-growing big cities struggle to keep it all centralized (Houston, for example).  After all, in one of the most famous journalistic explorations of Northwest Arkansas, Financial Times’ “The Town that Wal-Mart Built”, Jonathan Birchall observed in 2009 that he always found it “hard not to be hit by the irony in this Bentonville Renaissance. Wal-Mart’s football-stadium-sized supercentres are, after all, the epitome of the chain store culture that has destroyed small town centres and homogenised communities all over America in the past three decades.”  But it sounds like he took the bait.

The town that Walmart built has either proven itself immune to the main-street-murdering forces that afflicted most American cities, or it has recovered from that ailment magnificently.  Bentonville also boasts a regional airport that offers year-round, nonstop daily service to New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago; Alice Walton’s money helped build the terminal, which serves a population that had no regular airfare until 1998.  Bentonville Public Schools have offered the prestigious International Baccalaureate program since 2007.  And yes, Bentonville has a Walmart not so far away, in what probably was the edge of town not too long ago.

By this point in such a lengthy analysis, it’s obvious what has happened: Bentonville has responded to the fact that it hosts a multinational corporation by offering the sort of amenities needed to attract talent to the region—talent that, its current leadership presumes, will propel Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. to another fifty years of unprecedented growth.

Most MBA grads trained at Harvard, Wharton or Kellogg are going to need enticement to move to an area not recognized for its urban offerings.  On top of all the talent in multinational retail, Bentonville and its neighbors most also graciously host the satellite offices of 1,300 suppliers whom Walmart has lured due to its vast trade network—ranging in size from one sales exec to something as large as Procter and Gamble, for whom a few hundred employees call Northwest Arkansas home.  The elite business class that routinely visits the Walmart headquarters expects top-tier hotels and shopping, while many of the executives who make it their permanent home will inevitably seek sophisticated eateries in an attractive, walkable setting.  How much of all this was funded directly by Walmart is anyone’s guess (though I’m sure at least someone out there has the numbers).  The fact remains that the corporate culture in Bentonville fueled a demand for a Parks Department that builds a network out of its green space, or a Planning Department that performs traffic calming studies.

The hardened cynics can read about this serendipity in the Ozarks and offer an acerbic rebuttal: of course Walmart is going to prop up its hometown, but does that absolve it from the devastation that has taken place virtually everywhere else?  This assertion would be valid if every town with a Walmart suffered an equally moribund Main Street.  But they clearly haven’t.  And there remain villages too small or too remote for a Walmart, which have confronted the exact same decline of entrepreneurism in their historic centers.  Arguing from that same angle, the City of Bentonville did not enjoin Walmart to revitalize downtown—or force Alice Walton to build Crystal Bridges—any more than existing laws compelled Cornelius Vanderbilt to endow a university in Nashville, the capital of a state he never even visited.   No doubt some of Walmart’s boosterism in Bentonville is self-serving, since a desirable community only helps to improve Walmart’s reputation as both an employer and corporate citizen, which in turn can attract further investment.  However, viewing all corporate altruism as suspicious requires a labyrinthine recontextualization that is just as distorted as saying “Walmart killed our downtowns”.  Or its equally hyperbolic counterpart: “Walmart has had no impact on the way we shop on main street”.  Clearly it has, but the forces compelling consumer behavior remain complicated—baffling even.  For while most of us can understand that we abandoned our old downtowns out of convenience and lack of foresight, no one will ever truly be able to explain want prompted many American consumers to give up their cars so they could return to bicycles.  And if you don’t think I’m concluding ironically, I’ve got a Jane Austen novel to sell you.