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Wal-Mart is ranked number five on Business Week’s list of the top world companies. For certain people, the presence of Wal-Mart creates a fear that the many small, locally owned mom-and-pop shops in the Midway will be forced to eventually go out of business because of an inability to compete with Wal-Mart’s prices and product choices.

Others simply have negative opinions concerning the Wal-Mart corporation as a whole.

“Wal-Mart is bad in so many different ways,” said Carla Truax, a Hamline senior and activist present at the protest during the store’s opening.

“I think people are really starting to realize the connection between cheap products and their cost to the rest of the world. If something is cheap, it can sometimes mean that its cost is offset by environmental damage.”

Truax learned about the Wal-Mart protest through word of mouth and jumped on board because of articles she read in the New York Times that shed an unfavorable light on the company.

One of the biggest issues the protest focused on, she said, was the low wages and lack of health benefits given to employees of the store.

Chris Conry, a protest organizer and member of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, is also concerned with the way Wal-Mart treats its employees.

“[The union’s] interest in the Wal-Mart is primarily around jobs,” he said. “[Wal-Mart] has a way of making less-than-living-wage jobs. We were engaged in a process to assemble a coalition with people working on trying get a meeting with Wal-Mart.”

Conry and his counterparts were unable to get into contact with Wal-Mart representatives. Of all the community groups attempting to meet with employees of the company, only one was successful in doing so, he said.

Like Truax, Conry formed the majority of his opinion on Wal-Mart by reading about its policies.

“Virtually, it’s all a matter of public record,” he said. “My [views] came from time that I’ve spent plugging away on the Internet.”

Growing up in small-town Iowa aided Conry in developing a theory on what he feels the massive chain can do to small businesses.

“Even in the town where I lived, I’ve seen the drift toward a centralized, single retailer,” he said, referring to his town’s few nationally run chain stores.

Though the Midway Wal-Mart opened successfully, Conry remains optimistic.

“Over the last 10 to 15 years, the number of communities that have been opposing Wal-Mart has grown from the dozens to the hundreds,” he said. “It seems like Wal-Mart developed a reputation for having particularly ill effects on communities and with workers.”

The big-business impact

So far, Wal-Mart’s effects on small, privately owned businesses in the area haven’t been very noticeable.

Dave Gagne, executive director of the Hamline Midway Coalition, says his organization works with small business owners in an attempt to help them combat a possible drop in sales.

“Any of the small-businesses will discover that they can’t compete with Wal-Mart prices,” said Gagne.
“They will either die or get creative and compete with Wal-Mart with service and availability. They have to change how they do business.”

Gagne said that despite the protest during the store’s grand opening, not everyone living in or near the Midway refuses to shop at Wal-Mart. “If you ask the vast majority of people in the neighborhood, they would probably express some approval of having the lower-cost Wal-Mart opportunities,” he said.

“However, there is a growing group that understands that by having Wal-Mart come in, it may lower salaries [in the area] and immediately have an impact on surrounding stores. Stores have had to lower their prices. Wal-Mart has a subduing effect on wages and benefits.”

Gagne, like Truax and Conry, is most concerned with how Wal-Mart treats its employees.

“In the long run, it’s a quality-of-life issue for neighborhoods,” he said.

“If you end up lowering wages and reducing benefits for people in the neighborhood, then how are they going to get health care? How are they going to survive as a family?”

Business Week reported in 2001 that the average Wal-Mart sales clerk made $13,861 a year.

“Those who work [at Wal-Mart] don’t earn enough and have to turn to some form of public assistance,” Gagne said.

While some community groups experienced difficulties communicating with representatives for Wal-Mart, Gagne said that the store complied with requests asking not to sell guns at the University location.

Midway Wal-Mart management also agreed to install wheel locks on shopping carts so that they could not be pushed off store property.

A huge concern with city council and community members was that carts would be littered all over the neighborhood, which is already a problem in the neighborhood.

City Council member Jay Benanav worked with Wal-Mart toward reaching the agreements between the store and the community.

Community members were granted two of three requests, he said.

“The community was pretty adamant about not selling guns,” he said.

He also asked them to install wheel locks on carts and to pay a livable wage, Benanav said.

Wal-Mart refused to respond to one thing.

“They did not respond to the livable wage [request],” he said.

Another chain possibility

While the Midway community and Wal-Mart are continuing to build ą or break off ą a relationship, another retail giant is looking to settle in the area. The intersection of University and Snelling could be the possible site of a CVS Pharmacy, one of the nation’s fastest growing drug-store chains.

Benanav and community members involved with the proposal to build a CVS Pharmacy are not yet worried about the possible effects it could have on small businesses in the Midway because plans for the store are not completely concrete. “[CVS] is dealing with some legal issues, but the plan is to pop one up sometime next year,” said Benanav.

Ron Johnson, a pharmacist at Lloyd’s on the corner of Minnehaha and Snelling, said he does not feel threatened by the large chain pharmacies like Wal-Mart and CVS. In his opinion, people will still keep coming to Lloyd’s.

“[Our store has] more personal service and it is locally owned,” he said. “[CVS] would probably affect places like Walgreens more than us.”

Though Johnson isn’t taking the threat of big businesses too seriously, he is still overwhelmed by the amount of chain stores being brought to the area.

“Everything is turning out to be big boxes,” he said. “Everything around. It’s Wal-Mart; it’s Home Depot.”