Sam Walton’s legacy
Like many small-town Americans who have seen what Walmart has done to our local downtowns and small businesses, and like many who grew up in union households and witnessed Walmart’s long-standing anti-union practices, I am, at best, biased against the world’s largest private employer. I seldom shop there unless I have absolutely no other choice. All too often in Southern Illinois there is no other choice, unless it’s a dollar store or a convenience mart.
I’ve railed against its low wages, firing of pro-union workers, and destruction of the small-town business districts of my youth. But obviously Sam Walton, who started with one five and dime store on the town square in Bentonville, Arkansas, had a brilliant model. Americans love cheap prices. They love easy parking. They like shopping in one store.
In less than the span of a lifetime he built an empire. A retail empire, a wholesale empire, a trucking empire, a real estate empire. When empires get built some people get hurt. A few people get wealthy and powerful. The wealth generally flows to the center of the empire.
So, it is with Walmart. Sam’s kids are among the wealthiest in the world. Wealth has flown to the center of the empire, Bentonville, Arkansas, Walmart’s world headquarters. With the Walmarts, super Walmarts, Sam’s Clubs and now Walmart Neighborhood Grocers, it appears likely that wealth will continue to be sucked out of downtown small-town America and into the coffers of people who buy professional sports franchises for their personal toys, while they pay most of their employees starvation wages.
Now I’ve been to and through Arkansas several times. Mostly down Interstate 55 to cross over into Memphis, or down to Little Rock and on to Texarkana headed to Austin. It’s a poor state. Or sure looks like it through the windshield of my Jeep.
But I’d never been to Northwest Arkansas, as the area around Bentonville likes to call itself. It’s a different world from the Mississippi delta land of East Arkansas or the scrub land before you get into Texas.
I didn’t feel a huge pull to go to Northwest Arkansas, but I had a weeklong bicycle trip coming up and a payback to my long-suffering bicycle widow wife needed to be made. She wanted a trip not more than a day’s drive away with good museums.
The Wall Street Journal had a glowing column about the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville with its world-class collection of American art, some of it dating back to pre-Columbian days. It fit the bill, a five-hour drive, a highly rated museum and fresh air. Sign me up.
The museum’s benefactor is one Alice Walton. Yup one of Sam’s kids. I have to admit, like the steel barons or oil barons of an earlier generation, Alice has done her hometown well. The museum is an architectural masterpiece. They even picked up a Frank Lloyd Wright house and moved it from New Jersey to the grounds in Arkansas. The art is the equal of collections I have seen in New York, Boston or Chicago.
Bentonville is about the size of my hometown, Belleville, Illinois, that is to say, about forty-thousand residents. The difference is the Walton money and Walmart world headquarters. Vendors and would-be sellers to the world’s largest retailer come from all over the world to sell or try to sell to it. This fills the hotels and restaurants with free-spending expense account business-people sitting next to Patagonia and North Face-clad mountain bikers.
With hundreds of miles of mountain bike trails, the region proclaims itself the “mountain biking world capital”. Judging by the dozen or so bicycle shops in and around town and bikes racks on SUVs loaded with high-end mountain bikes, it’s a worthwhile claim.
After touring the art museum, it was time for dinner in a fresh fish market restaurant that wouldn’t have been out of place at a Florida dockside. I broke my “never eat grouper in the Midwest” rule that night to dine on a grouper sandwich that rivaled in flavor and freshness fish I’ve eaten on Sanibel Island, Florida.
A delightful conversation ensued with the couple seated at the next table. Originally from New Orleans, they’d been in Bentonville fifteen years, although they’d planned to stay only a couple of years before moving on. Asking how they got to Bentonville from New Orleans, he smiled and with a shrug said “Walmart”.
Clearly a question they’d been asked more than once. “Once we got here, we just fell in love with the place.” More conversation revealed that he was an attorney. His wife piped up with “he won’t tell you this but he’s a vice-president.” The khaki and sweater clad guy was clearly not overly impressed with himself or his position, in spite of his very senior status in the world’s largest private employer.
Years earlier, as an attorney, I’d had occasion to cross swords with Walmart lawyers. They were scorched earth, fight every battle, never settle a case adversaries. They’d fight a five hundred dollar claim with the vigor of a million dollar one. They were such a pain in the butt to deal with that I wouldn’t even take a case against Walmart unless it was a big enough claim to make it worth my time. Needless to say I disliked their legal tactics as much as the economic dislocation they inflicted on our small towns. I have to admit their legal tactics were effective though. None of the lawyers I knew would take a case against them unless it was big and clear cut.
But here was the nicest guy and very pleasant wife welcoming us to their town and saying “if you need anything just call us”. The very opposite of what I’d come to expect from Walmart lawyers. When I asked how many lawyers worked for Walmart, the vice-president told me one hundred-eighty, most in Bentonville.
As we drove around town after dinner, we saw what being home to a world’s largest corporation means. In the neighborhoods near downtown, fifty to seventy-year-old small homes were being torn down and architecturally designed larger homes built. Rows of brick townhouses that could have been lifted out of Georgetown lined the streets. On the outskirts of town, subdivision after subdivision with acre lots and five-thousand square foot homes replaced wooded fields.
I don’t know how many Walmart executives live in Bentonville, but clearly enough to fill all those houses and the new schools with their kids. Virtually every block we drove past featured a construction crew or a crane or a demolition crew building up or tearing down to build up.
Sam Walton’s original five and dime store is now preserved as a museum on the town square. We didn’t tour it, but I confess I bought a hot fudge sundae at the ice cream store next door featuring pictures of Sam making ice cream for the store in 1960.
Just as Sears and Montgomery Ward forever changed the face of retailing in America more than a century ago so Sam Walton did in the last half of the twentieth century. Just as the Sears and Montgomery Wards empires died so will Walmart’s…someday.
I appreciate what Walmart and Sam’s heirs have done for Bentonville. I like that Walmart lawyer and his wife. I like the art museum. I like that Americans can save money shopping. None of that means I’ll be shopping at Walmart anytime soon, nor will I like its labor practices nor its destruction of small-town America’s downtowns.
And, like most folks who live near St. Louis, I really dislike that Walton in-law, Stan Kroenke, for what he did with the Walton’s money and the St. Louis Rams. At least Stan and his lawyers sent back seven-hundred-ninety million dollars for moving the Rams out of town, after a scorched earth, fight every battle, never say settle fight.
Andrew Carnegie, the nineteenth -century steel baron, built libraries in small towns across America. Walton’s what are you going to do for America?
© William L. Enyart
Reflections from the River
Email: bill@billenyart.com
Audio production by: Tom Calhoun, www.paguytom.com