Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 15, 1993 TAG: 9308120013
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By CHRISTOPHER SULLIVAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
At long last, it was Grand Opening day. Overnight rain had washed the quarter-mile-square parking lot, shared with the new Sam's Club store next door, and the spaces would be filling soon.
The world's largest retailer was growing again. This store, in Salisbury, Md., was part of the Arkansas-based chain's latest stretch - into the Northeast, the West Coast and metro areas that Wal-Mart once bypassed.
Lately, however, whether because of less familiar territory or national economic sluggishness or the death last year of charismatic founder Sam Walton, something seems amiss as new stores open, an event that occurs 150 times a year.
It's a harder sell now for the Wal-Mart culture. Indeed, that culture is undergoing a wrenching reassessment.
To many, it still means quality goods, low prices, customer service and the folksy, small-town ways of the billionaire known as Mr. Sam. It means offering America what America wants. It means paying attention to the little guy, never putting on airs.
"Americans working for Americans, those values we learned as kids, that maybe are disappearing nowadays," was how Jeff Klaus defined the culture while stopping by the Wal-Mart Visitors Center that now occupies Walton's original dime store on the square in Bentonville, Ark.
But to others, it means something different: a steamrolling of sameness, "the Wal-Marting of America" that hastens the death of Main Streets. It means greed with a disingenuous smile, or simply an undefinable discomfort about an All-American institution that got too big.
"I don't know when Wal-Mart turned the corner, but I think they've turned the corner," says Philip Hoon of Chestertown, Md., a Colonial-era town north of Salisbury on Maryland's Eastern Shore, one of many places where residents have banded together to keep Wal-Mart out.
A congressional subcommittee plans hearings on the impact of mass merchandisers on America's towns, on hiring practices and on manufacturing.
"Wal-Mart is a success story but because of their success, they've had an impact," said Rep. Bill Sarpalius, the panel's chairman. "I've seen these towns get smaller and smaller. I've seen the businesses close up on the town square."
Succeeding against the odds always has been part of the Wal-Mart culture, too - ever since Walton stocked his fledgling stores with whatever goods he could make a deal on and load in his car.
Despite its huge-corporation proportions now - its sales of more than $1 billion a week, its 470,000 employees, its annual profits of nearly $2 billion - projection of small-town folksiness remains integral to Wal-Mart's culture.
Last week Wal-Mart reported sales of $30.16 billion in the first half of 1993.
But because high profit targets and constant growth also are part of its evolving culture, that image is getting harder to project.
"The size of our company dictates that we must do special things to keep `bigness' from becoming a negative," Chief Executive Officer David Glass told employees earlier this year. Decision-making, he said, should be pushed "down to the lowest level" from headquarters, with its more than 40 vice presidents.
Wanting hands-on supervision, Walton once said he didn't expect to grow much beyond a nine-store group.
"But," he wrote in his autobiography, "we figured out a way to grow, and stay profitable, and there was no logical place to stop."
The first Wal-Mart opened in Rogers, Ark., in 1962. There are nearly 2,000 today. Wal-Mart became the biggest retailer in 1990.
In the last decade, shareholders watching the "WMT" stock increased from 4,855 to more than 150,000. Mostly they've done well indeed, though this year the stock has slipped. Analysts' projections that sales growth will slow from Wal-Mart's customary levels got much of the blame.
Regardless, shoppers keep coming.
"They're polite, they're courteous," said Salisbury store customer George Godfrey, a 59-year-old construction worker, whose cart contained a Shakespeare brand surf-fishing rod and reel for $32.96. "Anywhere else, it'd run you $60."
As the checkout scanners buzzed in Salisbury, phones buzzed 90 minutes to the north, where the Coalition for the Preservation of Chestertown networked to prevent a grassy field two miles from the town's 18th-century square from becoming another Wal-Mart.
The bitter fight in Chestertown, where George Washington sojourned, is about ideals as old as the nation, about people deciding their own destiny, according to Marsha Fritz, a coalition member and architect.
"I think they're riding roughshod now," she said of Wal-Mart, which responded to the coalition's 81-page impact study with a two-paragraph letter.
The report compared total retail spending in the area with Wal-Mart's per-store sales goals, concluding that not only would 52 current shops be in "serious jeopardy" of failing but a megastore could not make a sufficient profit, either.
A 98,000-square-foot Wal-Mart would be incompatible, it said, with rural Kent County's scale, which "shapes a way of life by encouraging small businesses, frequent interaction between our citizens and unhurried trips on narrow country roads and neighborhood streets."
Larry Williams, Wal-Mart's Northeast vice president, has heard similar protests elsewhere in his territory. "It's just somebody's way of trying to stop growth into their areas," he said.
Chestertown is a Norman Rockwell setting come to life, but the dispute is a reminder that the artist's world is gone. Though small-town culture lives on as an ideal in many people's minds, those same people eat at McDonald's, not the soda shop; they take the interstate, not the back road.
And they spent $55.5 billion last year at Wal-Mart.
"We just happened to be the ones who saw America changing," Williams said. Wal-Mart spokesmen in Bentonville say organized opponents often are a minority. Ask the average folks, they say.
On the brick sidewalks of Chestertown, where church bells toll the time, an informal sampling of residents gave thumbs-down to Wal-Mart.
But just beyond its Rockwellesque culture, America's Wal-Mart culture picks up again. A survey of Kent Countians, conducted for the Wal-Mart site developer and dismissed by opponents, claimed 63 percent favored the store.
To waitress Lori Allen, who works in another Kent County town, Wal-Mart is what it says: well-stocked, reasonably priced, convenient.
She now drives 25 miles to a department store; a Wal-Mart in Chestertown would halve that trip.
"Bring it on," Allen said. "It's a lot closer to me."
by CNB