'Enough' isn't in Wal-Mart vocabulary

Editor,

The debate continues in Lake County over Wal-Mart Corporation's proposal to triple its store size in Polson (that's right, triple). The company is planning this huge steel box (about the size of two football fields) next to a 770-space parking lot (you read that right, an asphalt field big enough for over 770 cars). It is proposed to be built on the open space south of the current Wal-Mart location (no kidding, right next door).

At present, the property is not zoned for commercial purposes and is not within the Polson city limits. The corporation will demand that the city change the zoning and annex the site. Wal-Mart acts as if its desire to dictate changes to the community plan (and further dominate this economy) are inevitable, almost a matter of right. One question: Who controls this community, Polson area citizens or the Waltons' real estate department in Bentonville, Ark.?

Like Yogi Berra, we are feeling "deja vu, all over again." It was only 10 years ago that Polson said yes to Wal-Mart by granting a similar annexation and zoning variance; this act spurred growth in a new commercial [area] now called "Heritage Road." The 93/35 junction strip has since filled in with many smaller commercial buildings. Traffic is now often snarled, particularly in the summer, and two extravagantly expensive taxpayer funded four-lane intersections are now almost completed in an attempt to relieve the congestion.

We cannot escape the feeling that the community is being toyed with. The new highway asphalt was still warm when Wal-Mart announced the plan to abandon its current site (the development that largely created the need for these two multi-million dollar highway intersections), and move the almost addressed traffic problem south up the hill, where a new stop light is proposed to appear.

Wal-Mart is the nation's largest retailer and the four members of the Walton family, its principal owners, are collectively one of the wealthiest families in the world. Enough seems to be a word they do not understand. Wal-Mart specializes in controlling both the supply and distribution marketplace (supply from sweatshops in China and the Third World, distribution in the U.S., preferably rural U.S.) this is a marketshare strategy (first dominance, then oligopoly — goal monopoly). Anybody who believes Wal-Mart's ultimate aim is to increase retail competition probably had a great-grandfather in 1905 who believed J.P. Morgan merged railroads in order to lower freight rates.

Even though they open a store like this every few days, I can imagine the Waltons' overfed MBA team in Bentonville pausing to gloat if this plan is approved. The gloating wouldn't last more than a moment, however, because the quest for global retail dominance does not allow idle time. It takes time to manipulate a town of 6,000 into permitting the retail equivalent of a neutron bomb in this small business economy and locate it at the junction of Heritage Road and Memory Lane. This irony would be a triumph of greedy corporate marketing over common sense, and a tragedy for this community.

President Harry S Truman had a sign on his desk which declared, "The buck stops here." In truth, dollars never stop flowing into, out of and around a community. However, the vitality of the community is determined by how many times dollars circulate before flowing out. When a Wal-Mart Supercenter dominates a retail economy this small, the buck doesn't even pause before flowing out to Arkansas.

Wake up, Polson, your special and vital small lakeside town is losing its heart and soul. It is becoming a bland sprawling copy of American suburbia. Many of us live here and many people move here, precisely to avoid or escape such places. Then we are asked (or told) by this faceless corporation to support the expansion of the nightmare here. Polson, you have a community plan intended to retain what is unique about the community. All you have to do is follow it.

We need to tell the Waltons that the part of Lake County's economy they already control is enough!

Jay Wilson Preston

Cynthia M. Preston

Ronan