Column by George Sibley
Commerce – October 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE WAL-MART WARS have come to Gunnison. Down in Bentonville, Arkansas, the current masters of the universe have decided, for whatever reason, that Gunnison might be ready for a SuperCenter. This so inflates our sense of ourselves in the valley of the Upper Gunnison that we hardly know what to say, although we are trying out lots of statements on each other, as well as on Wal-mart.
We already have a Wal-mart – allegedly America’s Smallest Wal-mart. Wal-mart didn’t build the building – it would probably have been bigger if they had. It was built by a smaller retail discount chain back in the late 1970s, which sold out after a few years to another small retail discount chain, which struggled until around 1990 when it passed into the hands of Wal-mart.
I’ve heard that Wal-mart didn’t really consider us big enough for a Wal-mart then, but they picked up the store because, with big stores in Salida and Montrose, 65 miles either way, their trucks were going through Gunnison anyway and stuff could be unloaded while the driver took his lunch break. The new store immediately closed down one Main Street pharmacy by hiring away the druggist, and what was probably America’s Smallest J. C. Penney store closed soon afterwards. But the Wal-mart magnet then attracted a strip mall and a new City Market (that hired away the other Main Street druggist) behind a larger parking lot that has further eroded Main Street.
Those upheavals are pretty much forgotten, though, and therefore forgiven, in the way Americans have with the past. Now, we’ve become almost comfortable with the little box’s presence out there in what used to be Wilson’s bull pasture. It is staffed by locals and college kids, just like every other store, big or small, in the valley, and they are friendly or unfriendly on their own count and not because of some official policy – just like everywhere else. Their department managers (if you can find them) refer people to other stores downtown if they don’t have what you want. Except for the fact that the store doesn’t store its profits here, let alone invest them, but ships them right out to Bentonville to fuel the expansion of the Walton empire, Wal-mart appears to be just a big version of a small business.
But a SuperCenter? Rumors of this started surfacing last spring, and were confirmed in the summer. Although no date for construction has ever been mentioned, the whatchamacallit is now in the fan.
On the surface of it, this seems like one of those unifying “external threats that bring the community together.” An “informational meeting” organized by the local Main Street program directors drew around 250 people and turned into something of an “anti-big-box” rally. A proposal for a six-month moratorium on any big-box development was put before the Planning and Zoning Commission, which unanimously passed it on to the City Council.
The City Council balked briefly. They had been hearing from the people who express their opinions by phone rather than public meeting, and a couple of councilmen had heard from the masters of the universe themselves in Bentonville, from whom they thought they might have heard a veiled suggestion that if Gunnison didn’t want a big new store, they might eventually no longer have even America’s Smallest Wal-mart. So they indicated, on the first reading of the moratorium edict, that they would vote it down. Three to two.
THIS APPARENT DISREGARD for the will of the people – which one of the Councilmen had the bad form to call “the mob arena” – led to an unleashing of anger like I have never seen around here. A few days later there was a meeting to organize a recall drive for the Terrible Three. The Councilmen backed down at that point; and on the second reading, after a public hearing that drew more than 200, they unanimously voted for the moratorium.
And that is where we are now. We have half a year to figure out what we really want or don’t want in the way of big box retail development here; then Wal-mart may or may not replace our distinctive Smallest Wal-mart in the US with a generic Supercenter.
One thing I think we will quickly discover is that the community is not so unified against Wal-mart as some might think. When 200 people show up for a public meeting here, it’s a big meeting – but there are four or five thousand people who are not there; and walking home after such meetings, you can see by the bluish flickering light coming from their living rooms where those thousands are: out there in TV Land, the United States of Generica.
ONE OF THE FEW GUNNISONITES who spoke against the moratorium at the public hearing claimed to represent a “silent majority” that I think probably exists – a pretty malleable majority of free-market individuals who, after half a century of inundation from the “why ask why” forces in our society, are well trained at this point to parrot the USGenerica pledge of free-market allegiance: “What’s in it for me?”
There is also the local “class war,” or perception of same. My partner was a captive audience for an iteration of this, in a barber chair the other day. The class argument here goes: “Single mothers with three kids don’t have the luxury of showing up at public meetings to state their needs, but they need Wal-mart because they can’t afford to shop anywhere else. This whole thing is just the rich people in the valley against the poor people.”
One can raise the argument that, if places like Wal-mart, America’s largest employer, paid living wages and benefits, there might not be so many poor people. But the fact is, in this valley, Wal-mart’s wage-and-benefit packages don’t look so bad compared to wages and benefits in the valley overall – a valley with the interesting statistical combo of being one of the most highly educated populations in the nation with one of the nation’s lowest per capita incomes. My hypothesis is that this affirms the real purpose of Western State College’s liberal arts education: how to have a rich life without needing a lot of money. But I have deliberately not sought to gather evidence testing this hypothesis, and more likely it just reflects the nature and future of a service economy.
My perspective? I shop at Wal-mart for stuff I can’t find elsewhere in the valley – basically, work clothes, decent jeans for twenty bucks, Haynes underwear. I try to practice a ten-percent rule: If I can find it downtown for no more than ten percent more than Wal-mart charges, I buy it downtown. I hope that’s a fair tax to pay for supporting the guy who will, if he or she ever makes a profit, at least invest it here.
But if I happened to need a piece of material or a spool of thread – a pretty rare need for me – I would go to the Sewing Emporium downtown, regardless of any price differential, because Mary Spann was always doing something to challenge her customers to quilt, sew or otherwise put together something creative, which Wal-mart never does. It was worth going into the E&P just to look at the sewing art on the walls.
But unfortunately, Mary is closing the Sewing Emporium. She’s not blaming Wal-mart, but she did note that Wal-mart was selling a “knitter’s starting kit” for $10 that had cost her $10 from the supplier. We are thus diminished as a community by the individual’s opportunity to save a couple bucks. What a growing, spreading poverty that is.
BUT IN THE MEANTIME, truly the mean time in America, rather than uniting the people of the valley around the common enemy that all active communities seem to need, the Wal-mart War has great potential for ripping us apart. And this is happening in the larger cultural environment of one of the most emotional and divisive national elections in a long time. Quo vadimus? Is there any hope that good will and good humor might eke out small victories here and there, and thus keep hope alive? I’m not optimistic in this valley of Central Colorado, but I do continue to note the difference between optimism and hope.
George Sibley lives and shops in Gunnison, where he teaches at Western State College and runs the annual Headwaters Conference, which is coming soon.