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THERE LAST WEEK stood four of
Meritless litigation would be unseemly and, ultimately, useless. It would disdain public proceedings that, however odious their outcome, have evidently been on the square, and it would impede the right of an American citizen to legally dispose of his property. After Appomattox, Robert E. Lee quashed Confederate talk of continuing the conflict via guerrilla war. Last week's losers should also forswear tactics that merely harass. Moreover, Walmart's pockets are a bit deeper than those of any Parthian shooters.
As to moral suasion targeted at Bentonville, it is worth a try, though the record is unpromising. Once Walmart fixes on a site, the retail behemoth rarely backtracks. The detouring in the 1990s of Walmart from Ferry Farm, George Washington's boyhood home, is a happy exception that proves the rule. But it was the rule that applied at places like history-drenched Chestertown, Md., founded in 1706, which had to wage a harrowing 10-year battle to keep out Walmart, and Charlotte Pike, Tenn., site of both a Civil War battle and an Indian burial ground, where Walmart built a store over historians' and American Indians' protests. The common theme in these set-tos was expressed in the statement of a Walmart rep to Chestertown's mayor: "We don't lose."
Walmart nabobs may relent when they glean the historical importance of the Wilderness--the beginning of the end for Lee's army--and the friends of history should try to take that message to the highest corporate suites. Yet for months the nation's leading Civil War historians have railed against a Wilderness Walmart. Celebrities Robert Duvall and Ben Stein have joined them. The Washington Post, the L.A. Times, and ABC News have reported the controversy. If Walmart's executives are ignorant about the Wilderness, they rate a ticker-tape parade down Broadway as the first Earthlings to have just returned from the planet Pluto.
PIPE DREAM
What about the specter of bad PR? It is a small haunt. Walmart is a $401 billion company--the globe's largest. Its worth, according to the CIA World Factbook, exceeds the GDPs of all but 26 nations. Every week, its roughly 4,000 U.S. stores record 100 million customer entries--representing almost a third of the population. Expecting any significant number of shoppers to resist the siren song of "Save Money, Live Better" because of battlefield insensitivity in Where's That, Virginia is to dream.
Orange re-teaches a plain lesson: If citizens wish to save hallowed ground from development, they must buy it before the Walmarts arrive, or tighten local zoning. If the latter, they also must elect officials who will stand by that zoning: The Orange quartet pushed aside a 60,000-square-foot building limit to give Walmart 138,000 square feet for its Supercenter.
Meanwhile, opponents of what Sam Walton's creation represents--an insatiable hunger for world retail conquest--can take heart that the juggernaut at times stumbles. While Walmart has opened stores in 14 foreign countries, it didn't "take" in Germany and South Korea, nations from which it withdrew. At home, it suffers a steady pounding of criticism about the treatment of its work force (70 percent quit within a year of employment; barely half have health insurance); its alleged bullying of domestic suppliers, which may be forced to cut costs so low that they either go broke or move operations to low-wage China; and its decimation of local businesses when it hits town.
Juggernauts topple--A&P once held 80 percent of the U.S. supermarket trade--and the poem "Ozymandias" is still relevant business analysis concerning the transitoriness of the high and mighty. Can the business world's reigning "king of kings" be persuaded to act royally in Orange to save the sanctum of what is truly eternal?
