Given the often debated economic impact of adding a Walmart, I hope that someone is making a study of these towns going forward.
Nobody's really thinking about this in the grand scheme. There was something in Fiscal Times recently about how the death of Walmarts was leading to a renaissance of small shops without talking about what to do with the giant dead husk of the Walmart, or the fact that an extant small shop is a lot easier to support than a new small shop is to establish. Meanwhile, Amazon is so hot'n'bothered to get its products to you NOW NOW NOW that they talked the Post Office into delivering on Sundays, but only for them. To the best of my ability to determine, there is no corner of the United States that's immune from Prime 2-day. Amazon's own verbiage includes Puerto Rico and Alaska. I know that when I was in Eatonville, WA, I could get things just as quickly as when I was close enough to LAX to smell the jet fuel. I imagine the expense is substantially greater for bumblefuck USA than it is for LAX... which would be one reason why those Walmarts are dying. But for the average bulk shopper in rural America, Amazon Prime is a great Walmart replacement. And the jobs being lost are the shit ones - no one ever holds up a Walmart associate career as something admirable. Driving for Amazon sucks but I'm not sure it sucks harder than greeting for Walmart. Really, Walmart and Amazon were both locked in a death struggle to eliminate competition by sucking all profit out of retail. Walmart did it by scaling up and slashing margins. Amazon did it by eliminating brick'n'mortar and slashing margins into the negative. Lo and behold: retail is dead. And sure - there are probably lots of former Walmart shoppers that can't afford a Prime subscription. But let's talk about economic viability: We are, after all, talking about a town that would already be dead because its sole source of income was a coal mine that dried up, held in a liminal zombie state by a retailer that had no long-term reason to open a store there. I used to go off-roading in Questa, NM. Questa existed largely because of a molybdenum mine that was usually closed. In other words, most of the time Questa existed off of welfare. I spent the summer building electric cars in Jerome, AZ. Jerome ceased to exist in the '50s because the iron mine dried up. It wasn't until the Hells Angels moved in in the '70s that it became a town again. Towns live. Towns die. Yes, it's shittily ironic that Walmart killed their town centers to be profitable and now they have no viable reason for those centers to return... but if there isn't an organic reason for the town to exist, is it any more Walmart's fault than the mine?Her husband once worked in the coal mines. Now the couple lives on what little they get from Medicare and Social Security, and with precious few other options she made the hour-and-a-half trip from her home back in the “hollers” once a month to stock up.
Amazon structures itself so that it doesn't directly employ drivers. And while driving tends to be what everyone pictures when you think of the logistics industry, that is just the tip of the labor force. The vast majority of people employed in that field are doing warehousing or shipping hub work. I do that work. Based on what I've heard of their working conditions, I would much rather have a job as a Walmart greeter than work for Amazon's logistic operations. Both companies would treat me like shit, but Walmart greeters generally don't end up in the hospital. Warehousing is dangerous. And the jobs being lost are the shit ones - no one ever holds up a Walmart associate career as something admirable. Driving for Amazon sucks but I'm not sure it sucks harder than greeting for Walmart.
Yeah, I've talked to those guys. It's a shitty gig. And I knew some of the original warehouse guys at Amazon - one of 'em had the story of his towed Volvo written up in The Everything Store. I think both jobs are designed to grind you up and spit you out through deception; neither position is one with any long-term prospects and the externalities are carefully masked by Amazon. Somewhere on here there's an article that talks about the mobile home migrants that Amazon employs, like latter-day Tom Joads. I think that's one of the reasons Walmart is diminishing while Amazon is cresting; Walmart started their rape'n'pillage run out in the open and they started it back in the early '90s, while Amazon started their rape'n'pillage run in the dark and they started it in the early '00s. I think Amazon is gonna run out of rope sooner than Walmart did, though. Walmart, despised as it is by the liberal intelligentsia, is the 3rd place of the Rascal set. And Amazon ain't got no greeters.
Isn't this true of most warehousing / factory production / general "first line" jobs, not necessarily just Amazon? Though I am sure they mask things better than most places. I think both jobs are designed to grind you up and spit you out through deception; neither position is one with any long-term prospects and the externalities are carefully masked by Amazon.
Not at all. Typically, warehouse-related jobs are where unionization starts. Not only that but there's long been a tradition that warehouse experience leads up the ladder in any sort of sales/manufacturing enterprise. That's another leg Walmart has over Amazon - they at least tend to promote from within. Amazon, on the other hand, positions itself as a valuable resume builder within the tech world - "work for us, it'll impress everyone after you get sick of us." But that doesn't extend to the people who don't code.
Emphasis mine. Wouldn't it be seen as a silver lining though, that people are attempting to fill in the gap left behind by companies like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, etc. from leaving? I know I'm personally a huge supporter of small businesses and try to promote mom and pop shops as often as possible. There was something in Fiscal Times recently about how the death of Walmarts was leading to a renaissance of small shops without talking about what to do with the giant dead husk of the Walmart, or the fact that an extant small shop is a lot easier to support than a new small shop is to establish.
I should have been clearer. I'm deeply hopeful for the renaissance of small towns and small shops that feed them. However, none of the articles I've read about the effect of failing Walmarts on the small towns they parasitized has taken an ecosystem-wide view of the problem, and that's my beef with this article. "A vision of bountiful modernity" is not a phrase usually lobbed at a Walmart. And if you look up Kimball, WV, you'll discover that less than 200 people live there. I recommend you look up the Walmart in Kimball, WV, and click "street view" - the place is like an idyllic shangri-la, which is also language never lobbed at Walmart- there's probably more cars in the parking lot than in the surrounding two-mile radius around it. Once you've done that, zoom out until you see... civilization. You might even look for a Walmart in Princeton, WV (population 7,000) and determine that you can get to the Princeton Walmart from the Kimball Walmart in under an hour. Now - I grew up in a small town. If I wanted Little Caesar's it was half an hour away, through two reservations and across the Rio Grande. If I wanted Olive Garden it was two hours away, through 14 reservations and two mountain passes. There wasn't then but there is now a Walmart next to the Little Caesar's. I'm here to tell ya - driving an hour to get to a Walmart is not a hardship when you live in a town of 200 people. It's a fact of life. And that town of 200 people? It's below minimum viable by a fair amount. Walmarts are like an opportunistic infection - they thrive where the host is already weakened. The strain isn't as potent as it used to be, which is part of it. But a rural town with 200 people that happens to be an hour away from another Walmart isn't a place that needed a Walmart at all.Indeed, in a place so diminished, Kimball’s Walmart had risen like a vision of bountiful modernity, stocked with anything one could ever need. And its disappearance is typical of the rest of the stores that Walmart announced it was shedding.
I completely agree. My personal anecdote comes from a town of 2000 people. We had two grocery stores and there was one in the next town down, but it looks like only one is left now. We were the biggest city for twenty miles in any direction. The nearest McDonald's was twenty miles away. I remember when Pizza Hut came in; it was a big deal. Making a trip to buy anything besides hardware and groceries meant making a trip. Like you said, fact of life. But looking at a map of Kimball, WV reminds me of visiting Newcomb, NY in December. I was day hiking and needed dinner each night. There was one restaurant twenty miles away open Thursday-Monday in the off season or another 25 miles the opposite direction. The second advertises on their website "ATT and Verizon service," and eating there was the first time my phone connected to a tower in 36 hours. The closest Walmart or Home Depot or Best Buy is about an hour away. Newcomb is another mountain town. I suspect it mostly survives on tourism and people weekending or retiring up from Albany.driving an hour to get to a Walmart is not a hardship when you live in a town of 200 people. It's a fact of life.
Wow. I didn't know Wal-Marts could be found in towns so small. For towns that size, they really are behemoths. I can see then, how they could be convenient for so many people. I can also see how their presence, or lack of, could have such a big economic impact. Even if they employed only 50 people, that's a huge chunk of the population even when you factor in that they'll probably attract people from neighboring towns. They're also probably a boon for local municipalities and counties as far as taxes are concerned too.
A huge chunk. There's also a federal pen (FCI McDowell, 1600 inmates) and an overflow facility (200 inmates) within 15 minutes drive of it. Prisons are the second "oh my god we're dying" industry of depressed economic areas. If your town is thinking of putting in (A) a Walmart (B) a prison or (C) a casino, you're fucked. That means there's weakness and someone with deep pockets wishes to use the externalities of subsidized construction to funnel what's left of your local economy's money right into their pockets. That's because none of them are actually good for your town - they won't go there unless you subsidize the shit out of their existence. Walmarts will generally demand a tax holiday of 10 years or more and require all public works (water/sewer/gas, roads, electricity, you name it) to their new spot to be provided at taxpayer expense. They're notorious for shutting down in one location and opening another shortly before that tax holiday expires.
Well, retail is down everywhere. A lot of companies in a lot of industries are closing stores, downsizing, etc. I think maybe part of the reason people fixate on Wal-Mart is because the company is seen as so big and ubiquitous that we seem to think that they should be immune from this kind of behavior. If Wal-Mart seems vulnerable, then everyone is vulnerable.
Ok. So let's pull back a bit and take a look at this. This Walmart in particular had employees. It had people driving from miles around to get to it. It had a network of suppliers. It had people who serviced shit... coolers, lights, HVAC, etc. Now all those people are out of a job, or at least under-employed. And there is a big, huge, open building sitting unused. Is it so far-fetched to think of a bunch of locals pooling together, building little "shops" inside the Walmart (think old school Swap Meet), and continuing to provide the services the local community needs, using some of the existing infrastructure Walmart installed? Yeah... there are a lot of problems with that. But... I mean... what's their other option? Move to Atlanta? Yah. That ain't gonna work.
Here's my point: 1) It wasn't cost-effective for Walmart to do this, and Walmart has extraordinary price leverage that the fine folx of backwater West Virginia lack. Walmart has a nasty tendency to subsidize its stores early in their cycle; this particular Walmart (and Walmarts like it) likely didn't survive the costs/benefits analysis on further subsidy. 2) The services provided prior to the existence of Walmart were likely provided elsewhere, on a smaller scale, at a higher profit margin, not under one costly roof. Those services were also likely endangered by a shift in buying habits across the decades; there's no more Radio Shack, supermarkets have become huge, nobody buys books or records anymore (yes, hipster, I know you do, and your purchases have barely broached the noise floor) and even sporting goods come from giant retailers like Cabela's or Scheel's. There's no way to put a happy face on this - shit be bleak. But Kimball, WV had 400 people in 2000. It had 260 in 2010. In 2006 they opened a Walmart. But then the mines started closing. Last year, there were 34 underground mines in the region. Now there are 13. With the mines went the train jobs, the mechanic jobs and the car dealers. Now, houses are vacant with caved in roofs. Storefronts are boarded. “You’re just afraid to get up every morning,” McKinney said. “When you get up you think, ‘OK, today what’s going to close? Who’s going to lay off?’ You would pray, but our tax base is basically zeroed out.” Wal-Mart paid around $65,000 in taxes to McDowell County last year and 80 percent of that money goes to the local school board. With coal severance tax and business and occupation tax down, the county is left scrambling, trying to figure out how to support the community. “We cried all day yesterday,” McKinney said later. “We cried and it’s done.” I've heard it said that Shake Shack has a higher market cap than the entire coal industry. And coal is super-bad for the environment and we all can't wait to shut down the mines and and and. But coal mining is labor-intensive and provides a lot of jobs. Jobs that have been steadily declining since they all went to North Dakota and Wyoming when fracking became a thing. Circle of life, man. It sucks, but unless West Virginia figures out something to do other than mine coal, it's gonna be a rugged place to live.When Wal-Mart moved in to Kimball 10 years ago, McDowell County was in much better shape, according to McKinney.
I expect the future to be bright for little towns that get decent networking infrastructure. At some point the kids who moved back to the cities for cool clubs or artisan cookies or whatever will stop wanting to pay $madness to live in a shoebox in a place where it's impractical to own a car and someone keeps taking a dump on the subway and the population density alone is enough to give a saint a misanthropic streak. Many of them can work anywhere with good bandwidth.It sucks, but unless West Virginia figures out something to do other than mine coal, it's gonna be a rugged place to live.
I actually lived through the last time people said this, in the late 1980's to mid-1990's. I took a sabbatical from work specifically to work in one of these "tech communes" that were springing up in unlikely places like AZ, MT, NM, etc. The idea was that coders could be anywhere, so why not go somewhere cheap, beautiful, and have a really nice life outside of work, as well? Didn't work out. Turns out face-time is a real thing, and that when you work outside of the city, you are not pressured by the same stresses that city-dwellers are... so you don't think of inventing Uber, because, well, shit. The store is right down there, and I walk over there when I need something. Or I borrow Bob's truck when I need some hay. Or whatever. I wound up moving to Eastern Europe just after the wall came down, and lived a Wild-West kind of existence over there for the better part of a decade. And their tech infrastructure was always better than the US, and remains so even today. But Silicon Valley is still the 800 lb gorilla, no matter how many other countries try to develop their own version of it. Turns out, the people who make the disposable income are the people in the cities. And unless you live there with them, you don't come up with the killer apps that they will pay for. (No matter what that "app" is...)
I see my fellow programmers once or twice a year, and management not at all if I can help it. About half of us couldn't locate each other on a paper map. We've been working that way for years. Most of us learned computing in the free software community, so that was most natural to us; we'll email or im when we're in the same room.
This is an interesting point because I can think of four different books off the top of my head that make erudite, well-researched points that all disagree with each other. Bill McKibben agrees with you. The proliferation of online social networks and the decline in the standard of living the world over will lead to isolated small town networks that perform the majority of their socialization via virtual space, while their physical presence is likely to be curtailed and insular. Stephen Pinker disagrees with you. He points out that the network effects of innovation within cities exactly matches the ATP transfer efficiency of biological organisms (or some such - I can't remember precisely how he worked that one out) and that it takes a large grouping of people in order to find that small grouping that inspires you. Social movements, after all, always come out of the coffee houses of metropolises. Shannon Hayes agrees with you. Happiness is best found through self-sufficiency and generating your own resources and happiness independent of money or finance and that really, salary is a terrible marker for success when happiness matters so much more. Sherry Turkle disagrees with you. Virtual companionship is no substitute for actual companionship and happiness comes from the people you can reach out and physically touch, not the people you can skype. We were noticing something interesting yesterday while dealing with HostGator (again) and the fact that there's a giant airgap of knowledge between "I have a Wordpress website" and "I can harden my website against Slovenian portscanners" and that airgap is largely bridged by people who are overeducated and overqualified. Nobody got a CS degree in order to keep their girlfriend's brother's cousin's website online, but there's a lot of that. And maybe if you live in West Virginia and maintain clients across eight time zones, you can make it work. A camera operator I love working with lives in Fayetteville, WV. She tried LA for about a season and bailed. She built her own house out in the woods and it's well-insulated enough that she doesn't need heat. She makes it look super-attractive. I think all four of those smart people are right and wrong, in different ways for different reasons at different times. It's gonna be interesting to see.
Can I add a large group of economic geographers to that list? There is a significant part of the field devoted to the question of globalization and the (non)importance of clusters. Basically, they focus on the 'anywhere' part of bfv's comment. Is it true that globalization has made place irrelevant for work? In general, there have been two ways of looking at the question: 1. Globalization results in equality. The moment telecommunication made remote working and long distance talking possible, there have been people predicting a future where work can and does happen anywhere. Most notably, Thomas Friedman declared a decade ago that 'the Earth is flat', meaning the global playing field is leveled because of globalizing forces like the Internet. 2. Globalization cannot overcome cluster advantages. Michael Porter, for example, argues that The world is not flat: it is spiky, with peaks of wealth. Clusters - whether they are a startup cafe, a campus, a business district or a Silicon Valley - have a lot of advantages that trump globalizing forces. Bringing people together makes interaction, collaboration and innovation much easier. While the amount of jobs that can be done remotely has increased dramatically over the last decade, there are still so many jobs where physical proximity matters. I don't think giving Harrison, West Virginia a great network is going to be enough to save it.in a global economy [...] one would expect location to diminish in importance. But the opposite is true. The enduring competitive advantages in a global economy are often heavily localized, arising from concentrations of highly specialized skills, knowledge, institutions, rivalry, related businesses and sophisticated customers.
I think the state of Silicon Valley is a pretty good argument that making interaction and collaboration too easy is not a good thing. People who start talking about a thing after they've done it do all the good things.Bringing people together makes interaction, collaboration and innovation much easier.
For one of my clients right now, I am doing a bunch of research on collaboration, what works and what doesn't, etc. This Harvard Business Review article is an excellent place to get started with some really shocking shit about collaboration and it's effect on the workplace: https://hbr.org/2016/01/collaborative-overload Check this: 80% of our work day is spent on unstructured and (largely) unproductive "collaboration". Emails, meetings, and other bullshit that isn't actually our essential job function. And, something like 90% of all value is generated by 3-5% of the actual people "working". Everyone else is basically shuffling virtual papers around on their desks, and jerking off.
I would counterargue that the state of Silicon Valley demonstrates that limited resources produce more innovation than unlimited resources. Knock three zeroes off the capitalization of Silicon Valley and suddenly you've got a double handful of scrappy entrepreneurs surrounded by the piled corpses of people looking for a million dollar exit.
There's an argument going around, originating with Michael O. Church I think, that the problem isn't too much money, it's that the amounts of money floating around attract graduates from elite business schools who couldn't make it on Wall Street and use VC firms as their safety net, so the people running the show don't really want to be there, don't have much understanding or appreciation of technology, and see no reason to learn because startups are expected to fail. In that view, the whole circus is run by people treating it as a power suit McJob. I don't know how much truth is there, I have avoided that world my whole career, but from stories I hear and looking from the outside it sure sounds plausible. What I do know is that even among programmers, outside of Silicon Valley there's much more healthy skepticism of the stupid memes (the sharing economy...) than in it, and there would be fewer very smart people wasting their talent on nonsense, trivialities, and horrors with smiley faces painted on if they could get some distance. Talking to a Palantir recruiter was one of the scariest conversations I've ever had, because he was more than happy to admit the tinfoil hats don't know the half of it, but it was for the best because someone is going to do everything they do, and they're all "deviants" too. He said "deviant" a lot. They like deviants at Palantir, and that's why they're Making the World a Better Place. Because while they're deciding whether or not you're a terrorist based on your taste in porn, at least they're not going to judge you. And I could see how that pitch might work, he sounded like he really bought what he was selling himself.
Completely anecdotal, but I was friends with two people in college who now work at Palantir, and a third who spent a summer there before working elsewhere. From the three of them, and conversations involving other people with Palantir experience that place is completely drinking from the well. They all completely bought into the company, it's mission, and everything that Peter Thiel had to say. It was kind of scary to see that level of blind allegiance to a company.
Bill McKibben - Middlebury, Vermont (pop 8,545) Stephen Pinker - Boston (pop 655,884) Shannon Hayes - Warnerville, New York (the census doesn't know it, but Wikipedia says it's between Cobleskill, pop 4,678, and Richmondville. pop 2,513) Sherry Turkle - Boston Everyone thinks the way they live makes the most sense. I know someone who maintains Wordpress sites for a living. She has an English degree. Used to be a technical writer, but no one thinks a good manual is worth paying for anymore. When a problem an English degree and google can't solve comes up, she phones a friend, pays obscene consultant money, and bills her client for it in turn.We were noticing something interesting yesterday while dealing with HostGator (again) and the fact that there's a giant airgap of knowledge between "I have a Wordpress website" and "I can harden my website against Slovenian portscanners" and that airgap is largely bridged by people who are overeducated and overqualified. Nobody got a CS degree in order to keep their girlfriend's brother's cousin's website online, but there's a lot of that. And maybe if you live in West Virginia and maintain clients across eight time zones, you can make it work.