When I stepped out of my car on Wednesday afternoon, the intense heat radiating from below reminded me where I was: Suburban Hell. I was visiting the Alexandria Wal-Mart on Route 1, which opened last October in a former K-Mart location. This is one of those new, smaller-size Wal-Mart stores: At just 80,000 square feet, it’s about half the size of the characteristic big-box. Yet it still stands surrounded by enough blacktop to pave K Street from one end of D.C. to the other. That’s something you notice on a hundred-degree day.
The ugly sight and the smell of tar brought to mind everything I dislike about Wal-Mart. The corporate welfare deals that have fueled its growth nationwide are the stuff of legend. Wal-Mart lobbies for self-serving causes inimical to free-market growth and competition — for example, in favor of Obamacare, and in favor of higher minimum wage laws, which in both cases will harm the company’s small competitors. Wal-Mart’s apparently transactional financial support for anti-business groups like the Center for American Progress (notice how they never dump on Wal-Mart, even when they give to Scott Walker?) should doubly enrage the small businesses with which Wal-Mart competes.
But after I stepped into the air-conditioned store, I was also reminded of what I really do like about Wal-Mart. Not by Steve Restivo, the helpful company officer who was giving me a tour, but rather by a passing customer named Rose, who had nothing but complaints.
“You’ve cut down so much on the store size that you don’t have what I need,” she said to Steve. This Alexandria store, she complained, does not stock the half-gallon jugs of white vinegar that she uses to do her laundry. It doesn’t sell the brand of insect repellent wipes she was looking for. And when it does carry what she wants, it is often in sizes too big for her to carry with her arthritic joints.
Oh, and there’s no Tide, she added. Strange, because I had just seen bottles of Tide nearby. …
“Well ma’am, did you see the Tide in that aisle over there?” Steve asked politely.
“Oh, I know you have Tide,” she replied. “You don’t have the particular Tide that I want — the Downy-Free Tide.”
I assume she meant “Tide with April-Fresh Downy,” but I’m not the person to ask. You see, I live along the Georgia Avenue corridor in Washington. I love my neighborhood, but it isn’t an easy place to shop for everyday needs. At the nearby convenience store, I buy whatever Tide they have in whatever size they have, at whatever price they charge. It’s either that or another week of dirty underwear. And don’t go in there expecting to buy a big bag of tortilla chips.
My corner liquor store doesn’t even take credit cards. So I pay their high automated teller machine fees, then I pass my greenbacks through the bulletproof glass. The beer prices are high, and there isn’t much selection.
There are also two Safeways in my area — the one that’s way too far for me to walk sells alcohol and doesn’t smell of urine. The other one is the opposite on both counts.
So anyway, to hear a “spoiled shopper” like Rose was an awakening for me. It turns out that not everyone in our region lives and shops like we’re in the former Soviet Union. If you wonder why D.C. residents spent $41 million at Wal-Mart last year — despite the fact that there is no Wal-Mart in D.C., and no Wal-Mart within a 45-minute drive of downtown until recently — there you have it. There is a better world out there, and some of us would like to experience it without going to suburban Hell.
One of Wal-Mart’s four planned D.C. locations will be close enough for me to walk, at Georgia Avenue and Missouri. It includes no soul-sucking parking lot, and the curbside design is a vast improvement over the abandoned car dealership currently on the site.
There has been more controversy over this location than any of the others. The new people who suddenly invaded my neighborhood Listserv a few months ago to attack Wal-Mart seem particularly concerned about ruining the ambience there. I completely understand. I feel like I’m on the Champs d’Elysee every time I walk past that run-down Chinese take-out place, the Laundromat, the doggie day care, the McDonald’s, the beauty supply and the dollar store.
But I won’t be losing any sleep over that — not as long as everyone can get the right kind of Tide, a big bag of tortilla chips, decent beer, and a throw rug in a single trip.
David Freddoso is The Examiner’s online opinion editor. He can be reached at [email protected].
