A small town grocery store closed its doors in Columbia Falls, Montana. The employees were laid off as the owner conceded they couldn't handle the competition from their big new rival.
Another store crushed by Wal-Mart? Try again. While there is a Wal-Mart within ten miles of this grocery store, that Wal-Mart has only a small selection of groceries. No, the big business that killed the small town grocer was Super One Foods, a Western supermarket chain.
As is the case in much of the country, the small 'mom and pop' grocers that Wal-Mart is destroying don't exist. They were driven out of business by chain grocers like Albertsons, Fred Meyers, Smiths, and others. Some grocery stores go out of business; other chains acquire some. It is the nature of business and industry.
We're being asked to consider Albertsons and K-Mart as more moral corporate citizens than Wal-Mart, less likely to underpay employees and sell product made by slave labor. However, the fact is that both stores sell the same type of products. You are no more likely to see a "Made in America" label in Wal-Mart than in K-Mart. You are no more likely to have a long, happy career in groceries working for Wal-Mart than Albertsons. Either way, it's a repetitive service job that most people will not want to spend their lives in.
Big Grocers taking advantage of the anti-Walmart sentiment are the worst of hypocrites. They were innovators who devoured their less powerful competition decades ago. They followed the rules of Capitalism and won. Now, someone with a better business model has come along and is now systematically threatening their position. They are now pleading to be saved from the market forces that created them.
The opponents of Super Markets were wrong then and so are the opponents of Wal-Mart now. The truth of the matter is that the duty of business is not to protect its competitors, but to provide goods at the most reasonable price. Wal-Mart succeeds in that better than anyone else. Wal-Mart haters need not worry, someone will come along with a business plan that's better than Wal-Mart's. When that happens, people will rally around their local Wal-Mart's to save them from the bad guy, never realizing the absurdity of it all.