Massive Markets
In an effort to thwart neighborhood opposition, Wal-Mart is employing
some of the same tricks used by real estate developers.
By Karrie Jacobs
June 2004
While searching for photographs of Wal-Mart stores, I came across the
Web site of one Chris Cheatwood, a 23-year-old native of Oxford,
Alabama, and an assistant manager of the Wal-Mart in the neighboring
town of Roanoke. “The Roanoke store is very small,” Cheatwood
notes, “one of the smallest stores in the state.” But
that’s about to change. A Wal-Mart Supercenter is due to open there
soon.
I was looking for photos to remind myself that Wal-Mart stores are so
big, so dumb, and so ugly that they appear to be remnants of the waning
years of the Soviet Union. Cheatwood’s photos caught my eye because
they were sentimental, almost pretty, the primal gray-and-blue facade of
the big-box store partially obscured behind rows of cars, the whole
scene suffused in the pinkish light of the magic hour.
“There is a lot of excitement from the locals,” Cheatwood
reports in a blog that tracks the progress of the new store.
“Whenever I go to lunch somewhere in town, they always ask me,
‘When is the store opening? How big is it? Do you have
groceries?’” Strangely Cheatwood’s blog is perfectly in
tune with the soft-sell ads Wal-Mart is running on CNN. Recently I saw
one about the feel-good people of Napa, California, embracing Wal-Mart
as a part of their community. I began to suspect that Cheatwood is some
sort of shill, that his blog is a form of disinformation. I hope
Wal-Mart isn’t that clever. I do, however, believe they’re
learning.
A Wal-Mart Supercenter opens in America approximately every 1.65 days.
These stores, which pair a supermarket with a typical discount
warehouse, can grow as large as 220,000 square feet. Often, as is the
case in Roanoke, they are built to replace an existing Wal-Mart in the
same town. And according to Al Norman, the founder of a grassroots
organization called Sprawl-Busters, local community groups or
governments contest about a third of the new stores.
Lawrence, Kansas, is a prime example. The town’s mayor,
commissioners, and planners have been waging pitched battle against
Wal-Mart since the planning commission rejected a proposal for a
200,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter in October 2002. Lawrence is an
extreme case. It’s a famously liberal college town of 80,000 in
eastern Kansas that boasts the most vital downtown for miles around.
Massachusetts Avenue, the main drag, offers a world-class selection of
Converse high-tops, excellent bookstores, and restaurants that treat
vegetables with respect. The city government has carefully crafted
downtown’s role as a retail center, refusing to allow malls to be
built in outlying cornfields while permitting a sort of big-box ghetto on
a highway south of town. Wal-Mart already has a store in the designated
big-box zone—a much ballyhooed early 1990s prototype for a
“green” energy-efficient store—but, true to business plan,
wants another store, a huge Supercenter.
The land in question, on the northwest side of town, was zoned for
agriculture until it was rezoned a few years ago in an ill-conceived
attempt to lure a Home Depot or a Lowe’s into town. But the zoning
does not permit a department store on the site. “Wal-Mart claims
that it’s not a department store,” argues David Schauner, a
city commissioner elected specifically because he’s an outspoken
opponent of big-box development. “We believe, from all relevant
evidence, that they are a department store.”
Apparently this problematic zoning was somehow intended to protect
downtown. A home-improvement store wouldn’t compete with the
downtown shops—the thinking presumably went—but a department
store would. Or else a Home Depot generates less traffic than a Wal-Mart.
Or it was a miscalculation made by a previous set of city officials.
Whatever the reason, the local developer—a partnership known as
6Wak Land Investments—isn’t buying. To date they have filed six
separate lawsuits against Lawrence while the city has burned through
more than $100,000 in legal fees trying to keep the Supercenter out.
With sales of $259 billion, one million employees nationwide, 3,551
domestic locations, and a number-one berth in the Fortune 500 for the
third year in a row, Wal-Mart has replaced McDonald’s as the
company Americans love to hate. Why? “Because it metastasizes the
fastest,” says Norman of Sprawl-Busters. Of course, it depends on
whether you look at Wal-Mart from the left or the right. The stores are
either monsters, destroying everything in their path, or economic
engines. They either generate poverty with low wages, or help low-income
people with low prices.
I prefer to look at Wal-Mart from front and center—preferably from
the outer edge of the parking lot. What I see is not just a machine that
colonizes the countryside in 15- or 20-acre chunks—sprawl!—but
a mass retailer of architecture. And I’m not talking Michael Graves
at Target. What I mean is that while the cognoscenti prefer to focus on
the occasional Richard Meier–designed apartment tower or the Zaha
Hadid museum, Wal-Mart easily dominates the landscape that most
Americans call home. The biggest buildings most people routinely visit
are not Skidmore, Owings & Merrill skyscrapers; they’re
Wal-Marts.
The real problem may be that Wal-Mart has just recently woken up to this
fact. They are just now discovering the impact that a conscious design
approach could bring to its unending acres of facade. Out in
Bentonville, Arkansas, Wal-Mart has a director of architecture, Bill
Correll, a thoughtful, soft-spoken man whose résumé
includes work on the Mall of America. And though Correll has been with
the company for eight years, making subtle changes like replacing vinyl
tile floors with slip-resistant concrete or gradually shifting the
exterior color scheme from the signature dark blue and battleship gray
to a palette of earth tones, it’s really in the last year that
Wal-Mart has warmed up to the power of architecture. The chain has
instituted a program they call, in clunky Orwellian, “Store of the
Community.”
Correll explains, “What we’re doing now differently is
we’re proactively going in and trying to find people within the
community who can help us understand the most appropriate way for us to
design.” He will often send a team of architects to a new store
location “whether there’s controversy or not” in search
of “the regional flavor, the history and culture, and the local
architectural context around our site.”
For example, Correll’s team met with a coalition of civic groups in
a Fort Worth neighborhood and asked them about their favorite buildings
in the area and the characteristics “they would like to see
reflected” in the future store. A number of people cited a 1930s
high school as a favorite. “So,” Correll says, “we took
many of the elements—including some arched windows, clay tile
roofs, brick, and other material—and put these colors and materials
together as part of the design of the Wal-Mart Supercenter. Does this
defuse public opposition? I’m sure it does. But the real drive for
us is to be good neighbors.”
Sigh.
Wal-Mart has picked up on a trick that developers and architects have
used for years; you make cosmetic changes to a controversial building
and the public will somehow believe that you’ve changed—or
they’ve changed—what the building is. And sometimes it works.
The annals of Wal-Mart vs. Anytown USA are now peppered with company
representatives holding out the promise of “interesting
architectural features.” They’ve tried that strategy in
Lawrence, proposing a redbrick facade and a garden center detailed with
brick pillars and fake wrought iron. But so far the Store of the
Community isn’t flying there. As Kirk McClure, a University of
Kansas associate professor in urban planning, observes, “A facade
on a big box is a facade on a big box.”
According to the Lawrence Journal-World, the city commission
voted in March to rezone the property in question so nothing larger than
80,000 square feet could be built, eliminating all but the diminutive
Wal-Mart Neighborhood Markets (essentially supermarkets) that top out at
55,000 square feet. 6Wak partner Bill Newsome promised a seventh lawsuit
within 30 days. By the time they resolve this—if they resolve
this—they’ll be able to put up a blue-and-gray store and call
it Wal-Mart Classic. |
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For communities that reject the generic Wal-Mart Supercenter (like this
one, in Mexico, above), the company is experimenting with contextualism,
as in an Art Deco design for Los Angeles (below). |
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It is only in recent years that Wal-Mart has discovered architecture.
Its “Store of the Community” program has resulted in designs
like this one, for North Miami Beach.
Top, © Corbis; bottom, courtesy Wal-Mart |
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