This letter came out of a brief discussion with Claire Caplan, the producer of Midday with Dan Rodricks on Baltimore’s NPR station. There’s a Walmart proposed for development in Remington, and she asked if I’d be willing to share a few words regarding my opposition to the project for a show scheduled to air Monday, March 29. While I certainly do not claim to possess all the answers, this was a good opportunity to organize my thoughts.
Claire,
The short answer to, “why don’t you support Walmart in Remington” is that I do not believe Walmart’s long term goals are the same as Baltimore’s citizens’ long term goals. It’s easy to take potshots at specific problems Walmart has, but they’re so huge (no other retail services corporation can compare) that anything that can have gone wrong at some point, will have. But the problem I see is deeper than just, “I heard one of the managers was a jerk”.
What people in Baltimore want to see is more prosperity, what the city wants to see is more tax revenue (a city’s version of prosperity), and both groups want to see these things with as little effort as possible. A big-box shopping center—on the surface—promises these things on a very short time scale with limited up front cost to the city, but does so with a huge long term expense. There are a few problems with the proposed Walmart that outweigh the benefits.
First, more prosperity for citizens in the surrounding neighborhoods cannot be created out of thin air. Walmart’s business model is to undercut the prices existing businesses and to siphon off those business’ customers. This means we’ll see a wave of closures in North and Central Baltimore (Remington, Hampden, Charles Village, and Waverly for sure) starting a few months after the store opens and continuing until a new, more one-sided, balance is reached.
Second, once Walmart (or any out-of-state chain) has the money, it’s removed from the local economy. That’s very bad in the long term. The big boxes (Walmart and Lowe’s) are not going to build up Remington, they’re going to drain it.
Finally, the kind of traffic (both vehicular and human) that comes through a big box retailer is not interesting and doesn’t contribute to the character of Baltimore. Walmart is designed for closed-loop consumption. You drive up, walk in, buy your products, and drive out. I applaud the consideration and effort that has gone into not making the site another brutalist wasteland, but it will still be a primarily auto-friendly strip mall, which is not something worth celebrating.
The culture Walmart promotes is not one I want to be a part of. To Walmart, I am not a person, a citizen, or a neighbor; I am a consumer, good only for spending money. This is an institutional position brought on by the sheer vastness of the enterprise. That they hire P.R. firms to polish their image is not a statement of changing goals or improving business models, it’s the standard corporate acknowledgement that they suck at being good so they have to control the discussion.
I can’t say a Walmart in Remington would be entirely bad. It’s going to replace a dying business having few customers with a new business with a lot of customers. If the development project, in general, were pursued in a staged manner with more involvement from groups like the Chesapeake Sustainable Business Alliance, then I would be more likely to support it wholeheartedly.
What I want to see for Baltimore is more opportunity for people to do interesting and productive work, more encouragement from the city for small businesses and entrepreneurial activity, and more meaningful interaction between humans who care about where they are and who they are living next to. Walmart does not support those goals.
