Walmart abandons Big Box orthodoxy

Hey, sometimes in my convoluted prose I find little reasons to feel half-way decent about clogging up the Internet. The Project for Public Spaces gives me my Karma fix this week:

Wal-Mart, the big box retailer that altered the face of America with its supersized discount stores, now wants to restore a sense of place to thousands of communities. PPS can claim a major role in this surprising about-face. Last January, PPS President Fred Kent addressed the Wal-Mart annual board meeting with a well-received keynote address titled "Thinking Outside The Big Box: How Wal-Mart Can Turn A Place Around." Kent's ideas seemed to strike an immediate chord with Wal-Mart executives and stockholders, and by March the nation's largest retailer announced that it will begin shifting its operations from mega stores on the edge of town to small, downtown stores with independent owners....

[David Glass, Chairman:] "We're tired of being on the wrong side of the community-building equation."

The source of my good feeling? This November post predicting Walmart's coming derailment.

...Banks will not loan to smaller players where you operate due to the operational squash-power your company has over start-ups. But still, given your operating cost focus, more competent (and therefore, costly) knowledge has been driven out of your markets and been replaced by you, a low price, low product-expertise player. Again, competence generates more cashflow and disposable income. Income you need. The Lose/Lose part of this conundrum is, to get where you've gotten, you are no longer considered a positive economic force, nor a good neighbor: your markets are captive and possibly resentful of the lack of choice you've dictated; your local tax-base has lost it's diversity and thus its stability. Customers will bolt the first chance they get, the Chamber of Ex-Commerce resents you, and politicians will not like the quandary your business model has put the community in as angry voters ask them "how did you let things get this way?" You'll be big. And probably alone...

But notice: Contraction is the key word in so much of whats being said about them, positive or negative. America is an expansionist culture and a divergent, not a convergent economy. New product, not lower prices as it's first imperative. If the price of doing business means that brands and their companies and their employees must bend to the cultural and operational imperatives of Walmart, where does that leave a nation that invented James Dean or Apple or Coke?

In my opinion, Sam's America!® is a non-starter. Walmart's "great unravelling" has begun.

We'll see. Glass, the CEO and Chairman: think[s] we can take that to the shareholders and make a convincing case that a stronger local economy will be better for our stores in the long run. Smart, but tardy man, that Glass. Maybe he realized he was chewing off his own leg? Perhaps it's his prior military service that allows him to recognize a foolhardy Napoleonic march to Russia?

No. it's April Fool's. My karma's been had.

Oh well, since I'm all tingly and full of adjectives, back to finishing Brain > Metaphor > Brand, Part 3. (Yes, Walmart will be back as a case study, along with lots of real brand and ad examples for that Triune and Archetype approach.)

[Updated: Forgot to note the date and my Karmic shiner.]