Walmart Can't Win

Walmart is often vilified for, among other things, epitomizing sprawl.
Whether it is their consumption of former farmland, their
aesthetically ugly big boxes, or their stealing of business from local
moms and pops to regional stores with massive parking lots, Walmart,
in the eyes of some, represents everything wrong about how America is
sprawling.

Yesterday, I heard on the radio that Walmart said a lot of its growth
in new stores in this country will come from urban infill development:
sites within city limits that are unused or underused, like
environmental brownfields or decaying shopping centers. This is the
antithesis of all the things above: they're growing inside cities
instead of on their fringes, and they'll have to design these stores
to fit on footprints smaller than they're used to when land isn't a
constraint.

And yet I'm betting they're going to get a lot of flack for this
strategy. Some of it will be NIMBY, with citizens not wanting "that
evil store" in their neighborhood. Others will decry the store for
putting small businesses out of business.

I'm not here to argue that Walmart is great for creating jobs and
offering low prices; that's Walmart's job. I'm just pointing out that
Walmart can't seem to win. Maybe it's because people don't realize
there's two alternatives to everything and they're mad either way.