Wal-Mart abandons poorest customers

I'M NEW to the site and have been reading back issues. The June 11, 2009 article "Fighting to Unionize Wal-Mart" by Jason Netek and Matt Camp brings to mind a local issue that has been really bothering me.

Until now, there has been a Wal-Mart store in the heart of one of the lower-income areas of Kansas City, Kansas, referred to by locals as KCK. KCK shares its border with Wyandotte County. The demographic as of 2007 was 48 percent non-Hispanic whites, 26 percent African-American, 22 percent Latino, 2 percent Asian and 1 percent American Indian. There have been recent increases in the Asian population through an influx of refugees from Myanmar and Nepal, and the Latino population is growing steadily as well. The lower-income residents of KCK (and the largest proportion of its people of color) live in its eastern half.

This Wal-Mart was situated roughly in the middle of KCK's northern half, at 6301 State Ave. Easily accessed by bus routes and within walking distance for hundreds of families, it was a place where people could get affordable prescription drugs, low-cost foods and household items.

In a remarkable exercise of American greed, Wal-Mart decided to relocate and open a new Wal-Mart almost six and a half miles to the west, at 10824 Parallel Pkwy., at the glitzy Legends shopping mega-complex.

I spoke with two shoppers who said they were not going to shop out there. One, an elderly African-American woman, said it was too far for her to drive, and she was going to miss the convenient pharmacy service and the pharmacist she had known personally for several years. The other, a white woman of middle age, said she would drive to the Wal-Mart in Roeland Park, Kan., nine miles away rather than bother with all the traffic and crowds at Legends. She was disgusted.

There is no other department store in the area. There are a few Family Dollar stores, which sell terrible, cheap, unusable junk. I have no idea if this move has not only disenfranchised hundreds of elderly, disabled and poor pharmacy customers and families without cars (and those with cars but lacking sufficient gas money for wasteful driving), but employees as well, who can't afford the extra driving or who previously walked to work, and now must pay for bus fare. I would be interested to know.

Overall, this selfish, greedy action by Wal-Mart to relocate to an affluent, high-traffic glitzy shopping mecca in the extreme western part of the county/city, where virtually no poor families ever shop, demonstrates its commitment to the continuing exploitation of its workers and the communities of people who depend the most on the low-cost goods it provides.

It is instructive to go to the Wal-Mart web site and click on "Store Finder"; enter the zip code 66101. That's the zip code for the easternmost and poorest part of KCK. See where all the stores are now; they are located in a ring all around the outside of the city; there aren't even any stores in Jackson County, Missouri (directly east of KCK), which is the poorest part of Kansas City, Mo.

The greatest concentration of Wal-Mart stores is in a corridor between Overland Park, Leawood and Lenexa--the most affluent part of the Kansas City metro area. There are a staggering five stores within less than 10 miles. Heaven forbid that a busy soccer mom should have to drive the Lexus SUV more than a mile or two out of her way to pick up some forgotten item.

Thanks for reading my rant! Peace.

Kathy, Kansas City, Kan.

P.S. My late dad, who was a trade unionist for more than 40 years (and walked picket lines with any striking workers he heard about well after his retirement), liked to shop at Wal-Mart, but he always grumbled that they paid their people minimum wage. He was unfailingly polite to the workers, and every so often, he'd tell one with a wink, "You know, you ought to get a union in here."