Okay, I’ve already established in an earlier blog entry that I’m no fan of Walmart, but I felt this new development deserved an entry, too. To further their quest for total world domination, Walmart has begun branching out. They call these new stores “Walmart Neighborhood Markets”. Basically they are grocery stores, pure and simple. One just popped up in my neighborhood, like a mushroom, overnight. When I drive by that place it gives me the creeps.
Think about it. When the regular Walmart stores started cropping up everywhere, nobody thought much about it. But then they started appearing in small towns, and inevitably every small mom and pop store within a 10 mile radius wound up closing its doors. They just couldn’t compete with Walmart’s prices and extensive inventory. When those shops closed, the jobs went with them. Sure, a lot of those people got jobs at the Walmart–underpaid, soul-sucking jobs where they no longer had any personal connection with the customers.
Next came Walmart banking, and a scary number of people have put their money in the hands of this corporation, which already controls more money than many third world countries. And now we have Walmart Neighborhood Markets. Tell me, how long will the other grocery stores in your area be able to compete with that kind of buying power once one of these places arrives on the scene? And once Walmart has wiped out all the competition, they will be in almost total control of your access to food. And they will also be in control of the price of that food.
When Bell Telephone monopolized all US communications, it took the Department of Justice to break it up into smaller companies, most of which are STILL too big for their britches. Imagine the damage a Walmart monopoly could do before our lazy government managed to intervene.
When I drive by this shiny new corporate fungus, I have images of a store stocked with food courtesy of Monsanto and China, at outrageous prices, with lines wrapped around the block. Maybe I’m being paranoid. I hope I am. But when I talk about this, I kind of feel like Charlton Heston in the movie Soylent Green. He’s shouting, “Soylent Green is People!” to the masses, desperately trying to warn them that their sole food source is actually made out of human beings. Did they listen? Will you?
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