Atlanta, You’re Getting A Wal-Mart!
Aug 8, 2006    Georgia Political Digest.com   Opinion

Atlanta, You’re Getting A Wal-Mart!
Grayson Hurst Daughters | http://spaceygreview.blogspot.com | Bio

A funny thing happened on the way to the “Let’s Hate Wal-Mart” rally; I was distracted by a conversation. Let’s call this conversation a “social reality.” I found myself chatting with a Wal-Mart executive about organic milk; turned out, we both liked the same brand.

So, two people like the same kind of milk. What’s the big deal? The big deal is that I shared this small, apolitical moment of “social reality” with a Wal-Mart exec when I stepped beyond the boundaries of my typical social network.

Well-intentioned yuppies from the professional classes aren’t primed to embrace what they perceive to be “lesser” Wal-Mart values; Wal-Mart is all about the bottom line, low-wages, cheap junk we don’t need from a gas-guzzling China, union-busting activity and assorted other ills abhorrent to the intelligent, progressive chattering classes in their natural yuppie habitat. Progressive yupsters just don’t do Wal-Mart.

But the second, intown Atlanta Wal-Mart is now under construction about two blocks from my house, in a part of town I call “LB,” or Lower Buckhead, I-75 and Howell Mill Road. What’s a progressive-minded, urban community to do? Pretend the store doesn’t exist? Rely on stereotypes? Wear “Wal-Mart Stinks” tee shirts in the carpool line?

A truly progressive person is a curious person, a person capable of responding to a call to communicate at the very least. And Wal-Mart management bent over backwards here in the booming northwest Atlanta corridor to communicate with the surrounding neighborhoods. I figured if they wanted to meet us so badly, then the only polite thing to do would be to show-up where we were wanted.

Through a series of meetings, including a store walk with a host of Wal-Mart’s people that culminated in a preference for organic milk, a new reality about the company in an urban environment began to take shape.

The perception I’d held about Wal-Mart, the one that had been stewed and stirred within my particular social network, slowly morphed into a new reality built on a solicitous, open-minded, participatory stance from Wal-Mart management. Wal-Mart personnel put in long, tedious hours listening to gripes, moans, complaints, whines, whims, wishes, hopes and desires from citizens here in the NW corridor.

Not once did the Wal-Mart people become closed-minded, rude, defensive, arrogant, aggressive, unreasonable or unresponsive. Wal-Mart management listened carefully to the generous amount of often complex input we had to give.

The astonishing thing is that Wal-Mart rolled-up its sleeves and went to work to implement many of our intricate, community-minded demands, be it suggestions for interior design, merchandising and product mix, square footage maximums, or no gun, automotive or outdoor sales.

Wal-Mart was not pressured by government to incorporate such components; rather, it was pressured by the local citizenry, on a glaringly apolitical level I might add.

Of course, Wal-Mart knows full well that the greater Buckhead demographic is not one to be trifled with; the community has the resources (and the City Hall connections) to mobilize any effort it might need to bring about a super-sized load of bad PR on the mega-company, should Buckhead not get what Buckhead wants. We wanted organic; well, we’re getting organic.

Will this keep us from patronizing the mom-and-pop pharmacy just down the street when we zip over to Wal-Mart for our carrots and discover their astonishingly low drug prices? Hard to say at this point, but that is a choice, and a reality, the individual consumer will now have to come to terms with.

Given some genuine “social reality” though, a simple conversation even, we come to find ourselves on the same side of the fence in many matters.

But a tyrannical, dogmatic, rigid, arrogant, preconceived and unresponsive stance, be it from a massive corporation or an individual, brings no one fully in to our dramatically-shifting urban backyard at all.

Grayson Hurst Daughters is an Atlanta writer and producer with WaySouth Media, Inc.

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