Ready for Wal-Mart Yet?

By Karl Klockars in News on Feb 6, 2009 7:50PM

We've had a few hours to digest the hundreds of thousands of job-losses announced this morning, so now might be the perfect time to spring this on you: Wal-Mart would like to put as many as 5 new stores in Chicago. The Tribune is reporting that a new push is being put together to start out with a new store in the 21st ward, and take it from there.

There's a couple ways of looking at this.

First: Right now, any jobs are good jobs, and between the construction jobs it'll take to put the big boxes up and the staff to run the place, it's an easy way to put some cash back into the Chicago economy. Plus, the old sawhorse gets brought back out - if people are going to shop at these places, why should the suburbs get the revenue? (Side argument: people are going to the suburbs to avoid the sky-high sales taxes in Cook County, duh.)

Second: Just because the economy is in the shitter right now doesn't mean that it'll always be. We shouldn't just roll over and let Wal-Mart come in and do whatever they want just so we get some low-paying jobs with no benefits out of the bargain. They may promise tons of the now-famous price rollbacks, but that doesn't mean that we'll still want to roll them back at some point later down the road.

Third: Some sort of compromise? Pass a new big-box ordinance that isn't as restrictive as the one the Mayor famously vetoed back in '06. Let Wal-Mart come in and do some business, make sure that the employees are being done right by, and put some jobs in some rougher neighborhoods that could use any sort of economic investment they can get anyways.

Okay, so it's not the best of all the worlds - but in an economy where anyone is grasping at any economically viable straws, Wal-Mart opponents and union leaders are probably going to have a harder push against the retail superpower than it was a couple years back when things were hunky-dory financially.