Summary: No Cheers When Walmart Packs Up

According to article “No Cheers When Walmart Packs Up” in the February 1st – 7th edition of Bloomberg Businessweek, Wal-Mart being blamed for leaving small towns and rural communities without grocery stores or pharmacies because they have opened stores in these areas which resulted in the closure of the typical mom-and-pop stores. This is due to the fact that one-stop shopping centers such as Wal-Mart use their enormous purchasing power to provide the best products at the lowest prices, making it impossible for small family owned or local stores to compete. Additionally, Wal-Mart recently started closing some of its stores in the very same small towns and rural communities. In Oriental, North Carolina for example, Wal-Mart closed its store less than two years after had it opened and

Wal-Mart have also been spending more on its Web operations as well. As a result, Wal-Mart announced on January 15th that it would close all 102 of its small Express stores, many of which are located in these small towns and rural communities. Doing so would cut cost and allow the company to focus on its supercenters and midsize neighborhood markets and hopefully increase its profit margins.

Unfortunately, as bad as it sounds, Wal-Mart has no responsibility to help communities deal with the adverse effects of store closings. The reason for this is simple, Wal-Mart is a business, and like most businesses, they are in it to profit and therefore it does whatever needs to be done to make and continue making profits for its shareholders even it means putting its competitors out of business. It has to make decisions that are in the best interest of the company. So if it thinks that the closure of its Express stores would be beneficial to the company then that is a business