Archive Dive: I'm From Walmart, New Jersey
What if the supercenter didn't *kill* the small town, but *is* the small town?
This piece was originally a recap of a piece I published at Discourse Magazine, back in 2023, based on an idea I had when I looked closely at a Walmart store map in 2022. In some ways it’s a bit contrarian from an urbanist perspective, arguing that big-box stores are a lot like an enclosed version of car-free shopping districts.
But I also make a point that I think is not understood nearly enough: in some ways, suburbanites can get away from cars more easily than urbanites, despite the fact that suburbia is built around the car as the default means of transportation. Out in city streets, shopping in small stores, you are more exposed—to the elements, and to automobile noise and traffic—than you are in a big-box store.
I don’t think of this as being a point in favor of suburbia, so much as a kind of barely noticed revealed preference against the dominance of cars in our landscape.
I recently wrote a contrarian, conceptual piece at Discourse Magazine on Walmart. I’m not the biggest fan of Walmart, but this was my thesis: Walmart didn’t kill the small town, per se; in some important ways, it is the small town.
I don’t just mean that it replaced the function of the town, in that you can buy everything there, run into people you know, etc. I mean it in the sense that Walmart is essentially a town under a roof in a land-use sense, down to the aisles (streets) and departments (small stores). And a car-free town at that!
I wrote:
By segregating the cars completely outside and making the “streets” car-free—something often deemed suspect or radical when attempted in actual cities—the shopping experience becomes safer and more convenient to the customer. The ease of strolling down the “block,” crossing the “street” whenever you like, popping into whichever “store” you want, not worrying that kids will run off and get run over —those are the key conveniences of the mega-store. The essence of suburban big-box retail is classic car-free urbanism.
Here’s a typical map of a Walmart. Imagine, as I noted above, that you’re looking at a map of streets and storefronts. It’s easy if you try.
I tweeted this exact photo, over a year ago, just thinking the resemblance was kind of interesting. And it was one of my most-liked tweets ever. So I wrote a full piece on this idea.
Before I share some more of the piece, though, I want to show you a pair of images. The first is the perimeter of the Walmart property in (outside) my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey. It’s about 704 feet by 708 feet, or just south of 500,000 square feet. That’s the store, parking lot, and a little bit of the logistics space in the back.
The second image is the exact same square overlaid on the downtown core of Flemington:
There are roughly 20 departments in a Walmart; there are roughly 20 small businesses in this portion of Flemington, which is more than half of the downtown area. This is really striking to me. It’s a land-use story, but it’s also a story of commerce and scale.
From my original piece:
Walmart didn’t just compete with the small town. Maybe it didn’t exactly compete with it at all, per se. Rather, it replicated it. And, in stripping the frills and ornamentation of the indoor mall, it managed to replicate it quickly, cheaply and at scale. And so what the big-box discount department store effectively did was consolidate and transpose almost every classic Main Street enterprise—clothing, toys, crafts, décor, electronics, hardware and groceries —and place them all under one roof, under one corporate enterprise, in a massive, car-oriented property on the edge of town.
That map of the Chapel Hill Walmart resembles a town not only in a land-use sense—its “stores” and “streets”—but also in a business sense. Nearly every department—shoes, toys, pharmacy, etc. —represents what would once have been an independent specialized store. More than physical size or market share, this is the real sense in which Walmart has consolidated economic power.
And I go on to make a free-enterprise argument against big-box retail: an argument, basically, that ordinary people should have a right and ability to participate in their own local economies, and that large chains are not consistent with that, either in their physical size and car-dependent design, or in their hoarding and concentration of productive enterprises:
Between the hidden urbanism of big-box retail and the numerous tax breaks, incentives and subsidies that such enterprises wheedle out of local governments, one can imagine a pro-market argument for favoring a more distributed kind of commerce in classic cities and towns. Is there really a free-market imperative to let chains build ersatz private downtowns, stripped of their fundamentally civic and public nature? Likewise, is there one to favor a business that isn’t amenable to coexisting economically with the community in which it is located, or to tear the web of local commerce in deeply settled places, and in turn diminish the opportunity for ordinary people to participate in entrepreneurship?
It’s possible; even in a suburban retail pattern, like Eden Center in Falls Church, Virginia. That’s an old strip mall that was renovated and expanded, with some of the interior space subdivided into mini-malls with dozens of tiny independently owned businesses.
You can overlay trendy buzzwords onto this: “farm-to-table,” “artisanal,” etc. But whatever the form, the substance is basically life and commerce as we’ve always done it.
And even a modern Walmart still contains a trace of that old pattern.
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Walmarts also have public restrooms, which are often hard to come by in small downtowns.