I'm From Walmart, New Jersey

The supercenter didn't kill the small town; it is the small town

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,…