The picturesque city of Santa Fe, New Mexico already has a Wal-Mart. They’ve had one for twenty years. But the retailer wants to supersize its presence, by building a 150,000 s.f. store, and likely abandoning its first store. This plan has drawn fire from Santa Fe Business Alliance, which supports locally owned businesses. “Basically, they draw a lot of dollars out of the economy very rapidly, and that causes quite a problem locally,” the Alliance told the New Mexican newspaper. The developers have claimed that the Wal-Mart supercenter will bring hundreds of jobs and up to $6 million per year in new gross-receipts taxes. But these are gross figures, which do not take into account lost revenues from the existing Wal-Mart, which will be closed, and losses from competing grocery stores, which will also close. The superstore includes a gas station and drive through pharmacy. Wal-Mart claims the old Wal-Mart, which was built in 1985, will remain open. But when the New Mexican interviewed Sprawl-Busters for the story, we reminded readers that Wal-Mart has closed hundreds of older stores around the country, leaving many of them vacant for years and harming local economies. Wal-Mart has 356 “dark stores”, with at least one-third of them on a list that dates back to 1992. “About a third of them are larger than 100,000 square feet,” Norman said, adding that if the empty stores and their parking lots are counted together, the amount of unused space comes to 52 million square feet, or 1,000 football fields. Norman suspects the existing Santa Fe Wal-Mart store will be shut down, no matter what the company says now. “They’ve been systematically shutting down stores since the early 1990s,” he said “They’re the king of dead air.”
Wal-Mart has methodically shut down its older discount stores, like the one in Santa Fe. In 1994, Wal-Mart had 1,953 discount stores. Ten years later, it had only 1,478 discount stores. Instead, Wal-Mart build supercenters where the discount stores were closed. For earlier stories on New Mexican battles with Wal-Mart, search this Newsflash database by the name of the state. For empty store stories, search by the word “empty.”
