Folks in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania are wondering how many Wal-Marts are too much. Here’s a report just in from this small community: “Township supervisors announced this week that Wal-Mart intends to build a store in Waynesboro. The location would be behind a strip mall less than 5 years old, with a Food Lion grocery store which is struggling. A mile away is another srip mall which Ames recently vacated, and a mile from that is another strip mall which has a struggling Kmart and a vacant grocery store. Downtown Waynesboro is pretty much a ghost town. Wal-Mart currently has a supercenter in Hagerstown, MD, and in Chambersburg, PA — both are less than 20 miles from the proposed Waynesboro site. Wal-Mart will not help Waynesboro, but instead will destroy it! Township officials do not care. It all comes down to greed and the almighty dollar. Instead of building more retail space and ruining valuable land, it is about time officials try to redevelop the space which is sitting empty. I wish Wal-Mart would leave our town alone!”
The Wal-Mart “saturation strategy” means placing stores so close to one another that, as Sam Walton explained, “we became our own competition.” The theory seems to be that it is better to pick your own pocket, than to have someone else do it. So Waynesboro gets a store it doesn’t need, and Wal-Mart gets a little more market share. For local contacts in Waynesboro, contact [email protected]
