Study proves it: Walmart super-stores kill off local small businesses
You'd think Walmart would have learned its lesson.
The big-box giant has tried unsuccessfully to sweet-talk its way into our city twice already with promises of jobs, jobs and more jobs. And now it's knocking again, hoping to capitalize on high unemployment and a protracted recession to scare New Yorkers into thinking that Walmart - and Walmart alone - can propel our struggling communities straight to prosperity.
If history is any indication, nothing could be further from the truth. Chicago's struggling West Side learned the hard way that Walmart's stores destroy more retail jobs than they create.
In 2006, the big-box retailer promised to bring jobs to the cash-strapped community. But according to a landmark study by Loyola University, the company's rhetoric didn't match reality:
Within two years of Walmart's opening its doors, 82 local stores went out of business.
Instead of growing Chicago's retail economy, Walmart simply overtook it -
absorbing sales from other city stores, and shuttering dozens of them in the process.
Researchers at Loyola
dubbed Walmart's store a wash - generating no new sales revenue for Chicago, and no new jobs for hard-off residents.
Chicago's cautionary tale isn't isolated. Countless communities, and peer-reviewed surveys across the country, all reach the same conclusion: When Walmart moves in, small businesses, and jobs, move out; Main St. dies.
According to a provisional study by David Neumark, Junfu Zhang and Stephen Ciccarella called "The Effects of Walmart on Local Labor Markets,"
for every two jobs Walmart "creates," three local jobs are destroyed.
With due respect to Walmart, this is not the kind of economic development neighborhood small businesses need.
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