Wal*Mart

The Florin and Franklin intersection is my automobile slum de jour. Nothing within a .5 mile radius exudes any measure of safety for bicyclists or pedestrians. The extreme southwest corner houses the motherbunker, the supermarket-turned-personal storage facility, but what is hard to comprehend is that this is just the beginning of an entire dog-legged half-mile of large format retail on Florin Road...the largest being Wal*Mart.

Last evening I saw a Wal*Mart commercial that mentioned exactly two ways to survive these tough economic times -- 1) combine your trips when shopping, and 2) save when you get there.

Here's what's not said about #1:

"Implicit in combining trips is that you must drive your car here, because you won't save shit by combining trips if you walked. You will drive, or else you're not worth our business. And to further ensure you drive, we've placed our store six thousand feet away from the nearest residential 'community', set it back four hundred feet from the sidewalk, and provided for a four hundred by six hundred foot asphalt moat so every Mexican woman pushing her pram will compete against three black guys racing their Neon through the parking lot."

Here's what's not said about #2:

"This Wal*Mart is just one of 7,390 stores that employs ~250 associates, all but the top 15 of whom do not make enough to buy the median house even in the foreclosed wasteland of South Sacramento. The bulk of our merchandise is shipped into the Oakland port from Asia because you only want to buy cheap shit that doesn't last and not have to pay American manufacturing wages to make it. We've eliminated all other local competition, so you or your neighbors are either working here, working to maintain Florin Road as a six-lane cross town expressway, or not working at all. Yes...you'll save $2,300 a year by shopping here, but you won't have anything resembling a decent community anymore."

To cap this all off, about another .5 miles down Florin Road, a new Super Wal*Mart lies in wait in the rubble-strewn wasteland that was the site of the now demolished Florin Mall. Construction was halted just over two months ago. Nope. It wasn't halted due to the economy...it was halted by the County of Sacramento because they failed to adequately address...parking. Yes! Everyone is fully aware that no pedestrian in their right fucking mind would shop there, so several acres of illuminated asphalt are required. When the kinks are negotiated through and construction resumes and the store eventually opens, along with the closure of the Franklin and Florin store, what will become of the old site? What retail chain will take over the existing location that will (more than likely) have to compete with the Super Wal*Mart?