[Anyone] community standards by walmart

[debi]

Want to buy an empty Wal-Mart? Want to buy 333 empty Wal-Marts? There's all
that--and more--on the marketplace today, according to the latest list of
"available buildings" published by Wal-Mart Realty. The world's largest
retailer is also the world's largest real estate company, with more empty
stores to unload than most companies have occupied stores. To see just how
portable Wal-Mart is, check out their vacant properties list. Like a reptile
crawling out of its skin, Wal-Mart leaves its dead stores behind, much to
the consternation of local officials. Wal-Mart has shed hundreds of stores
just to move into bigger facilities with wider aisles. Most of these
relocations have been in towns where Wal-Mart shuts down the discount store
to open up a larger superstore across the street, down the block, or just
over the town line. "As Wal-Mart rolls out new supercenter prototypes," the
company explains, "it must also find uses for existing relocated stores
after they are closed." Although the company claims that in 1998 it sold or
leased 10 million square feet of what it euphemistically calls
"once-occupied" stores, Sprawl-Busters has obtained the February, 1999 list
of properties for sale or lease, and the amount of buildings on the market
is staggering: 333 stores sitting empty--more than 20 million square feet of
wasted, dark space--not counting the acres of asphalt parking lots. . These
buildings are spread across 31 states. Only 17% of these stores are owned by
Wal-Mart, 83% are leased. This means that 10.5% of Wal-Mart's total stores
are empty as of this month. 15 states have empty stores in the double
digits. Here are the leading states: Texas, 40 emtpy stores; Tennessee, 30;
Florida, 30; Georgia, 26; Alabama, 22; Arkansas, 17; Kentucky, 16;
Louisiana, 16; Mississippi, 15; So.Carolina, 13; Missouri, 13; Oklahoma, 12;
Illinois, 11; New Mexico, 10; No.Carolina, 10. The average size of these
empty stores is 62,057 s.f.--larger than most other retail stores in your
community. But 52 of the dead stores are larger than 100,000 s.f., with some
as large as 134,000 s.f. In February, 54 of the stores listed are "new" to
the list. "Quite frankly," admitted Wal-Mart's former Executive Vice
President for Real Estate Construction, Tom Seay, "I think the fact that we
relocate stores--and we relocate a lot of them--is a well-known fact in the
development community..." But the public has no idea just how moveable
Wal-Mart's feast can be. So don't expect a long term relationship with
Wal-Mart, because they arrive in your community with their bags already
packed, and their sights set on the next "relocation."

debi
butterflyskiss at malaspina.com

We are Each of Us Angels with but one wing,
And we can only fly embracing each other.

--L. DeCrescenzo