Beating the beast
The news seemed to fall out of the sky and land on Gardnerville like an A-bomb. Or, more specifically, a Wal-bomb.
A 152,495-square foot Walmart Supercenter, pharmacy and all, to be dropped like a cement block on the south side of Gardnerville.
Local business owners are still reeling from that imagined thud. Walls erected like the ramparts of a fortress. Cannons peeking from the embrasures, loaded with excessive inventory, every colorful sundry ever conceived and BOOM! A blast of low mark-ups. A price-ripping, shelf-shattering offensive.
To many, news of the Walmart seemed like a declaration of war on local business, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Up and down Main Street moms and pops are scraping to pay their overhead, to pay their bills and keep their doors open. Even though the stock market has stabilized to some degree, even though last week the Fed proclaimed the recession technically over, the effects of the crash are far from disappearing.
“Shop local” is the mantra. Keep your money in the community. But that’s a hard thing to do if you don’t have a job. Spending is not a priority. Food, shelter and family are priorities. And, if you’re lucky enough to have kept your job, you must now live with the constant threat of layoffs, a phantom terror that buzzes through your workplace like some stealth, virulent fly, blotting the sky black and picking at your nerves. You too are not spending. Either way, local retail joints are feeling the lack of consumerism, a heavy lack that pulls downward, as if the walls were closing, as if the floor were sinking.
“The thing I look at is why they’re opening here. Retail is not that strong in Douglas County,” Archie Reed, owner of the small Stratton Center gift shop Candles ‘N Crafts, said last month about the proposed Walmart. “We’ve got empty retail outlets all over town. There are empty ones everywhere you look. We just had a shopping center go bankrupt in Minden, and probably another one getting ready to go bankrupt in Gardnerville, yet we’re still building more retail space. It just doesn’t make sense.”
