Blaming Wal-Mart solely for the destruction of small-town downtowns is not
entirely accurate, and has a strong element of mistaking cause and effect.
When I lived in Levelland, Texas (population 24,000, roughly) in the
mid-'80s, the downtown was dead, dead, dead, consisting of a furniture
store, an antique auto parts store, a couple of insurance offices, a
doughnut shop that was closed by noon and the worst movie theatre I have
ever seen in my life.  Everything else was boarded up.  Levelland did not
have a Wal-Mart.  As I recall, there wasn't even a Wal-Mart in Lubbock, the
nearest city of any size, until sometime around 1987.

Charity and I were in Levelland last April.  They have a smallish Wal-Mart
now, in the same building that used to house my father's store on the west
side of town.  Downtown's still dead as a stump, but it's not any *more*
dead than it used to be.  If anything, it was looking slightly more lively
than it did 20 years ago.  You can substitute just about any of the other
cities I've lived in in my life, from the population-8000 west Texas oil
town I was born in (which as of the last time I was there, in the spring of
2002, still doesn't have a Wal-Mart within 40 miles) to the major
metropolitan center I live in now (which has no Wal-Marts until you get
well out into the burbs, and at that, I think there's probably half a dozen
in the entire state of Massachusetts), for Levelland and the basic premise
is the same: downtown is frickin' dead whether there's a Wal-Mart there or
not.

All I'm sayin' is that while it's easy to say "Wal-Mart kills downtowns,"
the entire idea of downtown being the shopping and entertainment center of
a town started dying back in the '40s, when the rise of car culture and the
baby boom fueled the development of subdivisions and sprawl.  Wal-Mart went
into towns ***where downtown was already dying, if not dead.***  Wal-Mart
is an EFFECT of this trend more than it's a cause.  Painting Wal-Mart as
the evil empire that has caused all of this economic devastation is
misguided and doesn't look at the deeper causes of the loss of downtowns.

S