Sitting in my new doctor’s waiting room in Waterloo, Ill., I listened idly to other people’s conversations. A mother bounced her toddler on her knee, and they chatted about the day’s chores. “We go to Wal-Mart a lot,” the mother agreed, adding ruefully, “We go to Wal-Mart too much.”
Just then a seventyish woman returned to the office to remind the receptionist, “My prescriptions are at Wal-Mart now.”
Summoned, I entered the inner sanctum for my allergy shot. When I came back, a woman was praising her 6-year-old granddaughter’s bravery. “We’re going to go to Wal-Mart and get you a Webkin,” she promised.
I drove away—down Market Street, past the Rural King that was described to me as “a Wal-Mart for farmers” and identified as “where the old Wal-Mart was.” I turned left on Route 3, where the Wal-Mart Supercenter now occupies triple the space—150,000 square feet—with a parking lot the size of the Sea of Galilee.
When I shopped there for groceries on New Year’s Eve, the place was packed. Women were having their hair done at the SmartStyle Family Hair Salon ($13.50 for an adult haircut). Refrigerated end-caps glowed green with rows of André champagne and Asti. Young men were withdrawing money from the lobby’s First National Bank. Was Wal-Mart the new town square?
The question nagged at me. I’d lived my first 46 years in St. Louis, where my liberal friends regularly muttered the litany of Wal-Mart’s real and perceived sins, from imports and the labor conditions overseas to union-busting here, bullying suppliers or putting them out of business, destroying neighborhoods and dominating, while killing, small towns.
Waterloo didn’t feel dead.
Nor were people here all het up about its evil empire. Mainly, what they missed was walking in and knowing people’s names.
Oh, they had their hot buttons: Downtown merchants set their teeth when the store’s name was mentioned, and a handful of people just plain wouldn’t shop there. But by and large, people saw Wal-Mart as either a godsend or an inevitable, if occasionally regrettable, fact of modern life. Its hugeness was what fascinated them. The Wal-Mart question wasn’t about policy; it was about which changes really were inevitable, how everyday life unfolded and who, in the end, had the power to dictate that.
When Wal-Mart showed up in 1981, Waterloo had a population of 4,646. Extended families lived a few blocks apart, and people rarely moved away. Main Street was lined with 19th-century buildings, and that’s where people shopped, in small family-owned stores, with maybe a semiannual excursion to South County or Fairview Heights.
The Rev. Dr. Robert C. Preece, now in Dallas, was pastor of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Waterloo for 17 years, 17 years ago. He called the place “a rurburb”—made up the word himself. “It was rural but being urbanized,” he explains. “There were 10 miles of cornfields between Waterloo and Columbia, but we could feel the city coming. Most people had jobs in St. Louis; some farmed in the evenings or on the weekends. Wal-Mart was one of the first high-profile indicators that not only were we going each morning to the city, but now the city was coming to us.”
Waterloo wasn’t your usual bedroom community, though; it had been a city of its own since the 1840s, with a strong German culture and work ethic. Family mattered here, as did cleanliness and conscience and loyalty and thrift. Steve Notheisen, who moved to Waterloo to open and manage that first Wal-Mart, says, “When a garment hit the floor, customers would stop to pick it up, look at the size and put it back where it belonged.” At Wal-Marts in other places, he says, “they’d just run the cart over it.”
When Wal-Mart chose Waterloo, it asked the city council to buy land, build a store and put up stoplights, as so many other towns had. “The city didn’t buy me land and put up stoplights!” one business owner fired back.
Waterloo offered a few financial incentives and left it at that. Some folks didn’t even want to do that much, but city leaders pointed out that Wal-Mart would collect sales tax, hire workers, pay city taxes and utility bills (Waterloo buys—and generates—its own power).
In the end, the biggest battle was the sign, Preece recalls. “Wal-Mart wanted to put up its usual sign, with ‘Discount City’ under ‘Wal-Mart.’ That went all the way to the city council. The feeling was that it was a denigration of an honorable, noble place. Wal-Mart wasn’t talking about Waterloo, they were talking about their business. Those corporate execs from Arkansas were scratching their heads.”
They removed the offending phrase, and by the time Wal-Mart’s doors opened, people were lining up to welcome Notheisen and invite him to join the Lions Club and the Chamber of Commerce: The company’s 328th store, it was the fourth in the St. Louis area (there are now 20), and back then, southwestern Illinois was the outer limit of Wal-Mart’s comfort zone. “The company was so small that crossing the Mississippi River was like crossing an ocean,” Notheisen recalls. “We expected our Waterloo sales to be moderately soft, but they were gangbusters from the start. I didn’t get home before 11 p.m. in those first weeks, and I’d be back again at 6 a.m., struggling just to keep enough merchandise in stock.”
Downtown merchants paled as they watched truck after truck pull up to Wal-Mart’s dock.
“A lot of families closed up shop out of fear that they would go under,” recalls one woman. “I think some were hasty.” The damage varied, depending on how similar a smaller store’s merchandise was to Wal-Mart’s. A grocery store, a Ben Franklin and Gamble’s, a general store, went down fast. “Some of us continued going to Paul’s Dry Goods, knowing we paid $20 more for a suit, to take care of Paul until he died,” Preece recalls. “And meanwhile we’d slip into Wal-Mart to buy a case of oil.”
Wind doesn’t exactly whistle through Waterloo’s town square. Those 19th-century buildings are carefully preserved, and there’s still street life, thanks to solid anchors (major banks, the new Monroe County Courthouse, the Harrisonville Telephone Company headquarters) and life’s three necessities: a good coffeehouse, a gossipy tavern and a serious steakhouse. Downtown business owners have found niches Wal-Mart can’t touch. Wal-Mart can’t hurt an antique store or a yoga studio; it can’t match diamonds bought from the Reime family, custom-made Amish furniture from Clark’s Country Oaks or freshly baked bear claws from Ahne’s Bakery. Waterloo Lumber stocks different brands rather than go head-to-head with Wal-Mart. Steve Wightman’s customers know they can call after hours and he’ll meet them at his pharmacy in 10 minutes.
Does Wightman shop at Wal-Mart? “Well, every now and again I do. My wife goes there.”
“Everybody does,” says Mike Mroz, a lawyer who now runs his family’s Gem Dry Cleaners in downtown Waterloo. “I call it the $100 store, because I can’t walk out of there without spending $100.” He grins. “We lost the dime store, and we got the $100 store.”
In 1996, when Wal-Mart announced plans to build a supercenter along the new Route 3 bypass, its prospective neighbors sued the city over the zoning. They didn’t care that Wal-Mart had just become the first retail company to top $100 billion in annual sales. They didn’t want their paradise of cornfields paved. “We took the case all the way to the appellate court and lost,” says Russell Watters, a lawyer who was one of the plaintiffs. “The final vote on the city council was a 4-4 tie, and Mayor Robert Krump cast the deciding vote.”
John Reichling, a union representative for Local 881 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, threw up picket lines and handbilled. “That’s your issue, not mine,” more than one person told him. “I’ll shop anywhere I want to.” He argued that the issue did affect them; they paid higher taxes because so many Wal-Mart employees received federal funding [public assistance for healthcare, food and housing]. “In one ear and out the other,” he says ruefully.
Reichling still won’t set foot in a Wal-Mart, but Watters stopped boycotting years ago. “They have more of a selection than anyone else in Monroe County,” he explains, then pauses. “I hate to say this, but in the long term? It was probably better for the city that I lost.”
Nostalgia gets laid down in layers: After Wal-Mart built the supercenter, people got misty about not just the old downtown stores but also the old Wal-Mart. It felt more like a neighborhood store, they say—smaller, less crowded, easier to navigate. “Now they may have three shelves full of candles, but you can’t buy a window shade,” says Monroe County treasurer Merrill Prange. “I hear this a lot: ‘Wal-Mart has everything you don’t need, but not much of what you do.’”
Notheisen says, “On Friday nights, the old Wal-Mart was the social gathering place. Couples would be standing in the aisles talking to each other. The supercenter’s so big, you can shop it and not see three people you know.” He left the Waterloo Wal-Mart in 1985 but eventually moved back to Waterloo; today he’s an alderman. “It was the quality of the employees—associates—that made me look good,” he says. “We had 3,000 applicants for 100 jobs.”
One of his first employees was Patty Smith (a pseudonym; talking about Wal-Mart’s like talking politics or religion). “When we opened, we kept saying, ‘Thank you for shopping at Kmart,’ because that’s all we knew,” she laughs. “Sam Walton came and sat on the floor and talked to us. When he said, ‘The day you hate to get up and go to work is the day you need to quit and move on,’ I thought, ‘Mr. Walton, there aren’t any more jobs around here.’ But they were good about taking people without even a high school diploma—and there were a lot of us—and training and promoting. It was much more personal then; they always said your family came first. All that disappeared after we moved. We had the same amount of people working and four or five times the merchandise. You’d have 800, 900 price changes that had to be done within 24 hours. The girls at the old store would bake cakes for birthdays; you could walk in that lounge and see 15 cakes. At the supercenter, you were just too tired by the time you got home. The world in there was going so fast, they lost the concept that you were really people.”
It’s hard to go back after you retire, Smith says: “At the door, that feeling comes back: fear, stress, dreading the day.” So she doesn’t shop there now? “Oh, it doesn’t bother me anymore. Since I worked as long as I did, I get a 10 percent discount card for life.”
Jim Baker owns the Courthouse Café on Main Street. In the 1860s, it was a millinery. Today it is most definitely not a Starbucks. You can order biscuits and gravy, and when Brian Hart, Waterloo’s de facto town historian, stops by to chat with Baker, he orders a “large” coffee. Baker gladly shops at Wal-Mart. Hart grudgingly broke down and bought a strand of Christmas lights at Wal-Mart, “and half of ’em don’t work,” he says, still ticked. “I wanted all green lights, and nobody else sold them. I go there when I have to. But I don’t like what they have done—not to our community, to the whole nation. They brainwashed everybody to think they are the only ones out there.”
“I think the world has evolved to where buying is about better prices,” Baker remarks calmly.
“But there’s no sense of family,” Hart exclaims. “The merchants in town became part of your extended family.” His voice softens. “You knew where you were by the smell of the store,” he says. “Gamble’s Hardware had a kind of oily smell, nuts and bolts, and in the spring the fertilizer would take over. Anything you needed, they’d have it in the back—if you wanted a snow shovel in July for a gag gift, they’d have one. Paul’s Dry Goods smelled of new clothes, and the floor creaked, and it’d be either Paul or Alma, her red hair always up in a bun, who waited on you. And Schmitt’s grocery store—a year ago I was in Germany and walked into a grocery store and realized that’s what Schmitt’s smelled like: You smell the coffee, the meat, the produce.”
In fairness, he can’t blame Wal-Mart for all the stores that closed in Waterloo. Nobody has their TV set repaired anymore or has time for crafts. “Wal-Mart hurt Gamble’s, but the main reason it died was because the owner got cancer. But—” Hart adds triumphantly—“his wife couldn’t sell it to anyone because of Wal-Mart.”
Baker shrugs. He needs to get back to work. “There is a lot to be said for the mom and pop stores, the community of people being downtown,” he concedes. “We’ve got a lot of people moving in, but they don’t know anything about downtown. They know a lot about ‘out there.’” He gestures toward the fast-growing suburbs in the distance, along Route 3. “Not that ‘out there’ is a bad thing,” he adds hurriedly.
A story about Wal-Mart is a story about how we shop—and a story about how we shop is a story about how we live.
Shawn Kennedy, Waterloo’s city treasurer, was graduating from high school when the first Wal-Mart was built. Now, she’s noticed, people buy more because everything’s there to buy, all the time. “Back then, you just didn’t make as many trips,” she says. “I think it’s our culture that has changed. You go into Wal-Mart, and then you find something else to buy. I tell my kids, ‘There was a time when you had to wait until Christmas to get stuff. You used to actually have a Christmas list; you didn’t just get everything you wanted right away.’”
Just about everybody I talk to is ambivalent: They love saving money, but they “hate going to that damned Wal-Mart.” Which is shorthand for hating the way our lives are changing—or hating global capitalism and its consequences—or hating concrete, or manic busyness, or anonymous crowds or the way everything looks and feels the same wherever you go. We’re measuring our love of convenience, choice, practicality and a good bargain against the deep comfort of knowing and being known; feeling things are small-scale, manageable and fair; living lives that are not detached and parallel but braided for strength.
Even cheap stuff comes with a price, and what’s lost when small stores close is trust. “People come back to us time and time again because we have proven ourselves,” one downtown merchant says. “We can call them by name, and we know they’re going to be back.”
Slowly it dawns on me: The much-vaunted friendliness of small towns isn’t because the people have drunk sweeter Kool-Aid. Yes, it helps that it’s quieter and slower here (even the pet roosters feel it, crowing well after daybreak). People aren’t frantically triaging options, running here and there. But the main point is, they know each other’s names, families and histories, and they know they’ll see each other again. The bigger the place, the greater the anonymity—and the license to behave badly.
So … has Wal-Mart been good for Waterloo? “Financially, it’s probably helped,” Prange says. “Community-wise, it probably hurt. Which of them is more important depends on one’s point of view. I’m a treasurer by trade. It’s probably helped.”
Mayor Tom Smith cites the economic advantages easily: “Wal-Mart brings other businesses, it keeps people shopping here in Waterloo and it brings others here to shop and eat.” And socially? “Oh boy,” he says, pausing. Then he brightens. “Because it brought the McDonald’s in, they have started a little breakfast club down there, just like the one at the Courthouse Café.” He resumes his original train of thought: “No, economically it’s been very good for Waterloo.”
And yeah, he shops there too.
Waterloo’s current population: 9,874, and that doesn’t include the surrounding suburbs. The city collected $1,871,000 in sales tax last year, and the Waterloo Wal-Mart usually brings in about half the total. Back in 1997, before the supercenter opened? The city collected only $830,000.
Natives like the sales tax—which helps fund the police force and street improvements—but they don’t like the draw. “When Wal-Mart was here in town,” recalls Prange, “people came from Columbia, Redbud, Maeystown. Now they’re coming all the way from Sparta and Cahokia, and it’s harder to keep the place clean and stocked. People are careless, and people from some economic strata are more careless than others.”
The supercenter employs 366 people, and even more work at the strip malls that now fringe the giant parking lot. Development has come a lopsided full circle: Thanks to Wal-Mart, Waterloo has a little shoe store again—a Payless. Instead of Barb’s Fashions, there’s a Fashion Bug. One of the two independent pharmacies was replaced by a Walgreens. “You have a lot of people from home that liked it the old way,” says organist Linda Mueller. (“From home” commonly refers to a woman’s maiden name—“She’s a Clark from home”—but can mean anyone who’s a native.) “But you have a lot of newer people,” Mueller adds thoughtfully, “who are coming because Waterloo has all that convenience.”
Mueller misses, achingly, the wide peaceful swaths of green farmland at the edge of town. But there’s a bit of geographic beauty to these soulless strip malls: They’re all along Market Street, the old Route 3 or the new Route 3 bypass. They’ve spread the town out a bit, tugged it to the north, but they’re not so far away that they’ve drained the life from the center.
The circle isn’t quite closed yet, either. Many of the customers of that old pharmacy switched, not to Walgreens, but to Wightman’s. And Wal-Mart’s bustling stretch of Route 3 just helped convince Schnucks to build a jewel of a store right across the street—giving Wal-Mart, finally, some real competition and spawning its own strip mall development, Waterloo Commons.
Overheard in a courthouse office in town:
“Now that the big Schnucks is there, there’ll probably be a Great Clips or something. And what’s going to happen to Gene’s Barber and the little salons? Downtown will get hit all over again.”
“They ought to do what they are trying to do in St. Louis: Put in lofts.”
“Get a bunch of yuppies in?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
“So downtown really used to be that busy Saturday mornings?”
“Uptown. First time I ever heard ‘downtown’ was when I worked in St. Louis. We called it uptown. And yes, it was busy.”
“Wal-Mart has hurt the small business in one way only,” Mroz, the owner of Gem’s, says. “They take our labor pool away. A lot of us depend on part-time labor. And Wal-Mart has benefits and more flexible hours.”
I stop short. All I’ve ever heard have been complaints about Wal-Mart’s lack of benefits. People prefer working there?
I meet the parents of a college kid who has been given flexible hours, started well above minimum wage and, a few months in, is already getting a raise. “They bring the kids that work hard sodas and candy,” his mom says. “We feel guilty about shopping there, because of all the imports, but we can’t not. Dog food, everything’s so much cheaper.”
Wal-Mart’s average wage for regular, full-time hourly associates in Illinois is $11.32 per hour; in Missouri it’s $10.86.
I talk to an older woman, call her Ethel Carter, who’s worked for Wal-Mart for more than 20 years. She’s tired of campaigns against Wal-Mart, “like those TV ads—if you look in the fine print, they’re sponsored by the confectioners’ union. You would think Wal-Mart was the only one buying imports. And a lot of those imports are made overseas, but for old American companies! I can scan ’em and tell.” Would she want to unionize? “No. Definitely not. I have too many benefits built up. And we do have health insurance. My husband was in a union, and now he’s on my insurance, and we pay the same.
“It’s like any job,” she concludes. “You are not 100 percent happy 100 percent of the time, but it’s a pretty good job. There’s some that are not happy, but some wouldn’t be happy anywhere.”
Sam Walton would’ve fit right into Waterloo. He grew up in Missouri and graduated from Mizzou. After serving in Army intelligence during World War II, he went to St. Louis to open a Federated department store, but his young wife refused to live anywhere with a population of more than 10,000, so he went to Newport, Ark., and bought a Ben Franklin just like the one that would later close in Waterloo. Brilliant at buying in bulk and selling on a slim margin, Walton opened his first discount store in 1962. As business grew, he learned to pilot a plane and flew low over small rural towns, anyplace where people had to drive to make major purchases. He’d count the cars on Main Street as an economic indicator.
Walton defended himself staunchly against accusations that he was killing the small towns he loved. Discount stores could only kill a small store if it had grown complacent, he said, and was charging prices the townspeople couldn’t afford. America’s free market capitalism thrived on competition.
What would Walton make of his empire today? He hated spending money, mistrusted technology, spurned advertising and media, stayed out of government’s way. He avoided growth for growth’s sake, and he dealt personally and directly with employees.
I ask the longtimers: Did Wal-Mart change when Sam died? I mean, aside from the Washington lobbyists and estimated $600 million ad campaign and satellite technology and stores all over the world?
“Yeah, it did,” Carter says with a note of sadness. “It lost a lot of the personal touch.”
Smith thinks the negative press in recent years—and the problems that spur it—are “really because Sam’s not around. He had a great fairness about him. After his death, employees became numbers.”
She remembers watching the infamous Dateline episode in 1992, just months after Walton died. After pointed references to Wal-Mart’s iconic status and its red-white-and-blue “Made in America” campaign, reporter Brian Ross grilled Walton’s successor, David Glass, about child labor—kids as young as 9, making as little as 5 cents an hour—at a supplier factory in Bangladesh. “You should have seen him sweating,” Smith says, still relishing the moment. “He said, ‘You can’t tell their ages.’ Then he got up and walked out. We all went to the store the next morning and said, ‘It sounds like ’em, they’ll do anything for that buck.’”
The program aired in December. Wal-Mart’s revenue increased by $15 billion the following year.
Shopping at Wal-Mart, I find lots of cheap compact fluorescents, organic bananas and cage-free eggs. The deli’s singularly unimpressive, in these days of cinematic pre-made foods, and I steer away from the meat everybody says isn’t so great (German towns are picky about their meat). But I snatch up half a dozen Yoplaits for a trifling 58 cents apiece, Every Day Low Price, grab some amazingly cheap curtain rods and, in the pharmacy, find a Sunbeam heating pad for $24.99 that was $34.99 at Walgreens.
Testing Wal-Mart’s famous customer service, I ask two different people if they sell ginger ale; the first says, “Oh, probably” and turns away; the second says, “If we did, it’d be in the soda aisle.” Ah, but it’s not. And she couldn’t care less. The older woman in notions knows all about different muslins, but a kid on the grocery side snorts as I walk away and says to his co-worker, “Light bulbs? She didn’t know where light bulbs are?”
On my next trip, I go in search of one of those flame-lighter things to reach the pilot light and am met with utter indifference. “We’ve got ’em in sporting goods,” a young woman finally tosses over her shoulder. She keeps walking. Er … where is sporting goods? “Follow me.” She walks through hardware at a fast clip, nods to the first sporting-goods aisle and turns off in a different direction.
Four trips later, not one person except the professional greeter, a giddy retiree, has even made eye contact, let alone welcomed me to Wal-Mart and offered to help, as Sam insisted they do every time they came within 10 feet of a customer.
But each time, I’ve spent about $30 less than I would elsewhere.
Wal-Mart’s been hit with some pretty hefty lawsuits—the largest-ever class-action suit for discriminating against women, suits by employees denied breaks or benefits, suits alleging child-labor violations … I go to the Monroe County circuit clerk’s office to see if anything juicy has been filed locally, but the heftiest file is Angela Farooqui suing Wal-Mart because she slipped and fell there, due to a grape and water on the floor. The company “should have expected that its invitees, including plaintiff herein, would not discover said grape and water and would fail to protect themselves against it,” the lawsuit reads. Wal-Mart responds that Farooqui was “contributorily negligent” for “failing to look where she was walking.” Verdict pending.
I go shopping again and notice orange plastic signs stored right on the main aisle for ready access: “Caution: Wet Floor.” Then I hear a loudspeaker announcement asking customers to report any spills, because Wal-Mart wants to keep its store clean for them.
The behemoth does respond.
The largest retailer in the history of the world, Wal-Mart just opened its 3,000th international store. We all watch, helplessly fascinated. If we condemn Wal-Mart for sins other companies commit just as freely, it’s because Wal-Mart’s example matters more. And slowly, public opinion has its way. Taken sharply to task for its bullying of suppliers, employees and towns, the Abominable is now gently placing stars on green trees and making serious improvements in energy efficiency, minimizing packaging and selling nontoxic cleansers, organic-cotton baby clothes and seafood caught in the wild. The cheap-cheap-cheap buy-buy-buy smiley-face has been erased from the ads, which now urge us to “Save money. Live better”—tapping into American thrift, virtue and material hunger in a far more palatable way.
In 2005, Dateline did a follow-up hidden-camera report looking for child labor in Bangladesh—and found none. The program did, however, find atrocious working conditions for adults—who were making 10 cents an hour. Wal-Mart assured the public that it had found violations at that factory, and a follow-up inspection had shown correction. That was prior to the Dateline report, though. So Wal-Mart promised to increase the percentage of its ethics inspections that are unannounced. Rare when Wal-Mart began regular audits, surprise visits are now up to 26 percent (although activists question how much of a surprise they really are).
The criticisms I hear in Waterloo, though, aren’t usually about faraway factory conditions; they’re about more immediate concerns, like Wal-Mart’s ability to trample small U.S. suppliers. “I knew one man who had to come out of retirement to keep his family business from going into bankruptcy,” a local businessman says. “His kids signed a contract, and then Wal-Mart decided it didn’t want their products anymore. After they’d expanded the business—bigger building, more equipment, more manpower, more inventory—to meet Wal-Mart’s demands.”
Wal-Mart’s resistance to unions doesn’t get much traction in Waterloo, either. “Monroe County is not a very labor-friendly county, being as how it was always rural,” Prange points out. “I hear more complaints about Wal-Mart buying from China. But then, everything everywhere comes from China.” He chuckles. “People think gambling’s immoral and indecent, but the casinos are full seven days a week. We’re a nation of hypocrites.”
Almost every hand in Kara Lavoie’s fourth-grade class shoots into the air. She’s been telling them How Waterloo Used to Be, and when she explained how everybody shopped in the town square, and all the shopkeepers knew you, and the little hardware store sold toys at Christmas, and Main Street closed whenever it snowed enough to sled down its rise, they breathed, “Cool!” Now she’s asked how many of their families shop at Wal-Mart.
Brian Hart’s daughter keeps her hand in her lap. The other kids’ eyes snake around to stare at her. After class, they have to know: “Where do you guys shop?”
People were glad to see Wal-Mart arrive because it gave them more choices, cheaper stuff, closer to home, under one roof. But then the choices seemed to shrink.
Hart can’t figure out why there’s not more competition. “Walk around and look how many banks we have,” he says. “There’s money here. Why is there no Target?”
The lack of real competition, and the sense of inevitability it breeds, point to the greatest irony of all: Master competitor Sam Walton, the great exploiter of the free market, has left people with almost no choice but to come to his store.
Joe Leicht, editor of the Monroe County Clarion, covered the supercenter zoning fight. “City Hall was packed with people saying, ‘They are going to destroy our city!’” he says. “On my way home now, I see the same people going into Wal-Mart.”
Most ribbon-cuttings are tired affairs, but the grand opening of the new Waterloo Schnucks in late January feels like a street party. Hundreds of people come, and Scott Schnuck introduces one family member after another. “They’re all here,” a security guard whispers excitedly to a customer craning her neck. “And a state rep and a state senator …” Schnuck is telling the crowd how fitting it is for his family business to be in Waterloo: “Schnuck, y’know, is a nice Irish name.” And then, with an auspicious blare from an Alpine horn, the crowd stills. The ribbon is snipped. The Waterloo German Band strikes up a polka. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you will just come this way,” a voice says into the microphone. “We are getting you through this way. Everybody clear a path, please. Clear a path.”
“Here you go, sweetie,” a husband says, sliding a cart to his wife. People linger by the glossy eggplant, crimson rhubarb, satiny green artichokes and gleaming bulbs of fennel—practically a Dutch still life—as the band plays on and gossip filters through the crowd. “We’re lucky,” a Chamber of Commerce member murmurs, looking around at what was rumored to be a
$6 million project. “They almost pulled out, and then Wal-Mart would’ve been it.”
Customers peer at the wine-soaked sauerkraut on the German specialty shelves, the longed-for salad bar (there wasn’t room for one at the old Schnucks) and pricey made-from-scratch soups, the certified Angus beef, the fresh seafood that was a topic of discussion at J.V.’s tavern the night before. Schnucks is going to give Wal-Mart a run for its (or rather, Waterloo’s) money.
In Sam Walton’s free market, nothing is safe from change.
