LOCUST GROVE, Va. (AP) – Wal-Mart wants to build a Supercenter within a cannonshot of where Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant first fought, a proposal that has preservationists rallying to protect the key Civil War site. A who’s who of historians including filmmaker Ken Burns and Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough sent a letter last month to H. Lee Scott, president and CEO of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), urging the company to build somewhere farther from the Wilderness Battlefield. “The Wilderness is an indelible part of our history, its very ground hallowed by the American blood spilled there, and it cannot be moved,” said the letter from 253 scholars and others.
Grant’s Union troops were headed to Richmond on May 4, 1864, when they confronted Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. The Battle of the Wilderness involved more than 100,000 Union troops and 61,000 Confederates. The fighting, according to National Park Service estimates, left more than 4,000 dead and 20,000 wounded. Some 2,700 acres of the Wilderness Battlefield are protected as part of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.
Preservationists regularly square off against developers in Virginia, where much of the Civil War was fought. This dispute, however, has stirred an outcry similar to the one in 1994 over The Walt Disney Co.’s plans to build a $650 million theme park within miles of the Manassas Battlefield. The entertainment giant bowed to public pressure and abandoned the project.
Wal-Mart…a class act……Always!
#31 – Gooddebate
>>You realize
Well, my evidence is anecdotal, but I’d give more credence to the Star Tribune test. They made a point of buying a little of everything. And you’re right, it Wal*Mart might be a little more expensive in one location, and a little cheaper in another.
And of course you’re going to pay more for a hammer at Ma & Pa’s Homestyle Hardware than you will at Wal*Mart (that’s why all the Ma & Pa stores go out of business when Wal*Mart moves in).
But the take-home message, which I think we can be confident of, is that Wal*Mart isn’t a whole lot cheaper across the board than any other similar discount department store. It just feels cheap, because of the shitty service and all the trailer trash that go there to shop, but the prices are nothing to write home about.