The famous cartoon of a Dalek at the foot of a flight of stairs,
saying
"That buggers our plan to take over the world", sums
up the position of Wal-Mart
after it failed in its attempt to go over the heads of California's
local
authorities. The giant US retail chain had wanted to side-step
city planning
regulations by taking advantage of California's mania for referendums.
It asked
the citizens of Inglewood, a blue collar city within Los Angeles
county, to vote
for "Measure 04-A" - approving Wal-Mart's plans for
a vast shopping centre
spread over 60 acres.
Wal-Mart
spent more than $ 1m on the election campaign, saturating Inglewood
with television ads and leaflets extolling the economic benefits
in terms of
jobs, tax revenue and the low, low prices that the new Wal-Mart
Supercentre
would offer to the city's mainly black and Latino residents. Yet,
in a display
of solidarity, a coalition of local politicians, church groups,
union leaders
and activists, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, took on the
company with a
$ 250bn annual turnover, and defeated Measure 04-A by a clear
20% majority of
votes cast.
Wal-Mart
had plans to open 40 of its Supercentres in California, capturing
perhaps 20% of the state's food sales. Those plans have been thrown
off-course,
thanks in part to the protest campaign that focussed on the poverty
wages, union
bashing and sweatshop labour that Wal-Mart uses to staff and supply
its
omni-retail outlets - economic bullying highlighted by the Los
Angeles Times'
recent Pulitzer prize-winning series of investigative articles.
What
connects the voters of Inglewood and the shoppers of Britain is
that
Wal-Mart also owns the UK supermarket chain Asda, and would dearly
love to open
more stores here. But Wal-Mart may need to hurry: the news from
China yesterday
was that two of the country's largest department stores are to
merge, to join
China's largest retail group. In a few years it may not just be
Ikea or Wal-Mart
threatening to overrun the countryside - it could be the Shanghai
No 1
Department Store company that wants to strip-mall the M4 corridor.
