D.C.’S relationship with Walmart was fraught from the beginning, but this breakup still hurts
Walmart, we knew your bad habits all along: killing off mom-and-pop stores; treating workers poorly; getting us hooked on being able to buy a toilet seat, party balloons and bananas all in one stop.
Plus, you’re so unsexy — you’re where our country cousins shop. Going into town to the big Walmart is the smalltown cringe we left behind in our rearview mirrors. Ewwww. We’re the Target generation — the shiny, red place with a gay pride aisle, hipster lamps, hexagons and espresso pods. (Even though most of Target’s benefits and pay had long been just as miserable as Walmart’s.)
But you looked our way, Walmart. And we had to reevaluate you. Because you promised to do for D.C. what scores of big-box retailers refused to do — acknowledge and invest in the forgotten food deserts in our lowest-income parts of town.
And now? You’re bailing like a bad boyfriend — yet again. It’s enough to leave us “blood mad,” the words a stunned Mayor Muriel E. Bowser used when you jilted us the first time in 2016, three years after promising to build retail castles in the neighborhoods that needed them the most.
Back in 2013, I spoke with Alphonzo Ransome, then 53, a father of two working for D.C. Public Works and relying on a Walmart in Maryland to help him make ends meet. He was excited about the plans for one in his Ward 7 neighborhood.
“When it comes to D.C., it’ ll really change some areas. Some of these places in the city haven’t seen development in 100 years. This will change everything,” he said.
He left the front door of his brick duplex in the middle of our conversation to come back with a shiny, red Radio Flyer tricycle he bought as a gift for a family member the night before.
“It was $79 at Toys R Us,” he explained. “I found it for $49 at Walmart.”
The D.C. Council at first seemed as though it might imperil the plans by passing a living-wage bill that singled out the Bentonville, Ark.-based behemoth.
“I understand the salary concerns, but that’s a fight we can fight later,” Ransome — the tricycle dad — told me back then. And I was right there with him.
The folks east of the Anacostia River didn’t want to play chicken with the big-box retailer that was finally interested in them. The jobs, the value, the ability to spend locally — even at a big-box store — was important to residents. Walmart won that fight when then-mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) vetoed the bill. And we gave in to those utopian, aspirational sketches of Supercenters in D.C.’S most tired neighborhoods.
The first two opened quickly. They weren’t in the city’s poorest wards, but they were in places that didn’t have other supermarkets.
“We fought for a long time to make sure that this store would really represent what we want in our ward,” Bowser, then a D.C. Council member representing Ward 4, said when the Walmart at 5929 Georgia Ave. NW opened in 2013. “A high quality building, fantastic products, and wonderful services.”
The Walmart at 77 H St. NW opened the same day.
I have to admit, I came to quietly thank that Walmart for existing, dozens of times.
It was the last-minute savior for the kinds of things you forgot at odd hours or needed immediately — things that we’d usually have to cross state lines for. Poster board and glue for the kid who just remembered the science project is due tomorrow. A dozen plastic swords for a knight-themed birthday party because the ones I ordered online didn’t come. A suitcase three hours before an international flight because mine broke. Cough medicine at 11 p.m., hours after all the local pharmacies closed.
More importantly, the store is always full of families whose public benefits could go far there. There was never a time that I didn’t see lines full of generations sharing a cart full of groceries, kids bargaining over cereal flavors, moms weighing which cuts of meat would stretch the budget furthest, aunties with their magazines.
“Not happy,” one of my neighbors on my community email group said in a chat about the closure. “I shop at this Walmart (and Aldi) regularly to stay within budget and I love that I can walk there if I choose.”
But our money wasn’t enough for the goliath, which is the world’s largest company by revenue and boasted 7.3 percent global revenue growth in its latest quarterly report. In a climate of economic uncertainty, the company said the store “hasn’t performed as well as we hoped.”
I’m sure other shoppers treated to the same dead freezers and empty shelves I saw these past few months, as Walmart clearly checked out of the relationship, have similar thoughts about performance.
What about our expectations? Walmart promised six stores when the living-wage bill was quashed a decade ago.
They built only three. And yup — guessed it — they went into neighborhoods that were quickly gentrifying.
D.C. leaders were shocked in 2016 when Walmart pulled out of the deals in the city’s lowestincome neighborhoods. D.C. had committed $90 million to one of those sites.
That’s when Bowser talked about her boiling blood.
“It’s an outrage,” said Gray, who in 2013 saw through the handshake deal for the stores. “This is devastating and disrespectful to the residents of the East End of the District of Columbia.”
Now, to add insult to injury, the only Supercenters the company is keeping are flanked by condos, a craft brewpub and a bar with ping-pong tables and mussels on the menu. A sign went up at the H Street store this week, announcing its closure at the end of March.
The breakup letter from Felicia Mccranie, Walmart’s regional communications director, was terse.
“We are grateful to the customers who have given us the privilege of serving them at our H Street location,” Mccranie said. “We look forward to serving them at our other stores in the surrounding communities and on walmart.com.”