I’ve just moved to Providence, Rhode Island and in the process of setting up house, found a need for a few last-minute pantry and grocery items not acquired in our preliminary Costco run. So naturally, I looked up the nearest Walmart 1.7 miles away and off my boyfriend and I went. We easily found fabric cleaner, soy sauce, and brown sugar. When it came to lettuce and ginger, however, there was none to be found. Upon chancing across a store associate, I asked directions to the produce department thinking perhaps I had missed it. Here I learned a curious thing. Not all Walmart’s are created equal. In fact, as the store associate helpfully informed me, most Walmart’s don’t even carry produce at all. It is only the Walmart Supercenter’s that have a produce department and the nearest Supercenter, I discovered, was 10 miles away.
Curiously, there are 3,569 Walmart Supercenters in America, including the one in Lexington, but only 351 basic or discount Walmart stores. It follows then, that even with those odds, I’d end up at a Walmart without a produce section. Walmart, after all, has become nearly synonymous with the idea of the one-stop shop and certainly it is the first place I thought of when looking at my shopping list, though it certainly no longer feels like a “discount store”. The image of Walmart is so familiar that it is easy to forget that the enormous building sprawled at the end of a massive parking lot somewhere filled with groceries, clothing, cleaning supplies, medicine, electronics, garden equipment, and whatever else might be needed on any given Tuesday afternoon is not what Walmart started as.
The first Walmart opened in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962 when Sam Walton opened a discount store built around a relatively simple proposition: sell products cheaply and sell them in places where people could not otherwise find that combination of price and variety. Before opening Walmart, Walton had opened a 5&10 shop in Bentonville, Arkansas, a small town that suited his wife’s want for small-town living and offered Walton the bonus of the plentiful hunting seasons that came with living at the corner of four states. The success of the dime store inspired Walton to open the first Walmart in Rogers to bring even greater opportunity and convenience to his customers.
Walton’s first stores were not conceived as urban department stores. Quite the opposite. Walmart’s early expansion was designed in part to give rural Americans access to the kinds of affordable merchandise that had traditionally been available primarily in cities. It was a vision of revolutionizing the rural shopping experience, of bringing the easy convenience of city shopping and the excitement of new products, directly to areas where such items would otherwise be hard to find.
For centuries there has persisted the quiet excitement of “going to town” when families set out on foot, hitched up the wagon, or piled into the car to take the twice yearly sojourn to town to trade furs or crops for rarities like sugar, coffee, flour, candy, and cloth. The traditional general store has long stood as a connection to the world beyond, supplying such wonders as refined sugar, milled flour, toys, books, and bolts of ready-spun cloth. Certainly, I remember exciting family outings piling into the car to go to the Cheese Shop for bulk bags of oats, flour, sugar, and beans, a box of Amish butter, and perhaps a bag of the many candies that stocked the shelves there. Eventually they opened a donut window there and, lo, the colorful chocolatey donuts one could buy there were worth the drive alone.
That Walmart started with the same goal as neighborhood grocery stores on a larger scale is important because Walmart’s history is, in many ways, a history of rural American retail though we are well past the possibility of dime stores now. By the 1970s, Walmart had expanded rapidly, aided by distribution centers and its increasingly sophisticated trucking network. Then, in the late 1980s, it introduced the store that would forever change what shoppers expected from a Walmart: the Supercenter. The first Supercenter, opened in Washington, Missouri, combined a traditional Walmart general-merchandise store with a full supermarket, creating the one-stop shopping model that is now so familiar.
The irony, however, is that the same efficiency that makes a Supercenter useful can make it disruptive. Walmart’s ability to offer so many products at such low prices depends partly upon its enormous scale, purchasing power, and distribution network. A small, independently owned grocery store cannot necessarily compete with that scale. And when the local store disappears, the community loses more than a place to buy milk. It loses a locally owned business, local employment, and often a place that has adapted its inventory to the needs of its customers. Rural America has increasingly come to depend upon large-scale retailers for its food supply.
Walmart began by bringing the advantages of big-city retail to rural America. Decades later, the Supercenter has become embedded in the landscape of many rural and urban communities alike that its absence is unthinkable. There is no magic left in it, no excitement at discovering a rare treat. Instead, those burning fluorescent lights turn the warehouse into a crushing space piled with aisle upon aisle of merchandise, of product, but there is no joy in any of it, no sense of discovery though Walmart would have us believe there is some hidden magic in the pitiless scape of its conglomerate corridors. Instead, we whip through with our carts, tumbling our go-to pantry, grocery, and home goods off the shelves with alacrity. Perhaps we pause to take note of the latest display of tradwife inspired clothing in the women’s department, the seasonal pastels, the ruffled collars and sleeves of the latest dresses, the cardigans in soft polyesters. It is cheap and expensive at the same time.
There are many things I will have to learn about Providence. Where to buy groceries. I lean towards the Italian bodegas on the corner of my street in Little Italy. Which coffee shops are worth the walk. Which streets become impossible to park on after five. Where to find the best bread, the cheapest gas, and the freshest lettuce. There is an indie grocery down near Brown’s campus that stocks fresh produce from local farms that I have high hopes for.
In Lexington, I knew my way around. I knew the roads and the stores and the rhythms of the place, the secret places to park that are usually free. Now, even a trip for brown sugar can become an expedition as I learn this new place. I am learning Providence one errand at a time, accumulating small pieces of knowledge that will eventually become instinct. Someday, I imagine, I will know where to find everything here without thinking about it. I will have a favorite grocery store. I will know which route to take home. I will know to order coffee at one café and matcha at another. I will have places that feel like mine.
Maybe home is not a particular house or town or shop or café or corner, but a collection of things you know by heart.
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