Well, not exactly. Though Walmart transformed what was a thriving downtown into a shell of its former self.
I was raised in Carlinville, a town of 5000 in Southern Illinois. It is in the transition area between cornfields and coal mines, and is closer both geographically and culturally to Kentucky and Ozark Missouri than to Chicago.
My home town is a Mid West icon with brick streets and a circular town square with a bandstand in the middle. A stone monument in our church yard marks the site of where Lincoln campaigned against Douglas for his senate seat. Nearby is an imposing county courthouse, constructed from huge limestone blocks and surmounted with a magnificent dome. When it was built the town hoped that the state would want it for its capital. Alas that honor went to Springfield, some forty miles north, with what seemed to me to be a much less spectacular capital building.
The town also boasts a thriving college, Blackburn. It was famed for its work-study program that requires students to enroll in work hours, such as mowing the lawn and helping in the kitchen, in addition to academic credits. The money saved by student workers was said to have allowed the college to endure through the depression even when many other similarly sized institutions were faltering.
My family home was near the college. It was a simple house, one of a hundred or so prefabricated homes purchased from a Sears-Roebuck in 1930 by the Standard Oil Company to house the workers in its nearby coal mine. It is the largest such colony of Sears-Roebuck homes in the country.
And the town is on old Route 66. What is not to like?
I grew up playing in the cornfields near the college, then joining the high school band in concerts for ice cream socials in the bandstand of the town square. My father was elected County Superintendent of Schools and his office was in that magnificent court house. It was as if the whole of the town was my back yard.
My first proper suit was purchased at Surman’s Clothing Store on the Square. We knew the Surmans, they attended our church, and their daughter Jane sang in the choir. Next door to the clothing store was the pharmacy where we got out prescriptions filled from a pharmacist who knew us by name and would call if we forgot to get a refill that we needed.
We didn’t need many store-bought groceries since we had a fourteen-acre mini-farm with our own chickens and cows and sheep, and one lethargic pig. It also had a huge garden area where we grew corn, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, lettuce, cucumbers, and much more. We seldom bought stuff from a store since my mother would cook and carefully seal glass Bell jars that we stored in the basement. The peas and corn and other vegies would last all winter. For ice cream we would make our own from milk that got from our cows, cranking the churner and adding salt to the ice around the interior ice cream bucket. Then we would add our own strawberries and raspberries to taste.
We would go to the store for sugar, salt, some other staples, and most exiting for me an occasional candy bar. I liked Mars bars the best. Fortunately the stores were nearby. There was Lanzerotti’s Superette, just a few blocks from our house, run by an Italian immigrant family who lived upstairs. Their sons, Louis and Richard were among my closest buddies in high school. Whenever I went there for even a candy bar or a soda Mrs. Lanzerotti would engage me in long conversation about everyone in our family as if we were kinfolk. For even more food supplies there was the IGA, though for the life of me I don’t remember what those initials stood for—Independent Grocers’ Association, perhaps? I knew almost all of the workers there, since many of them were the older siblings of my high school class mates.
I visited the hometown recently for a high school class reunion. There were 100 members of our class and now there are only about 40 of us left. Of those half are in long term care facilities or in other ways not able to travel even a few blocks to the reunion restaurant. There were about twenty of us who were there, and we seemed genuinely happy to see each other. Perhaps we were equally happy just to be alive.
The town had not changed much in outward appearance. Almost all of the old buildings around the square were still intact, including an old hotel that had not seen a guest in decades. I remember that the Elks club occupied the upper floors, and our Boy Scout troop met there, though today only the lower floors are still occupied by various shops.
What has changed are the shops themselves. Gone are the clothing store, the pharmacy, the neighborhood grocery stores. Instead the shops are occupied by antique stores and tourist items for the Route 66 trade. There are more restaurants, coffee houses, and taverns than I remembered. The town has survived largely because it is seen as a charming old-fashioned Route 66 tourist stop.
Where have all the other shops gone? To figure that out you have to venture to the edge of town, actually across the city lines in an area that is immune to city sales and property taxes. There one finds an enormous store the size of a football field surrounded by an asphalt parking lot that would hold hundreds of vehicles.
Walmart has come to Carlinville. And it has conquered it.
Walmart was founded in 1962 not far from Carlinville in rural Arkansas by Sam Walton, a clever entrepreneur who seized upon a brilliant marketing strategy. The one thing that small town American misses most, he reasoned, were the megastores of big cities that offered a dazzling array of everything imaginable at ridiculously cheap prices. By clever marketing and control of the supply chains back to factories in China and elsewhere, he could offer “always low prices, always,” as the store liked to boast. And it would transform middle America.
Transform he did, garnering an obscene amount of wealth in the process. Virtually every county seat town in the mid-West soon had a Walmart superstore. Within fifty years Walmart was the largest retailer in the world with over ten thousand stores, over two million employees and annual yearly revenues of over 600 billion dollars (that’s billion with a “b”).
Though Sam Walton is long gone, his heirs still own over half of the company’s shares. The combined wealth of the Walton family is over $340 billion dollars, making them collectively the richest entity in the world, wealthier than Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Sam’s three children each have about a hundred billion dollars in wealth: Jim has $96 billion, Rob has $94 billion, and Alice has $89 billion (making her the richest woman in the world).
Meanwhile the employees are not faring as well. As of October 2024, the average wage is around $25 an hour, ranging between $14 and $31 an hour. Most “associates,” as the salespeople are known, earn around $26,000 per year. This is a considerable increase from several years ago when the pay was so low many Walmart employees depended on government food stamps to get by.
Though it’s true that the standard of living in Carlinville is not Orange County or Manhattan Island, $26k does not go very far in sustaining a family budget. I talked with one fellow in Carlinville who worked in the stockroom of Walmart and was having to borrow money to feed his family of five. He now has switched to being a welder in East St. Louis, a forty- minute drive away, but well worth it financially.
Most of my former high school classmates are delighted to have Walmart in town. It’s one-stop shopping. They have a clothing department, a pharmacy, a florist section, and a huge grocery supermarket, all with greater variety and much lower prices than the old stores in town formerly had.
All the old stores quietly went out of business, one by one, as Walmart expanded its sales. The last independent grocery store, the IGA, closed a couple of years ago. The Lanzerotti Superette is now a residence, the Surman clothing store now sells antiques, and the town square pharmacy is now a coffee house for the Route 66 tourists.
At least Carlinville looks much like it used to, due to the tourist trade. But Walmart pulls its customers from all of the surrounding towns. Driving through them on the way to the St. Louis airport after my high school reunion, I was dismayed to see the ruins of all the little towns I remember from my youth. They all seem to be in a terminal stage of torpor, additional victims of Walmart’s ravenous reach.
Many of my former classmates have been grumbling about the erosion of the quality of life in the rural mid-West. They often blame the government, immigrants, and the liberal elites on the East and West Coast who sap the country’s strength and weaken the small towns that used to be so prosperous. I quietly encourage my classmates to look not so far away, but at the megastore at the outskirts of our own little village, offering “always low prices, always,” and eviscerating the small shops that used to be at the heart of our town’s commercial life.