Wal-Mart Neighborhood Markets: The Change,

Wal-Mart Neighborhood Markets: The Change, the Issue, and the Problem for the Future change recently brought about is that corporate super giant Wal-Mart, has branched out, as its latest entrepreneurial endeavor, into the neighborhood grocery business. Unable to build as many Super Centers as it would have liked, due to challenges from local zoning, Wal-Mart opted instead to build a number of (relatively) small, free-standing local grocery stores, to rival veteran grocery businesses like Vons, Smith's, Albertson's, Safeway, Raley's, and various others locally and nationwide. The new grocery stores use non-union employees. The major issue, for the future, therefore, within the local jurisdictions where the new Wal-Mart Neighborhood Markets have been built, is that of whether or not Wal-Mart Neighborhood Markets will catch on sufficiently, in neighborhoods nationwide, to threaten local jobs and unions.

The problem is that, should this happen on a long-term basis, especially if more and more Wal-Mart Neighborhood Markets are introduced, and catch on in local neighborhoods as other Wal-Mart entities have, it would result in a severe reduction of local union jobs, and consequently a weakening of the unions themselves. Newsday (February 17, 2005) describes these new neighborhood markets thus:

rich guy... wants to move into your modest middle-class neighborhood...