SUPER WAL-MART / is it really super?!

The big box is taking over - or so it seems. In the upstate region of South Carolina alone, there are nine stores within 30 miles from Clemson, SC. While the public appears to hate the vast expanse of the Wal-Mart stores, no one wants to give up the low, low prices that Wal-Mart can give the consumer due to its high imports of cheap goods. Bruce Mau provides statistics in his book Massive Change, that begin to describe the mega implications that such a big company holds. As the world's biggest economy, with $244.6 billion in sales in 2002, it also becomes the world's biggest employer, with 1.3 + employees. Wal-Mart has more people in uniform that the United States Army. As a piece of the global economy, Wal-Mart is the nineteenth largest economy in the world.



Value drives the consumer, and thus, Wal-Mart survives in this parodoxical age where the consumer is taught to hate the corporation, yet have every gadget phsyically possible. Since Wal-Mart can deliver the gadgets for less, of course the public is going to shop there. Mau describes how the bar code, located on an object's packaging, has revolutionized the global perspective on shopping. With a bar code, an item automatically belongs to the global world of retail. Will there be a day when nothing is free from the bar code, including humans?


The Heat Maps below for Wal-Mart stores at two separate time intervals show "the relative interest in an entity at every locale in the United States. We have developed a geographic model of news influence which enables us to gauge the relative amount of exposure a given entity has received as a function of location."


Each Super Wal-Mart totals 186,000 square feet (4.26 acres), and Wal-Mart builds approximately 2 stores a day - 8.5 acres a day, 310 acres a year.

Furthermore, as of May 2006, Wal-Mart realty has 320 vacant properties listed, totalling over 25 million square feet. To draw an accurate comparison, the September 11 attacks destroyed 28.7 million square feet of building space - 30% of Lower Manhattan's office space. While the statistics against Wal-Mart are rather sickening, the fact that Wal-Mart perpetually delivers the lowest price, and drives competition away, means that Wal-Mart's success is inevitable. What does this say about our society today??