| The "Tiny town" is 70,000 people who live in an multi-city metro area of around 600,000. That may not be like SF or NYC big, but it's also not just a random metro area. Having lived there for a few years, you're painting with a poetic brush a bit and I'd like to clarify how I see it. Walmart owns Bentonville. The city council, mayor, and basically anyone there is almost completely subservient to their interests. Again - WM never moved in to the small community, the small community literally is Wal-mart. For many years, people in the town worked in Wal-mart retail buildings & warehouses around Bentonville. Around 2013 the company started to struggle to compete and found that they needed to attract talent, so the Walton Family Foundation started spending somewhere around $300 million - $400 million a year in improvements and restoration projects. This included massive subsidies for companies that moved in to the area - WFF also paid partially or fully relocation money, but I have no idea how much they paid other than one restaurant owner I spoke to who was basically given moving costs, a building, and "free" rent for a year. The whole "Wal-mart HQ" thing is just another in their line of tactics to attract new talent in to the area because they are struggling to build an ecosystem of talented developers and analysts. Which, again, there's nothing wrong with this tactic if that's what you're hunting for. One thing I'll give WM for sure - they are 100% focused on building out a tech bubble for people who want a semi-urban lifestyle. There's a lot of TX & CA transplants and honestly it's working great for them. All told, none of this is even kind of comparable to Amazon moving to NYC or Atlanta. Nor is it comparable to a company moving in to a small town brand-new. [ed: oops missed an important sentence!] |
It's now 54,909, but maybe it's 70k as you say.
Either way it sounds precisely like a situation where a giant corporation moved in to a small town. Or more accurately the tiny store grew into a giant corporation and so did the small town.
My point was merely that many small rural town mayors would love it if a giant corporation would move an HQ with tens of thousands of high paying jobs into their tiny communities! This is why the are willing to give giant incentives to them.
You make great points otherwise, thanks for sharing your perspective!