The City of Winona is a special place in Mississippi, but when it comes to Walmart closing, it is not.
Blaming elected officials or anyone in Montgomery County is cutting at the wrong people.
Walmart is closing stores all over the country. For example, 10 percent of its Sam Stores closed January 11 putting thousands out of work. Persons at the corporate offices, who make these decisions, do not see the lives impacted or the communities impacted. They only see a negative number in a ledger book and cut it.
This trend of closing stores is not only Walmart—dozens of major retailers will close thousands of stores in 2018.
Instead of blaming elected officials and entertaining nonexistent and contrived stories about denied deals, the blame lies at the feet of several real factors:
• A major shift of shopping habits of persons and their dollars to the internet.
• A drain of talented and educated people from rural areas and, Mississippi in particular, to out of state or more urban areas of Mississippi.
• Corporations demand for more and more profit rather than a decent profit margin and being a backbone of the community.
This is why citizens should support local retailers more than national chains or national internet companies.
At present, online retailers are not quite to the point of selling products like traditional brick-and-mortar stores, yet the day will soon be here when Walmart.com, Amazon and other online entities ship more products to Montgomery county addresses than it ever sold in its stores and almost none or only a tiny amount of those dollars will ever make it back to the county or even in the state.
So, rather than concocting wild ideas on social media and the internet, the citizens of the county need to go offline and shop with locally-owned businesses. It is not the elected officials who drove Walmart away it, it is corporate executives studying internet sales trends.
