The Bully of Bentonville

by Anthony Bianco

  Over the last decade, Inglewood has started to attract some significant investment from national retail chains. Costco, Target, Home Depot, and Kmart all built stores along Century Boulevard near the Hollywood Park racetrack and adjacent casino (though the Kmart didn’t last long). When the company that owns Hollywood Park put sixty acres of parking lot between the racetrack and the Forum on the market in 2002, the L.A. developer Stanley Rothbart pounced. Rothbart, who’d already built a dozen stores for Wal-Mart throughout California, took an option on the property and drew up plans for a $100 million shopping center called The HomeStretch at Hollywood Park. Wal-Mart was so enamored of the project and its prime location that it cut a deal to put two giant stores—a Supercenter and a Sam’s Club—into the center, potentially filling more than 60 percent of the 650,000 square feet Rothbart was looking to build.

  Wal-Mart’s bid to enter Inglewood did not sit well with its city council, which was pro-union in its sympathies. In September 2002, the council approved an “emergency” ordinance effectively banning stores of the size the company was planning from selling groceries. This was the very same law that the UFCW had been urging on many California cities. “Wal-Mart’s plans to enter the retail grocery business in Inglewood are dead!” crowed Ricardo Icaza, president of UFCW Local 770. 29

  Icaza soon had to eat his words. Wal-Mart’s local operatives gathered 9,000 signatures on a petition to put the issue on the ballot, more than twice as many as needed to force a referendum. The company also threatened the city with a lawsuit for alleged procedural violations. On the advice of the city attorney, who doubted that the big-box ordinance would survive a court challenge, the City Council voted to rescind its ban. Icaza was irate, and his mood darkened a few months later when Lorraine Johnson, an investment banker who sat on the city council, reversed herself and came out in favor of Wal-Mart as her term was expiring. “She went south on us,” Icaza recalled. 30 The UFCW drafted one of its business agents, Ralph Franklin, to run against Johnson. Franklin, a Boy Scout leader and longtime Inglewooder, ran on an anti–Wal-Mart platform and won handily.

  Now it was Wal-Mart’s turn to seethe. Even allowing for the fact that many Inglewood residents belonged to one labor union or another, one could argue that the UFCW had gained inordinate influence over Inglewood’s government. While it did not necessarily follow that the union’s success in imposing its agenda was bad for the city, Wal-Mart clearly was suffering for it. “Wal-Mart and our customers are tired of being bullied by the unions,” complained Peter Kanelos, the Wal-Mart community affairs manager responsible for L.A. “If the union and the local politicians they put in office want to attack Wal-Mart, they can rest assured that we’ll fight back. 31

  It is one thing for a corporation to complain about the undue political influence of an opponent. But it is quite another to hold itself out as representing the popular will, as Wal-Mart has done frequently in site fights across the country. From Scott on down, the company’s executives seem to regard the act of spending money at Wal-Mart as an implicit endorsement of the company’s expansion imperative. Or, as Kanelos put it in Inglewood: “People support and want Wal-Mart Supercenters. We’re going to do everything in our power to make certain that Wal-Mart customers are heard.” 32

  To this point, the city council had not taken any formal action on the HomeStretch proposal. Wal-Mart was not without influence at City Hall. Inglewood Mayor Roosevelt Dorn was officially neutral but clearly favored the shopping center and eventually would come out foursquare for it. Rothbart’s staff had been working harmoniously with Inglewood’s city planners, some of whom favored the project, to prepare the development plan for formal consideration by the council. However, Wal-Mart now overplayed its hand. It decided that trying to deal with Inglewood in the customary way was not worth the company’s while. As Kanelos put it, “Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to be denied?” 33

  In August 2003, Wal-Mart helped organize a group called the Citizens Committee to Welcome Wal-Mart to Inglewood, which quickly gathered signatures requiring the city to put HomeStretch to a popular vote through Measure 4-A. Instead of the usual page or two of prose laying out the particulars, it consisted of seventy-one pages of abstruse plannerese that no layman could possibly understand. A vote in favor would not merely indicate support for building a Supercenter in Inglewood but would exempt Wal-Mart and its developer from Inglewood’s land-use regulations. It would also approve HomeStretch as designed, without city review or public hearing. “Under the guise of ‘direct democracy,’ Wal-Mart would shut out government and public oversight,” the Los Angeles Times noted in “A Big-Box Ballot Bully,” an editorial denouncing 4-A. “Love Wal-Mart or loathe it, the ballot box is simply not the place to decide how many parking spaces this mega-center should have, how many new traffic signals would be needed to prevent gridlock or whether local sewer lines can handle an extra 50,000 gallons of waste a day.” 34

  Many of Inglewood’s elected officials reacted as if they had been slapped in the face. “This initiative is quite unfair to the voting public and extremely insulting,” said Eloy Morales Jr., the only Latino among the city council’s five members. “It’s even more insulting that its sponsors claim it is the purest form of democracy. That’s just false. They know what they’re doing and they wouldn’t do it in Beverly Hills.” 35

  The Vote No On 4-A campaign drew the support of almost all of Inglewood’s federal, state, and local officials and the great majority of its African American ministers. Although Wal-Mart had to make do with the Chamber of Commerce and some black business leaders, it did enjoy the inestimable political advantage of unlimited funds. The company spent heavily on TV and radio advertising, while its opponents concentrated their comparatively meager financial resources on door-to-door canvassing. Wal-Mart kept it simple, emphasizing the standard economic arguments: The new shopping center will add jobs (1,200 overall, including 300 at Wal-Mart) and boost sales-tax receipts (by as much as $5 million a year). Meanwhile, opponents emphasized Wal-Mart’s disrespect for representative government, but also let fly every accusation and complaint contained in the We-Hate-Wal-Mart manifesto: It tramples small business, underpays and overworks its employees, discriminates against blacks and women, fights dirty against unions, and rapes the environment.

  Cox Menswear is an ideal place to take the street pulse of Inglewood while adding to your wardrobe. It’s on the corner of Market and Manchester, right in the barely thumping heart of what once was Inglewood’s busy downtown shopping district. Cox’s is a compact little store, so there is no missing Darian Jackson, better known as “DJ,” haberdasher to the ’hood and man in the know. DJ is a short, husky black man in his mid-thirties with a little hoop in his left ear, a shaved pate, and an amiable been-there, done-that attitude.

  Like most stores on Market Street, Cox Menswear has a poster in its front window that reads, “Save our Community from Wal-Mart. No on 4-A.” The special election is just four days away—April 6, 2004. “I’ll vote, but not everybody will, know what I’m saying?” DJ says. “They feel it don’t do no good—they’re going to put a Wal-Mart here anyway, so why bother? But this is my neighborhood,” he continues, putting a little steel in his voice. “I’m from here. As I got older, I realized you got to pay attention.” 36

  DJ and I stand just inside the store’s front door and talk. Only five customers—all of them black men—enter during the next hour, and DJ is on hand-slapping terms with each one of them. Periodically, he glances at the Korean woman behind the cash register. She and her husband, Yoon Lee, have owned Cox Menswear for twenty-eight years and have employed DJ for four of them. When DJ alludes to the budding tension in Inglewood between black customers and Korean owners, he leans toward me and speaks sotto voce. Halfway through the interview, Mrs. Lee tells him that he’s gone on long enough. He ignores her completely and keeps on talking. I ask DJ if he is the store manager. He gives me a sly look. “You could say that,” he says.

  DJ s
eems blissfully unaware of the political machinations behind the ballot measure. The main reason he is voting no on 4-A is that he thinks a Wal-Mart would cripple Inglewood’s small businesses, black- and Korean-owned alike. “They put all the little businesses out of business,” he says. “Not us, though, ’cause we carry different kinds of stuff than Wal-Mart carries. I guess I could see it if Wal-Mart was going to hire people from the community, but they won’t.”

  Jobs are in short supply in Inglewood, but DJ has two of them. On the weekends, he works down the street as a security guard at the “swap meet,” a kind of indoor flea market constructed from the ground-floor ruins of what long had been a J. C. Penney store. (Market Street also used to have a Sears and an elegant Boston Store branch, now a boarded-over discount jewelry mart.) Much of the merchandise sold at the swap meet and on Market generally is a step or two downscale from today’s Wal-Mart. A general merchandise store called Crazy 5 is touting a year-end clearance sale (in April!) with a banner proclaiming, “$4.99 and up or down.”

  The fortunes of Crazy 5 no doubt would decline if a Supercenter were to open a half mile away, but amid the discount jewelry shops, sporting goods stores, and beauty salons on Market Street are a handful of businesses that already have done what Ken Stone and everyone else urges local merchants to do when Wal-Mart comes to town: specialize in what Wal-Mart doesn’t carry. There are two large stores (Michael’s School Uniforms and Cambridge Uniforms) that sell nothing but school uniforms, and a third (Lynton Uniform) exclusively offering nurses’ outfits. A Wal-Mart might well stock uniforms, but not in the number and variety on display in these establishments, which draw their customers from all over Los Angeles, where public schools require both boys and girls to wear uniforms. The Korean-owned World Hat & Boot Mart Two, Market Street’s largest store, is buoyed by a national mail-order business and also caters to the local demographic by offering a big, multihued selection of Kangol caps along with its row after row of cowboy hats and Western-style boots.

  Market Street also is home to a number of black-owned, black-themed businesses heavily dependent on an Inglewood clientele. Would a new Wal-Mart stock dashikis, Masai shawls, African drums, hip-hop sportswear, and high-end cosmetics for “exotic skin tones” or put crawfish étoufée and catfish po’boys on its fast-food menu? Hardly. But most of the half dozen establishments that traffic in such fare on Market seem to be barely hanging on as it is. “You see how dead it is today?” says Derekshawn Brown, a makeup artist who runs the Four Seasons Cosmetics Beauty N Barber Studio for his brother, owner Jerry Smith. “We sit here waiting. Where are the customers?” 37

  Four Seasons got its start down the block in 1991 as a booth in the swap meet officially known as the Inglewood Market. Unlike most of the many beauty salons in Inglewood, Four Seasons has its own proprietary line of cosmetics. “We’re a specialty store,” says Brown, an even-tempered, rail-thin man of about thirty who is dressed way down in a gray T-shirt and gray sweats. Brown not only put a “No On 4-A” poster in his front window but convinced his landlord, a Korean woman who occupies the building next door, to put a sign in her window, too. “A lot of people in Inglewood are frightened of Wal-Mart,” says Brown. “It’s the power.” 38 Brown, too, is intimidated by Wal-Mart, but opposes the HomeStretch development for an entirely counterintuitive reason: It would be too far from Market Street to bring spillover traffic to his struggling beauty parlor. “Why put it over there by Hollywood Park when you got Target, Home Depot, and other big-box stores already?” Brown says. “Put it here.”

  The question of Market Street’s fate is freighted with significance far beyond its rather paltry economic contribution to the city. For many black residents, it is a symbol, at once infuriating and embarrassing, of Inglewood’s failure to realize its potential as a model of African American self-determination. “Fleshing out any dream seemed so possible here…because blacks lived here in great numbers, not in the usual cordoned-off inner city or redlined enclave, but in a real town a few miles from the Pacific,” recalls Erin Aubry Kaplan, a writer who grew up in Inglewood in the 1970s and returned to live here in 2001 after a long time away. Today, she continues, Inglewood is “the promising underachiever who fucked up and could least afford to because everybody was counting so heavily on his success. What happened to you? I want to shout out the car window at the offending landscape. Where did you go?” 39

  When white residents fled en masse in the 1960s and 1970s, they sold their houses to black families and their businesses to Asians. City Hall has yet to rise to the challenge of nurturing a black-owned economy in a black-run city. In fact, this is a city that has not had an economic development plan worthy of the name in decades. Its most ambitious undertaking was Market Street Renaissance. Launched by Mayor Dorn with great fanfare in 2000, the project has amounted to nothing more than a $4 million face-lift. Fixing up Market Street with streetlamps, wrought-iron benches, planters, and other accoutrements of upscale shopping has failed utterly to entice folks downtown.

  With the new stores opened in recent years by Home Depot, Target, Staples, Bally’s, and the like, Inglewood’s center of retail gravity has shifted sharply eastward, toward the new, privately developed shopping centers along Century Boulevard near Hollywood Park. That these and other national chains were able to set up shop in Inglewood without anything like the outcry that Wal-Mart provoked only goes to show that a majority of Inglewooders—black and Hispanic alike—have nothing against big-box stores in particular or economic development in general. Chain stores may not recycle dollars locally to the extent that locally owned businesses do, but the jobs these stores created gave work to hundreds of youths who might otherwise be on the street.

  In treating Inglewood the way it did, Wal-Mart antagonized a black population that had come to measure its failure in large part by its failure to determine its own economic destiny. We’ve been exploited by absentee business ownership for years and now America’s biggest company wants us to turn over sixty acres, no questions asked? No way. If Wal-Mart accomplished nothing else, it unwittingly roused Inglewood from the lethargy induced by chronic underachievement. The Coalition for a Better Inglewood, a civic group formed in opposition to Wal-Mart, “encouraged a brand of activism in the city that it hasn’t seen in a very long time….” notes Aubry. “The fact that Inglewood was a black and Latino city that Wal-Mart assumed would be a path of least resistance made the victory that much sweeter.” 40

  It might well have hurt Wal-Mart on balance that Mayor Dorn stopped feigning neutrality about a week before the election and came out “one thousand percent” for the HomeStretch development. Dorn, who has been mayor since 1997, is increasingly unpopular, particularly among the Market Street merchants. In their view, he literally led them down the garden path with the Renaissance project and now is selling them out to Bentonville. “I thought he would be a cool mayor ’cause he’s from the ’hood,” DJ says. “But he never comes around. I saw him more when I was a juvenile.” (Dorn, a lawyer by trade, served as a juvenile court judge in Inglewood for eighteen years before becoming mayor.)

  Sunday, April 4, is the thirty-sixth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, and the Vote No On 4-A campaign makes the most of it, putting up posters and passing out pamphlets carrying King’s image and invoking his moral authority in support of the cause. In one, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which Dr. King founded, comes out against the “deceptive” 4-A and also takes a direct swipe at Wal-Mart. “Of course, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., never shopped at a Wal-Mart,” declares Rev. Norman John, the organization’s L.A. director. “But he consistently urged us not to support stores that do not support the right of workers to organize.” 41

  Meanwhile, the ministers in most of Inglewood’s two dozen black churches take to the pulpit to urge their congregants to smite Wal-Mart at the ballot box. About 10,000 worshipers throng the Forum for a service led by Bishop Kenneth C. Ulmer, pastor of the Faithful Central Bible Church, which
bought the Forum for $23 million in 2001. Bishop Ulmer eases into his Wal-Mart sermon after leading the huge choir massed behind him onstage in a couple of thunderous hymns. “An organization has come into this community, across the street, and structured a ballot issue that, if it passes—let me explain it to you,” Ulmer says. “You will have to get more permission to build a doghouse. You will have to go through more approval by the city to add a carport to your home than this organization will have to go through if they come into this city. It is structured so there is absolutely no governmental or community accountability or input. I see it as an insult to us for them to come into our backyard and tell us what we can do.” Ulmer pauses briefly as an outburst of applause ricochets around the Forum. “Wrong is wrong,” he concludes, “no matter who does it.” 42

  The next morning, Reverend Jesse Jackson brings the campaign against Wal-Mart and 4-A to its symbolic climax at a crowded press conference in the parking lot of the Bourbon Street Fish Restaurant, directly across Prairie Avenue from the Wal-Mart site. Eight speakers precede Jackson to the stage, including a fiery representative of Lewis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, who denounces Wal-Mart as “a modern-day plantation” and as “this slick, slimy, sleazy, deceptive corporate giant.” Jackson takes the rhetorical high road, exalting the fight against Wal-Mart as an extension of the civil rights movement. “We must not disconnect the struggle in Inglewood from the global struggle for economic justice,” says Jackson, who was standing next to King when he was gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis. “When Dr. King went to Birmingham, people said, ‘Dr. King, you are from Atlanta, why are you in Birmingham?’ This is one nation, one flag, and one set of rules. ‘Why are you in Selma?’ Because unless people can go into Selma, they cannot be empowered in Los Angeles and New York. One nation, one flag…