For all his objections, though, he is no stranger to the checkout lanes of the old Wal-Mart in town, one of those familiar blue-and-gray buildings that have become as recognizable as McDonald's arches, and seemingly as ubiquitous.

"You pretty much have to shop there," says Scott, who owns a computer and printing store in this town of about 8,200, in a lush river valley in the northeast corner of the state.

"You get forced into shopping there because other stores close and you lose choice."

As Wal-Mart winds up its fourth decade - a time in which it has gone from a single store in Rogers, Ark., in 1962 to more than 4,000 around the world today - the retailer has achieved a certain inevitability in small-town America.

Where once the distance between small towns was determined by how far a horse could carry you in a day or where the train would stop, today the mile marker is more likely a Wal-Mart.

And whether a town has a Wal-Mart can determine its economic viability.

"Wal-Mart is just all-pervasive," says Kenneth E. Stone, an Iowa State University economist who has extensively researched the chain's effects on the state. "The towns that don't have a Wal-Mart don't do as well retail-wise as the towns that do have them."

Stone's research shows that the town with the new Wal-Mart instead becomes a magnet for the entire area's dollars, drawing shoppers from neighboring communities who might otherwise spend closer to home. And its presence often attracts similar retailers, notably Kmart and Target, also started in 1962.

Although a number of locales have kept Wal-Mart from opening - most recently, the Kent County planning board voted down a proposed store in Chestertown, Md., while the town of Belfast, Maine, has banned all superstores - these fights often seem like the kind of skirmish that flares up long after the war has ended.

Consumers have long since voted with their feet - or rather, with their cars and their wallets. If there isn't a Wal-Mart in their town, they'll often drive to the nearest one.

"Generally, Wal-Marts are welcomed to town because you might as well get their tax revenues," says Thomas O. Graff, a University of Arkansas geographer who studies where and how the retailer locates its stores.

A Wal-Mart opening in an urban or suburban setting generally adds an option to a crowded mix of stores - and another big box and parking lot to the asphalt-ridden landscape.

When such a store opens in a rural locale, it has a greater impact, tending to turn its host community into a regional retail hub, with other stores and restaurants opening nearby to catch any spillover effect.

For some Iowa towns, hit hard by the farm crisis of the 1980s, retail can bolster a depressed local economy.

But the new development in one town can come at the expense of smaller communities in the surrounding area - their stores generally wither in the shadow of the giant next door and their Main Streets become ghosts of their former selves.

"Wal-Mart sucks all the oxygen out of an area," says Karl Knudson, a Decorah lawyer representing residents who have petitioned to block the construction of the proposed supercenter.

Wal-Mart's drawing power is breathtaking, with more than 100 million people shopping in its stores every week, according to the company, and new ones sprouting up at the pace of about 15 a month. With annual revenue of $166 billion, it is the second-largest corporation in the world, trailing only General Motors.

While the store continues to expand in cities and suburbs - it recently announced plans to build in Baltimore's Port Covington - and overseas, rural America remains the heart of Wal-Mart Nation. This is where Wal-Mart started, locating stores where no other national chain would.

In many parts of rural America, Wal-Mart has become the only place to buy any number of things - books and music, health and beauty aids, clothes and tools - a troubling specter to those who cite the company's paternalistic approach to what it chooses to carry. Wal-Mart, for example, will not sell music CDs it finds offensive, or the morning-after birth control pill.

The fight over Wal-Mart here, like others going on across the country, is a second-generation conflict: Decorah has a Wal-Mart, but the company wants to replace it with a store more than twice as large, a so-called supercenter that adds a full-size grocery store to the usual general merchandise that makes up its traditional base.

Having conquered any number of market categories - Wal-Mart sells more toothpaste and children's clothing than any other retailer - it continues to move into additional areas. It entered the full-service grocery business only in 1988, when it opened its first supercenter in Washington, Mo., and has become the No. 1 grocer in the country.

Some of those supercenters also have gas pumps in their parking lots, posing a new threat to yet another category of retailer.

When the first Wal-Mart came to Decorah 14 years ago, area towns experienced the now-familiar domino effect: First, the stores selling the same merchandise that Wal-Mart sells lose business and close. Then, restaurants and other facilities that depend on traffic from those closed stores also shutter. Eventually, business groups such as the Jaycees falter because no one is opening stores in a dying downtown.

And soon, what is lost has gone beyond economics.

"When I came here 20 years ago, our Main Street was filled with shops," says Kenneth Steege, a pharmacist in West Union, a small town about 25 miles from Decorah. "We used to have more clothing stores, a Sears catalog store, two hardware stores. We used to have two grocery stores; now we have one. We lost our movie theater.

"We all used to stay open late one night a week, and it became like a meeting spot. You'd stand around and yak. We don't do that anymore," he says.

"In small communities, people really pull together. There are always fund-raisers - for the delivery room at the hospital, or to refurbish the swimming pool. Kids come around selling pizzas for school. We all kick in. You lose a lot of that when all you have is one big store."

In West Union, residents are easily tempted to shop out of town - not only can they drive northward to Decorah, but they also have the option of going a bit farther, 60 miles to the south, to the even larger town of Waterloo, with its own Wal-Mart as well as Target, Kmart and a department store-anchored shopping mall.

Although some residents do try to support their local businessmen and women, it's not always possible.

"I really do try to shop in town. The only thing I have to go out of town for is grandchildren things, like clothing," says Carolyn Havenstrite, a lifelong West Union resident.

Havenstrite has an extra reason for loyalty to downtown merchants - she is one of them, operating a Radio Shack and electronics repair shop next door to Steege's Pharmacy.

As she details the travails of being a small merchandiser in a town between two larger ones, a real-life case study walks in: A police officer who recently bought a cellular phone accessory at Wal-Mart wants to see whether Havenstrite carries it so that he can save himself a trip out of town next time. She does have something similar, but the officer balks when he sees the price: $14.99, compared with the couple of bucks he paid at Wal-Mart.

Havenstrite sighs.

"I had a lady who brought in a 25-inch television for repair that she had bought at Wal-Mart for $199," she says. "We can't even buy them [from a supplier] for that."

Havenstrite remembers as a child when it was a major event, not a matter of everyday life, to go to a store in another town. Today, even with gas prices rising, driving miles and miles to shop is commonplace.

"With two still in diapers, you have to go to Wal-Mart," says Jerri Martin, on a recent trip to the Decorah store from her home in a town about 20 miles from here. "We're here about three times a week."

"And sometimes twice on Saturday," her husband, Bill, adds ruefully.

The parking lot around the store is filled with cars from neighboring counties and even an occasional one from Minnesota, the border of which is about 15 miles to the north. For some shoppers, the proposed supercenter, with its groceries in addition to the usual general merchandise, can't open soon enough.

"One-stop shopping!" Jerri Martin says, her eyes widening in anticipation.

"We've been to the supercenter in LaCrosse," Bill Martin says of the Wisconsin city about 55 miles from here, "and I think something like that would be good for Iowa. I wish they'd quit arguing about it and build it."

For almost three years, Decorah has wrestled over Wal-Mart's desire to close this 74,000-square-foot store and build a supercenter about two miles away, on the banks of the winding Upper Iowa River that is considered the state's most scenic waterway.

The 184,000-square-foot store would be built on the river's flood plain, but the City Council has voted to rezone the site to allow Wal-Mart to build on it. Wal-Mart says construction will begin this summer and the store will open next July, but opponents are continuing their challenge of city and state permits that have been granted to Wal-Mart to build on the site.

"No one messes with the river," says Frank Holland, a retired engineer who owns a farm across the river from the proposed site.

Holland fears that if Wal-Mart builds on the flood plain, there will be nowhere for the water to go in the event of a flood but onto his farm.

"If the water can't go to the right," he says, "it's going to go to the left."

Others oppose the store for a variety of reasons - some worry that garbage and runoff from the store will pollute the river, which is beloved for its 100 miles of canoeable waters, others that it will draw business away from Decorah's pleasant downtown.

More so than smaller towns nearby, Decorah's downtown remains fairly lively, even though Water Street, its main thoroughfare, has a few vacant storefronts. Having Luther College, with its 2,600 students, in town gives Decorah a more youthful cast than its neighbors, which, like many small Iowa communities, are becoming increasingly older.

You can get everything from tattoos to lattes to baby chicks at downtown Decorah stores - surely this is one of the few main streets in America to have both a hatchery and an Internet cafe on the same street.

"What makes Decorah so viable is you can walk places. There isn't even a sidewalk to Wal-Mart," says Scott, the computer and printing company owner, whose office is on Water Street.

Scott has spoken out against the proposed supercenter at the numerous, and often emotional, City Council meetings to consider the store.

"They don't live here. They're not going to clean this up," one resident, Steve McCargar, declared at a recent council meeting, holding up a bag of garbage he collected from near the existing store to show what kind of trash the new one would send into the river.

Residents such as McCargar, who manages an organic food co-op on Water Street and lives downriver from the new site, have kept their fight going despite the City Council's repeated votes to push the project forward.

Water Street merchants have survived the existing Wal-Mart by counter-programming: They don't sell the same products. The downtown clothing shops, for example, carry more upscale attire, and other stores specialize in furniture, artwork, gifts and antiques.

But a supercenter would offer even more products and services, giving additional stores cause for concern. The sheer size offends some in this modest town who say they believe that Wal-Mart is acting greedily.

"More businesses would probably say they were helped by the old Wal-Mart than hurt. Decorah was becoming a regional shopping hub when it got the Wal-Mart, and that sealed it," says Rick Fromm, managing editor of the twice-weekly newspaper here. "But with this new Wal-Mart, it's just so huge. A small town works if everyone gets their share. But now Wal-Mart kind of wants it all, from groceries to tires to the eye doctor."

Proponents of the new Wal-Mart say it will keep retail dollars in Decorah: Those who live here won't have to leave town to shop at a supercenter, those in the surrounding communities will flock here and patronize other businesses as well.

"The one thing Wal-Mart does is bring people to town," says Decorah Mayor Vic Fye. "And once they're here, they look for places to eat; they buy gas."

Fye has been dealing with Wal-Mart for much of his political career: He first became interested in joining the City Council when some residents opposed the first Wal-Mart, which he also supported, and now as mayor, has spent much of his time trying to get the new one built.

Fye sees Wal-Mart as a vital part of the diversified local economy, providing a complement to the town's manufacturing base as well as to the more upscale retailers on Water Street.

"People who work at the factories, Wal-Mart is the kind of place they can shop," Fye says. "For people who want the better quality than what Wal-Mart has, you can go downtown.

"The way I look at it, Wal-Mart is going to be somewhere," he says, "so it might as well be in your town."

As they await the outcome on Wal-Mart, area merchants say they can't do much more than they're doing: providing more personalized services, counting on customer loyalty and hoping that, in the end, the bottom line isn't the only line.

"We bought our son a bike [at a local store] and probably paid $10 more than if we had bought it at Wal-Mart," Steege, the pharmacist in West Union, says. "He threw off the chain like boys always do, and we took it back to them and they fixed it for us.

"Well, there's a value to that."

Copyright © 2001, The Baltimore Sun

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