Thursday, April 29, 2010
Politics / Clout City / News Is Walmart the Only Retailer Interested in Pullman? Maybe Not.
Posted by Hunter Clauss on 04.29.10 at 04:36 PM
The fight over a proposed new development in Pullman on the far south side has so far been focused on whether it should include a new Walmart store, and the development’s main cheerleader in the City Council, Ninth Ward alderman Anthony Beale, has defended the inclusion of the controversial retailer by saying it's his only choice—he's reached out to other big-box firms and they’ve all turned him down. Beale has made it sound like he's in a mad dash to find a date for the high-school prom and all the pretty girls were already taken so he got stuck with Walmart.
But not everyone is buying his version of events—starting with the very retailers who supposedly spurned him.
Earlier this month Beale told the Chicago Plan Commission, which had to sign off on the project, that he originally wanted to avoid another Walmart showdown in the City Council. “Wal-Mart wasn’t our first choice,” Beale told the commission right before it rubber-stamped the project. “I worked with the unions as far as trying to get other retailers to come to this particular site.”
Beale went so far as to say the entire project would be doomed unless Walmart is part of it—an argument eagerly accepted by the Plan Commission as well as local editorial writers.
The area is, of course, named after industrialist George Pullman, a guy who was so hated by union workers that he was buried in the middle of the night in a cement-covered coffin in 1897. Under the redevelopment plan pitched by Beale, more than 800 homes, a community center, a hotel, and two big-box retail stores—including the city's second Walmart—would be built on the 180-acre site, which once housed a Ryerson steel facility. Beale said he worked with union leaders to try and interest Jewel-Osco, Dominick’s, Target, Costco, and Ikea so it didn’t have to rely on Walmart.
But representatives for several of those retailers told me they were never approached by Beale, the site’s developer, or anyone else about opening a new store in Pullman.
“No one at all has contacted JEWEL-OSCO about building a store in the development,” Karen May, a spokeswoman for Jewel-Osco, wrote me in an e-mail.
Joseph Roth, a spokesman for Ikea, had a similar story. "We definitely have not been in talks with anyone in Chicago about opening a store," said Roth. "We don’t recall anything like that." Roth also said Ikea was not “pursuing another location in Chicago at this moment.”
Target spokesman Kyle Thompson said no one from that company had any records about Pullman. "We have no documents on anything about that project," he said.
Costo chairman Jeff Brotman said he'd have to double check but he doesn't remember anyone approaching his company about Pullman. "I know nothing of that," he said. "I’d be a bit surprised if someone didn’t tell me."
Wynona Redmond, a spokeswoman for Dominick’s, said she “couldn’t confirm or not confirm” whether it had been approached. “I don’t see why you wouldn’t believe him,” Redmond said.
David Doig heads the nonprofit Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, which is the project developer. He told me a broker for a firm called Mid-America Real Estate had contacted other brokers who work with the five retailers. The broker, Dick Spinell, provided reports on whom he contacted and what their response was, said Doig, once the general superintendent of the Chicago Park District. But Doig said he couldn't give me copies of those reports.
"Those are in-house documents," he said.
Spinell did not return several calls for comment.
Beale accused the retailers of being less than forthcoming. “They may be playing games with you,” he said. “Here’s a big, gorgeous site and they said no. We reached out to a lot of them. I guarantee you that we reached out to a lot of them.”
Beale said he worked with the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 881 to try and hunt down an alternative to Walmart. Marina Faz-Huppert, the legislative and political director for the union, told me union reps did work with Beale, but not on the Pullman project.
“We had talked about putting him in contact with other retailers, but that was in part of a different development at 115th and Michigan,” she said.
The alderman said he'd been working on both sites simultaneously. “We were also marketing 115th Street, so a lot of them, if they said no to 115th Street, they’re going to say no to [Pullman] because it’s the same ward,” he said. “This is just me, but if we’re trying to market something and here’s a piece of property that we say you can go into and you say no, I’m not going to turn around and re-approach you again for some other site." Still, he said, it's possible the developer approached the retailers about both sites.
Beale said he thought he had records of meeting union leaders, but "it's been awhile." His office didn't respond to my request to see copies of them.
Comments (25)
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I'm a bit confused by the whole premise of this article. It has been widely known that there were plans to develop that property and that retail stores would be a part of it. I think it is safe to assume that no other retailers besides Wal-Mart are interested if they have not seriously pursued the idea of opening a store. Nitpicking over whether these retailers had specific talks about the site with the developers or the alderman doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose.
Furthermore, we do not live in an economy based on central planning. It seems quite obvious to me that if one retailer clearly is much more enthusiastic than anyone else about opening a store at a given location then it would be rather strange for anyone to think that every alternative must be looked at before this is allowed to happen. Implicit in this article is the suggestion that Wal-Mart is the least desirable retailer of anyone and that the city should choose its preference of retailers in deciding what to allow. I'm not sure where that comes from (other than people buying into all the union propoganda that has been spewed in relation to this issue).
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"Furthermore, we do not live in an economy based on central planning. "
What do you think Walmart does, ace?
Thanks for the research. The blather from aldermen and other salaried representatives of the Daley administration before the Plan and Community Development Commissions needs way more serious fact checking, they think they can say anything with impunity.
That's cute. As I'm sure you know, I meant central planning by the government. Since the word "socialism" has been overused lately by ideologues and extremists I was attempting to use alternate language. Every company, of course, has a good deal of central planning as to how it operates its business. Wal-Mart centrally plans much of its operations and competes with hundreds of other large retailers (and thousands of smaller ones) who also centrally plan their operations. That obviously was not what I was talking about.
ProgressIllinois.com has a great story about how Wal-Mart employees are struggling to get by, you can check it out here: http://tinyurl.com/2f8kkfg
In the regular monthly meeting of the Pullman Civic Organization on April 21, Mr. Doig was asked point-blank to name the exact retailers who had been approached, and declined, to anchor the Pullman Park development. His list was detailed and comprehensive. Now we know he was lying to our faces. Thank you for turning over this sordid stone.
Re: The original IAC, "Implicit in this article is the suggestion that Wal-Mart is the least desirable retailer of anyone..."
Many residents of this community do, in fact, believe that WalMart is the least desirable retailer, based upon its abysmal record of employee relations and its practice of selling substandard imported products. While it is true that 60628 is a food desert, and we do need jobs, what we need more are decent jobs that provide living wages. Pullman and Roseland residents have been lead to believe that anything is better than nothing. Not true - we can do better than WalMart.
The part about this that I find interesting is that Costco was never asked.
Costco has only one store in the city, another is planned for 15th & Ashland. They need more stores here & the South Side is where the open land is.
But I've repeatedly read that the city has offered them land, either free or cheap & Costco turned it down. This story changes everything!
So why are so many aldermen fixated on Walmart & not Costco or Target.
Jewel isn't going to open stores in poor areas, their management hates poor people. Dominick's might, just to get market share.
Aldi & Sav-A-Lot [same ownership as Jewel] will open anywhere they can find land, but their selections are limited.
This gets curiouser & curiouser!
". His list was detailed and comprehensive. Now we know he was lying to our faces."
Why? First of all, out of the five retailers quoted in this article only one states definetevely that they were not approached. Another comes reasonably close to doing so but states clearly that they wouldn't be interested anyway. The other three gave vague responses. Does the list you mention include the one retailer here who would explictly contradict that they were approached. If not, I have no clue what basis you have to think that Doig was "lying to your faces". And even if it did, I think it would be a stretch to say so. It's not as if there are not incentives for a retailer to not be completely truthful. Or they might be confused. More importantly, a retailer does not have to formally "decline" to open a store in order to give a clear indication that it isn't interested. That is not the way these things normally work. This development has been planned for quite awhile. If Wal-Mart is the only one that has stepped forward I think it can be safely assumed that it is the only retailer who is significantelly interested in opening a store there. Nothing has stopped others from expressing interest to the developer. If they haven't, they are not interested. So it doesn't make sense create a big deal over the question of whether retailers specifically declined or not.
I've never understood the argument that Wal-Mart jobs are "not good enough" and that it should be obligated to pay all its workers a wage that enables them solely and completely to raise a full family in a comfortable home and live a comfortable life. That is not what entry-level retail (or restuarant) jobs are supposed to be. It never has been that way and it never will. Are you one of the people who believes that Wal-Mart should be forced to make sure that each and every worker is paid a wage that enables him or her to raise a family of four without any other income and pay for a nice place of living? That is the definition of "living wage" that I have seen most people state. The reality is that people who have to raise families of four by themselves should not expect that an entry-level job should allow them to do this. The people who generally occupy entry-level positions generally have other means of support to live. A very high percentage are high school students working at their first job and living at their parents house. Others are college students helping to pay for their education and spliting rent with three or four roommates in an apartment (and often with parents who are happy to provide financial support for both their education and their rent). Some front-line retail workers are married to people who are the primary breadwinner in the family and for any number of reasons are quite content to have a small job making lower wages. None of these groups of people depends on a Wal-Mart type job to live. And they are the people who occupy the overwhelming majority of the retailers' entry-level positions. So the idea that Wal-Mart, or any other big-box retailer, is filled with employees who are barely able to survive is ludicrous. Why don't you walk into a Wal-Mart and ask these employees about their life situation. See if you can find anybody who is going hungry.
Another thing I've never understood is why this huge advocacy movement focuses on Wal-Mart. Every retailer (except very high end ones that require a much higher level of specialization among all its workers), large and small, as well as every fast food or quick service restaurant pays similar wages. This is true with Target, KMart, Best Buy, Walgreens, CVS, Jewel, Borders, McDonalds, Wendy's, Panara Bread, Dunkin Donuts, and yes, even Starbucks all pay its entry-level workers the same type of wages. Most of these workers don't complain about this because, as I said, they are generally in the catagories I described earlier. But for whatever reason, the protests we see all over the internet and in the city council do not complain about any of these other employers. It is always just Wal-Mart. Why is that? The hostility towards Wal-Mart makes no sense. It is under no obligation to employ anybody. It doesn't have to exist. Yet people act as if they are unethical if they don't pay enormous wages to everybody it employs. And, of course, now that everybody will be receiving universal health care soon the complaints that Wal-Mart does not provide enough health care benefits should definetely no longer be part of this discussion.
"based upon its abysmal record of employee relations"
What abysmal record? Since Wal-Mart is one of the largest employers in the country you can obviously find workers who have, over the years, complained about their employer. You can find workers of every employer complaining about things they don't like. And since Wal-Mart is larger than everyone else and has more employees that makes it all the more easy to find things thay you think you can cite to prove it has an "abysmal record of employee relations". You can, for example, cite lawsuits that have been filed by a few dozen employees out of the hundreds of thousands (or millions) who have worked for it over the years and act as if this provides evidence of something. Many people are easilly swayed by emotion and there are people who you will even be able to convince. But this doesn't pass the logic test.
Every poll I have seen showed that the overwhelming majority of people in the community where the Wal-Mart is being proposed support it. Most of the people against the opening of the store don't even live in the community. The alderman in the ward supports it. The store will provide employment to many people who need it. It will provide lower prices and will also reduce the need for people to spend money on gas to drive out of the area to other retailers. This means people have more money to spend at other businesses as well. It will also bring people in from outside the community to shop, which will also help other businesses in the area as well. That is an effect that certainly would not occur with a Jewel, for example. It is time for the Wal-Mart to be approved.
IAC, are you dense?
"First of all, out of the five retailers quoted in this article only one states definetevely that they were not approached."
What story were you reading because in the one I read I saw this:
“No one at all has contacted JEWEL-OSCO about building a store in the development,” Karen May, a spokeswoman for Jewel-Osco, wrote me in an e-mail.
"We have no documents on anything about that project," he said.
"We definitely have not been in talks with anyone in Chicago about opening a store," said Roth.
"I know nothing of that," he said. "I’d be a bit surprised if someone didn’t tell me."
And that last one comes from the guy who OWNS COSTCO. If the owner of Costco doesn't know about it, then who would?
Again, only one of the five retailers stated definetevaly that they were approached. That was Jewel-Osco. Saying "we have no documents" about the project, as Target did, is not an emphatic statement that no discussion occurred. They could have had a low profile conversation, for example, in which they agreed nothing would be written down. With Ikea, you conveniently left out the next sentence which contradicts the impression of certainty made by the sentence you quoted. You will notice the spokesman then said "we don't recall anything like that" before making it clear that they were not interested anyway. I'm not sure what you mean when you say the Costco quote "comes from the guy who OWNS COSTCO". Costco is a public company. I can buy shares right now and I would own it also. The person quoted is the Chairman of the board and co-founder (no idea why he allowed himself to be quoted in an article as trivial as this). He apparently isn't even an executive with the company right now. That certainly doesn't mean he isn't correct that Costco wasn't approached. But it also doesn't provide the clear proof that you indicate.
@By The Mark Twain correction: Jewel does not own Aldi and Save-A-Lot. In fact, Aldi, owned by Albercht, a German company, is a direct competitor to Save-A-Lot (a subsidiary of Supervalu, Inc.). Jewel's owner is Albertson, which is also a subsidiary of Supervalu.
Recap: Albercht Discount - Aldi and Trader Joe's, Supervalu/Albertsons- Jewel and Save-A-Lot.
Beale's ward is a ghetto war zone. Its blighted, has one of the highest crime rates in the city, the highest foreclosure rate in the country;a strip club down the street from the church of a clout heavy ghetto preacher-politician( Meeks), and is 10-15 minutes away from south suburban and Indiana shopping malls that have lower prices and taxes. Plus, it has a corrupt,integrity compromised, police hating, ineffectual alderman at the helm of the ward.Yeah, I can see why Walmart and business/residential developers are flocking to build there.
To Original IAC:
A living wage is not defined as one which allows a "comfortable home" and "comfortable life." but the minimal amount necessary to rent a 2 bedroom apartment, to feed and clothe a family of 4, and provide sufficient funds for transportation to and from work and school. The Living Wage Ordinance's proposed hourly wage of $11 comes out to about $23,000 annually, barely above the poverty level of $22,050. Not only can a family not secure a "comfortable home" on that income, they would be hard pressed to find any home on that income. Just go to the real estate section of any Chicago newspaper and see how many 2 bedroom apartments you can find listed for $575/mo including heat (30% of the living wage). $11/hour is not a princely wage, it is a very low wage, and one that Wal-Mart, one of the wealthiest corporations in the world, can afford to pay.
See. There is that "family of four" argument. It is bizarre. How many people who work at entry-level jobs at Wal-Mart do you think fully need to support a family of four with their income? I'm sure these statistics are easily available. It isn't many. That isn't who normally works at entry-based retail jobs. I told you that in my earlier post. Most front line big-box workers do not even have children yet. I would assume that very few of the ones that do have a family of four who depend solely on their wage. If someone is married and has two children then presumably, at least under ideal circumstances, their spouse would also be working (or would have earned and saved enough money over time to provide some monetary support). If someone is a single parent and is attempting to raise three children on an entry level retail job then I think most people would say there is a certain level of irresponsibility that has caused this. If you can't support them, you should not have three children. It strikes me as rather crazy to devise an ordinance requiring retailers (or a particular retailer) to pay specific compensation based on beliefs about how it would effect only a tiny percentage of their workers. Yes, sometimes when the economy gets bad there are people who get into unusual situations where they may need to support a family with much less income than they expected. But there are ways of dealing with that, such as government programs. It is pure insanity to require a retailer to adjust its compensation structure so that it may deal with the tiny amount of these people whom it may employ. And they will continue to need to do this when the economy rebounds. It makes no sense.
Whether Wal-Mart is one of the "wealthiest corporation in the world" is immaterial. When they are forced to pay higher labor expenses it means they will need to employ fewer workers. They will open fewer stores, charge higher prices, shorten operating hours, and have fewer people working in the stores at any given time. These are real costs. Wal-Mart has very small profit margins on the products they sell and any increase in their costs has a significant affect on their abilty to compete effectively. Their main competition, Amazon.com, can operate its business with only a small fraction of the amount of workers as any brick-and-mortar retailer. Amazon.com does not employ any workers at all in the state of Illinois. And I would assume they are in the top 5 in terms of the amount of sales to people in the state. That is what Wal-Mart is up against. If you don't allow Wal-Mart to open a store or if you drive their costs higher it means less people are employed in the area and there is less money that people have to spend.
"The broker, Dick Spinell, provided reports on whom he contacted and what their response was, said Doig, once the general superintendent of the Chicago Park District."
So, uh, did you contact Dick Spinell?
How about the folks at US Bank? Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives is just a shell controlled by US Bank.
You may also want to ask Doig why US bank created CNI in the first place.
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/new…
I like the assumption implicit in the article that while WalMart (and the Aldermen that love them) are lying corporate scum, that every other retailer mentioned in the story is honest and above reproach.
Heck, I hate WalMart as much as the next commie, but you folks are seriously naive about the way of the American corporate world if you believe all the denials coming from the other guys.
(Oh, and would you tell your IT boys to implement SSL on the login page. Sheesh.)
nothing garners comments like a Walmart thread, cause few issues have so many paid operatives on both sides
Needless to say, if there are any paid operatives on this thread (which I doubt) I would not be one of them. If you look at my post history you will see that I have made 148 posts about numerous topics just since the current comment system was introduced last fall (and there was another 50 to 100 prior to that). So if I am a paid operative I would have to be paid by quite a few people over a very broad range of areas.
Seems like this is the same old story as was the gift of space in Cleveland's Steelyard Commons to Walmart a good number of years ago. No outreach or similar deals discussed with or offered to long time Local Cleveland supermarkets (or large chains). Same "no one else was interested" excuses from various local City councilmen. Makes it seem like it might be the same old lies? And I am not a paid operative. By the way, if you can get hold of the old Akron Beacon-Journal series on WalMart and its effect on what were successful Ohio businesses, it is a good read.
The Walmart going in on the southside area has been going on for about 3/4 years.For the unions or Jewel/Domincicks to say that they weren't asked is total B.S.I am no fan of Walmart.But for this sight to stay empty this long is a disgrace.Why has Walmart been the only one to try for this land.After Walmart was denied the apporval 3/4 years ago.I thought for sure the unions would get together and get some store built on that land.The place is still empty.Has progressillinois reported on all the people who struggle with NO job.And if the jobs are so bad at Walmart,quit the damn job,no one is forcing you to do the job.You can see how great uneployeement benefits are and how the state( who is many months and several hundred millions behind in paying thier bills) works.If any of these other companies think this development is so great is,all
they have to do is outbid Walmart.Have them put thier money where thier mouth is.
Ace Mann
there's another jewel about 4 minutes away from this site. why though would be a jewel be any better than a wal-mart? they're both ran by corporate boofoos, and I doubt jewel treats its employees any better?
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