Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for July 25, 2020

Go over to the next town. Someone will accept the deal for the right price.

Is Goliath doomed ?

Sometimes Democracy works when there is quality leadership AND the people put in the time and effort to participate.

Tell them you’re a stable genius and no one could have done a better job.

So far no Wal-Mart in the City of Seattle.

…and that’s the way it works in the sleepy little town of Collier Bluff.

No fair! They didn’t give him a chance to bribe anyone.

Time to move on to Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook.

Modernize and make the suppliers pay for it. https://financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/suppliers-absolutely-furious-at-walmart-canada-plan-to-recoup-investment-through-new-fees

He forgot the bribes, I mean gifts….

If only.

Yep! Good for the town’s folk. That’d be a Goodnight, John Boy.

I suspect the planning board will all be driving new cars in a few weeks.

Sadly, I have read of villages & small towns that let them in & it had many bad side effects

In real life half the town would vote yes because it’s cheap and convenient and all of the planners would vote yes because it’s more revenue.

Tell them “The peasants are revolting”.

In our dreams.

Love it!

They always say that the people have a say in these things, but I have found that in the end the opposite is true.

YES!!!…uhh, I mean NAY!!!

Next step: WalMart lobbies the state legislature and governor to pass a law preempting local planning boards from doing this.

Oh, that’s just the planning board. They can be overturned.

Don’t tell them anything. Just bend over and grab your ankles.

We didn’t see any money change hands yet. The planning board is waiting for their share before a yes vote.

“You can’t just… .” Um, yeah, they can.

I’m tanning now…where is Zonker when I need him?

Hasn’t Walmart trampled over dissenting locals before?

My kind of town… Walden is… my kind of town

You can’t vote against Amazon at a town meeting.

Idk if it’s still true, but Montpelier, Vermont, used to be the only state capital without a McDonald’s.

In my Vermont area, the people of the larger town chased Walmart away—but some of them patronize the one just across the river. They also made a point of supporting their local family hardware store on Main Street (where you can open a drawer and find one screw of the right kind if that’s all you want to buy) until the Home Depot at the edge of town closed down. The huge building’s been abandoned for years—if it were handier to downtown you could install an indoor skatepark for kids. Or a post-apocalyptic theme park.

This is probably a big factor in why they support him,they can ignore environmental issues because “he who won’t be named” is destroying the controls on little by little.

In the early 00s our subdivision was part of a group of 5 that stopped the development of a Walmart near Beltway 8 and West Road in Northwest Suburban Houston. There was already one less than 3 miles away but their supposed selling point was that this would be a 24 hour SUPER store. Set inbetween a small shopping center and a neighborhood facing an already too congested main artery with an elementary school and junior high school across the street. We stopped them by using environmental impact studies and other impact on the water and drainage in the area. Apparently they had not don’t these prior to asking for the land use to be changed and when the studies were presented to the land board Walmart was turned down . No super center for you!

“Wait a minute here, I haven’t got my bribes all paid yet!”

This a happy ending that sadly never happened in real life.