who’s afraid of walmart?

Joel Kotkin, a U.S. urbanist with a soft spot for suburbia, didn’t deny that Walmart forces small businesses to close — he just wondered whether that was such a bad thing.
“Walmart shuttered a lot of those rural general stores, but they were charging a fortune, and they didn’t have the selection,” he said on the phone from his home in the San Fernando Valley.
“For a lot of people in smaller towns, having a Walmart was a big plus.
“If the people in this area are Walmart shoppers,” he said, referring to Kensington Market, “they’re working class, and the savings really matter to them.”