Jolly Green Wal-Mart

James Clements
Published: July 6, 2008

For as long as I have been alive, there have been two options in retail: You could buy local and support small business owners in your community, or you could sell your soul to the Wal-Mart devil, pay much less for an inferior product, and destroy every bit of the character and local charm of your hometown.

Those were your options (unless, of course, you lived in areas where protestors kept Wal-Mart from coming in the first place).

And then comes the news last week that Wal-Mart is changing it’s image, both literally and figuratively, and committing to buying produce from local producers across the country. (I’ll wait in case you want to read that last line again.)

When someone in the Wal-Mart marketing department came up with the idea to soften the blue in the company store logo and lose the hyphen (the new Walmart signs will begin showing up in stores this fall), did the transition somehow soften the hearts of the Wal-Mart executives at the same time?

Or perhaps it was the accountant who realized that buying local produce could save the company millions of dollars in shipping with the rising cost of fuel? Either way, our nation’s retail behemoth may find soft light hides more flaws.

According to a series of new Web site features, Wal-Mart will now allow shoppers to see what locally grown produce is available at stores in their state (livebetterindex.com), plus they’ve built an entire “Farmers Market” feature section devoted to highlighting local farmers within a larger “Food Center” complete with recipes and kitchen tips

(walmart.com/locallygrown).

One of those highlighted farms, Parker Farms, is located less than 100 miles from Culpeper in Westmoreland County. According to the Web site, if you were to going to shop at a Wal-Mart in Virginia today, you could buy locally grown:

Broccoli
Corn
Cucumbers
Green Bell Peppers
Peaches
Radishes
Squash
Yellow Squash
Zucchini
Eggplant
Chilies
Tomatoes

The Web site says Wal-Mart serves “200 million shoppers annually,” and “nearly 90% of American households” shop in its stores. It also claims to be, and I have no reason to doubt it, the “largest retail purchaser of U.S. agricultural products,” with annual purchases of “$400 million in local produce,” and it expects that number to continue to grow.

Because Wal-Mart controls such a large share of the retail food market, it’s in a unique position to set national buying patterns. But is this latest move an example of an industry leader, or simply a response to a demand for produce that doesn’t sit on a truck for days before it gets to the store?

No matter what caused this shift on Wal-Mart’s part (and even if it’s something as soul-less as saving on shipping costs), the big winner here is consumers. Not only will you be able to feel better about eating locally, you’ll also theoretically be safer as well — with regional distribution, tainted food will not, in theory, be getting shipped to the four corners of the country.

I’ll continue to spend my Saturday mornings at the Downtown Farmers Market on East Davis Street (across from the Depot, if you’d like to join me), where I can talk directly to the people who grow my food. But I applaud Wal-Mart for this new policy.

It shows an understanding of a changing marketplace and an awareness that consumers might continue to buy cheap manufactured goods, but we’re getting smarter about what we eat.

James Clements is a Culpeper resident and independent columnist who appears each Monday. E-mail