Like Mushrooms Sprouting in the Night

Coming soon to an abandoned steel mill near you!

Yes, boys and girls, the biggest of the big boxes is going to be swooping down from the sky like Dorothy's house impacting the land of Oz.

Quinsigamond Village will never be the same again.

You can see the Blackstone Valley Mall from the proposed site, only a mile away. Will there be empty boxes up there on that hill in a couple of years?

I wonder how abutters feel about their new neighbor?

Of course, locating the new Wal-Mart right next to the sewage treatment plant is only fitting.

Open these doors, and you might smell something worse than sewage, however. And there's always that slow, sucking sound of local dollars being ripped out of the local economy and into the pockets of the Walton Family. Somehow, I just don't see one of the world's biggest vacuum cleaners magically creating any sort of big economic boom for Worcester.

Of course, we'll have to watch over the next few years to see if the Wal-Marts in West Boylston, Oxford, Leicester, and Westboro remain open, since the vacuum cleaner effect of this company is hardly immune to its own ability to suck.

Anyone who thinks Wal-Mart is a nice company has another think coming. But, of course, you'd have to invest a lot of time reading in order to be able to think with the necessary facts (pdf), and who's got any time to do that? Obviously, no-one on the zoning board has the time, or anyone else who thinks this is going to be good for Worcester. They'll never have a clue until it's time to fight the Walton Family's billions over tax assessment challenges. Until that happens, our city officials can happily dream of how wonderful it will be to have taxable property on that site again, and gleefully start borrowing against future revenues that, most likely, they'll never see.