Last year, Wal-Mart Corporation built a new store and parking lot on acres of farmland a few miles from Brattleboro, in Hinsdale, New Hampshire. When the new store opened, an existing Wal-Mart a few miles away was closed. That store and parking lot have been vacant ever since. In Brattleboro in 2008, Home Depot Corporation closed a store. That store, and the huge parking lot around it, are still vacant. Both vacant stores and their huge parking lots could be converted to organic farmland, or to the kind of mixed housing and commercial development with parks, wide sidewalks, and narrow streets that are found in downtown Amherst and Northampton. This is what happened in 2002 in Mashpee, Massachusetts. There are “before and after” photos at:

www.terrain.org/articles/28/tachieva.htm (Scroll about half way down the page, or search the page for “2000s: transformed”.)

Wal-Mart Corporation is owned by the richest family in the world, the Waltons. They pay some of the lowest – if not the lowest – wages in the world at the factories in China where most of their products are made. In the USA they pay barely above minimum wage.

On October 10, members of Jobs With Justice www.jwj.org plan to stand outside five Wal-Mart stores in the Valley. They will hand out information to customers and workers. The public is welcome to join the JWJ members. “Together, we can raise awareness with customers and other workers that our communities will not allow Wal-Mart to continue to mistreat its employees, circumvent community values, or try to silence workers from speaking out,” said Jon Weissman of the western Massachusetts chapter of JWJ. More information is available by contacting him at jon@wmjwj.org or by phone: (413) 827-0301.