Posted by
SDS on Saturday, September 23, 2006 10:10:03 AM
I was almost pleasantly surprised the other day to hear Rush Limbaugh comment on our little local election here in Rosemead, California. A century ago, this part of Los Angeles County was a little farming community near the San Gabriel River populated by farmers happily growing, by report, wheat and eventually oranges and strawberries and other crops that like warm weather. The City of Los Angeles, about 10 miles to the West, eventually spread in this direction and urban sprawl engulfed the former farmers. Rosemead is now lost in the continuum of bedroom communities that have sprung up in a century of Southern California growth.
When I was growing up here a lo-o-ong time ago, people (including my grandpa) kept cows and chickens and rode their horses up into the San Gabriel mountains to the north to fish and camp. The rural nature of the community vanished forever in the 70's when Southern California Edison decided to build its new headquarters on what had been a duck farm next to the Rio Hondo, a tributary of the San Gabriel River. Sidewalks and subdivisions replaced bridle paths, pastures and orange trees.
So when Walmart decided to buy a big vacant lot which had once been used to grow strawberries, I was not upset. Some of my neighbors, on the other hand went on a, you should pardon the term, crusade. Professionally made Stop Walmart signs erupted. People asked me to sign petitions ( I didn't), and dozens of people attended normally really boring City council meetings. After all the dust settled, two City Council members who had approved the Walmart had been replaced, but the Walmart was moving forward. If course, the subtext was that this is a Super Walmart-- grocery store included-- unlike other Walmarts nearby. Labor was making a stand to prevent the competition.
The
local supermarket strike three years ago, when the chains took a stand on health care benefits was a prelude to this opening. Supermarket checkers who make seventeen dollars an hour and have no co-pay on their health benefits are a luxury the chains can't afford when they have to compete with Walmart. So this humble little community that most people in Los Angeles, for goodness sake, have never heard of, became the location of a showdown between Walmart and the unions, with Walmart eventually deciding to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to win. And they did. One of my neighbors was on the committee to recall two Rosemead City Council members who had voted to approve the Walmart. There were a lot of skirmishes on both sides including an injunction that issued against the recall election because the pro-recall folks had not complied with all those liberal laws requiring recall petitions to be circulated in languages other than English because of the very substantial non- English speaking populations around here. One of the dirty little secrets the liberals don't like to admit is that all those Spanish, Chinese, Thai, VietNamese and Korean speaking minorities who live around here actually welcome the Walmart for the very simple reason that, just like working people who speak English as their first language, they like to save money. A week after it opened, on September 19, the recall election was held. The recall lost. The Walmart is open and is doing well, by all appearances.
For myself, I am now in consumer retail heaven. Walmart within easy walking distance has a really terrific supermarket in it, with a bakery and a deli. Costco, where I can buy massive amounts of stuff at significant savings, is up the hill and Penny's, Sears, and a variety of other stores are nearby. Not the Rosemead of my youth. I'm not unhappy. As I told my neighbor-- it's Southern California Edison's property, unless you want to buy it from them, they have a right to do with it as they please-- and actually they have a duty to their shareholders not to just let it sit there empty as they have done for at least twenty years. And if you are into mulicultural shopping, you should drop by. You can shop surrounded by people of every race and culture. It's kind of uneventful. We're all just trying to get our groceries folks, nothing to see here.