Wal-Mart Confirms Interest in N.Y.C.
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New York City has long watched from a distance as Wal-Mart entered communities across the country and around the world. No longer.
The world’s biggest retailer confirmed yesterday it is working with the city and with a developer to purchase land at Rego Park, Queens, to construct what could be the first of many Wal-Mart stores to take on the Big Apple.
“I think we will continue to look at opportunities in the area,” a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, Daphne Moore, said. “If there’s an opportunity for us, we’ll seriously pursue it.”
For the pilot store, however, the plans are still in the early stages. “Anything beyond saying we’re interested would be pretty presumptuous at this point,” Ms. Moore said.
The proposed site, in a heavily trafficked retail area on Queens Boulevard near the Long Island Expressway, the Grand Central Parkway, and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, is a strategic location for Wal-Mart. There it will join a new cluster of big-box stores, such as Target, Marshall’s, and Best Buy, and be near one of the busiest malls in America, the Queens Center.
But first Wal-Mart will have to win a New York-style fight that in some ways may resemble the type it has encountered in local communities across the country, where detractors contend the company’s stores worsen traffic and sprawl, force neighborhood businesses under, and drive down wages and benefits.
Wal-Mart’s entrance to Queens “will be an opportunity for organized labor and immigrant communities in New York to reject everything that Wal-Mart represents by rejecting their presence here in our city,” the executive director of the New York Civic Participation Project, Gouri Sadhwani, said. She called the Arkansas-based chain “the worst example of corporate misuse of power and workers in the world.”
The national political director for Unite, Chris Chafe, said he feared it may be too late to keep Wal-Mart out of Queens, but labor is determined to ensure the store’s workers are organized, despite the company’s staunch resistance to unions. The organization’s full name is the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees.
“Wal-Mart is opening a new store somewhere in America every day and that’s their program for growth throughout 2005,” Mr. Chafe said. “It speaks to the need for workers in the labor movement to establish as soon as possible an aggressive ground and corporate campaign, so when an entity like Wal-Mart comes into a union heavy area like Queens, we have the means to keep them out, or organize them.”
While labor is charged up for the fight, local business leaders and community board members said merchants and residents have not complained about the potential Wal-Mart.
“That’s going to be a blockbuster store,” the executive vice president of the Queens Chamber of Commerce, William Egan, said.
“Obviously,” he said, “when these box stores come in here, there are pluses and minuses.”
The former, he said, would be benefits for consumers, employees, and a potential spillover effect for other merchants from increased traffic. But he said he is concerned about additional traffic in the already congested area, the company’s community commitment, and the potential negative effect on small businesses.
The founder of the Queens Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Ernesto Cury, voiced similar reservations.
“If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen, but I can’t get excited about it,” he said. “If I am going to calculate who is going to be hurt by the most gigantic retailer in the world, selling everything from Band-Aids to coffee, it’s got to be the small businesses in the area.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Cury said he recognized the need in the community for greater business options.
“It’s a lower- to middle-class immigrant population that is growing,” Mr. Cury said, mentioning newcomers from India, Southeast Asia, South Korea, China, and all over Latin America. “These are working-class families that probably will benefit from the competitive edge that Wal-Mart will present.”
Queens’s population grew by 14% in the 1990s, which constituted 40% of New York City’s total increase in population.
“Queens is still relatively underserved in the retail area. It has seen such population growth, and retailers are only beginning to serve that population there,” the research director at the Center for an Urban Future, Jonathon Bowles, said.
Mr. Bowles also cited specific concerns about community involvement and infrastructure, without discounting the potential benefits of Wal-Mart’s arrival in New York City.
“I’m definitely no fan of Wal-Mart, mostly because of their labor practices that have been highlighted, ” Mr. Bowles said. “But I’m not necessarily against them coming into Queens.”
Vornado Realty Trust, a Manhattan based development company, owns the site that the chain is considering and, according to the Associated Press, wants to put up a mixed-used structure that will combine retail and housing. The Wal-Mart spokeswoman, Ms. Moore, said the 135,000-squarefoot design would be “unique” and “different from your typical store.” Ms. Moore could not confirm a date but said it typically takes Wal-Mart 10 months from groundbreaking until grand opening. New York Newsday reported yesterday Wal-Mart officials said the store would be completed in late 2007 or 2008.
The next step will be an environmental review at the Department of City Planning. A spokeswoman for the agency said it received a preliminary draft for the expansion of the Rego Park Mall yesterday. The agency will review it before it is considered by the local community board.
While the district manager of Community Board 6, Kathleen Histon, said it was too soon to gauge the community’s reaction, she said a decision on a land-use application “is not on a particular retailer, it has to do with the use of the property.”
As of November 30,the company had 1,363 Wal-Mart stores, 1,672 Supercenters, 550 Sam’s Clubs, and 76 Neighborhood Markets in the United States. That doesn’t include its 54 locations in Puerto Rico. Internationally, the company operated a total of 1,519 outlets in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, South Korea, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.