Wal-Mart and Alco

So, I mentioned that Decorah has a Wal-Mart. It’s on the outskirts of town, almost delineating the eastern border. There are a few shops past the intersection that leads to Wal-Mart, but they’re isolated outbreaks at best. When you hit Wal-Mart, you know you’re in the town proper.

While this may sound sad, Wal-Mart is my one real tether to the larger world in northeast Iowa. Okay, sounds sad nothing—that is sad. On the other hand, you can’t get new releases of DVDs anywhere else, and the magazine racks at Wal-Mart blow away the magazine racks at any other place in Decorah or Cresco. They also occasionally have a decent selection of Transformers (shut up).

I should admit up front that I’m not the biggest fan of Wal-Mart stores. My sense of fair play is offended when I hear the reports that they keep their workers at a part-time status to avoid paying benefits, that they snatch up illegal immigrants to pay them below minimum wage and that they occasionally try to build on sacred burial grounds, which I swear I am not making up. It doesn’t help their reputation that their prices attract the type of customer who would previously be found skulking between the aisles at a dollar store. If you go to a Wal-Mart, you’re not going to see the most affluent members of society. There’s already a website or two devoted to the “People of Wal-Mart” that showcases the Freaks and Geeks (mostly Freaks) you’re likely to find. If you want to see the real people of Wal-Mart, though, go to the cash registers. That’s where everyone has to count the cost of what they want, and you can see it actually hurts some people. I’ve seen women trying to control two children using an EBT welfare card to pay for some off-brand groceries that consist mostly of frozen food and entrees in bags, and the tired, defeated looks on their faces always gets to me.

However, recently another store in the Wal-Mart vein was built in Decorah. I can’t really call this store “big-box,” although it is boxy and it is the biggest store in Cresco. I think “medium-box” is a better adjective. Its  name is Alco, and if you haven’t heard of it, you’re probably not from around here. I have seen exactly one other Alco store since I’ve been living in northeast Iowa, and that was in a town just across the border in Minnesota, one that has the same design ethic as a 1980s K-Mart.

Alco is supposed to bring in people who want to shop at Wal-Mart, but don’t want to make the half-hour drive. It’s definitely an appealing concept. The problem is that, having been in Alco a few times, I don’t think people are going to be leaving Wal-Mart in droves.

The main problem is that the store seems more like a larger Dollar General or Family Dollar store than a Wal-Mart. Off-brand groceries, knock-off electronics, DVDs that you could get at other big box stores a few weeks before, and discount books that are usually featured in high-end bookstores “Last Chance to Buy” bin by the entrance, filled with the kinds of books you really don’t want to buy—cookbooks by now-dead celebrities, kids books and a disturbing number of self-help books covering fad diets whose time has passed, the best investment system in a pre-recession market and how to have a healthy and fulfilling life in a pre-recession market. Going through the Alco discount book bin is a uniquely depressing experience.

All this combines to create a sense that perhaps you are wasting your time shopping here, when you can drive half an hour to shop at Wal-Mart. It doesn’t help that, on the whole, Alco charges more per item than Wal-Mart.

That said, however, I have shopped at Alco before, in fact bought a couple discount DVDs there, and for a small town store it isn’t that bad. The big problem is that it is trying to be a small-town “big-box” store. They could have done much better for themselves if they had simply said they wanted to be the next step up from a dollar store, like the nearby Dollar General.

Going into the Dollar General is like going into a dollar store that has decided to pull itself up by the bootstraps. They’ve got a ton of discounted DVDs of blockbusters that were popular last year that nobody wanted, but they’ve also got a pretty decent selection of more critically acclaimed movies. I mean, where else will you find Slumdog Millionaire on the same rack as Transformers 2? And yes, Dollar General carries off-brand food and cheap clothes, the same way that Alco does. And Alco does carry things Dollar General can’t, like do-it-yourself furniture and outdoor furniture. Still, I think I’d rather go to the little store trying to be something more, rather than frequent the store trying to be the small-town version of an urban store.