The Mayor, Bill de Blasio can get political all he wants to about Walmart not being in New York City but what it boils down to are the City’s economy and their greedy hands.
If you live in any of the 5 Burroughs as I do then you know we need a Walmart. It will provide 1000’s of jobs, will help boost the economy (like NYC needs it anyway), but the main issue is, the people want it. So why don’t we have one?
It’s pretty simple.
NYC thrives off their ridiculously high prices for everything, but having a Walmart in the city will destroy what the city is built upon. Can you imagine a Walmart in Manhattan? The amounts of crowds it will draw on a daily average will make your head spin, but it will hurt the economy in Manhattan. Manhattan is a tourist area, and if you give the tourist an option of buying an NY t-shirt off 34th and Broadway for $20 or heading over to Walmart and getting it for $4.99 where do you think that family will do it’s shopping? There is not a vendor in the city besides food that will survive a Walmart in Manhattan.
Now shift that focus over to the Bronx, Queens, Staten Island or Brooklyn and it gets a little different. These are non-tourist places, the heart of the city lives here, everyday folk. A Walmart in any Burrough will be great. There are vendors here, family owned stores and restaurants that will still thrive because they don’t survive off tourist money to begin with. These are the neighborhood vendors, the ones we know we can go to get what we need when no one else has it. We not only trust them, we know them, hell they are our next door neighbors, our friends, and family. By placing a Walmart in these Burroughs will provide jobs that are hard to come by. But there will be one issue. The cost of living is so high in NYC that a Walmart employee might be on the street within a few months. The average employee at Walmart can earn between $8-$17hr, in some parts of the city you can make it, you may struggle, but it can be done. But if that was the case think about the money we will save with the drop in food and everyday essentials prices. Cabs will see an increase of riders, subways, and buses will profit due to shoppers. The city will boom but in de Blasio eyes it will suffer.
If de Blasio wanted to try it out, put it in one Burrough first and see how it goes, since I live in the Bronx, why not here. But NYC is too greedy to cut corners where the profit margin is concerned; they are too busy putting free WiFi booths on the street or spending millions to put WiFi and cell phone charger ports on trains to think about the people and what this will mean to our city. There is a Walmart West Chester, but that is a 20-30 minute drive and an almost 2-hour bus ride from the Bronx. There is another one across the bridge in New Jersey but if driving, there are tolls to pay and the George Washington Bridge now costs $13 to cross, and that money goes where again? NYC has a great plan to money rape you, so why should they give in to the cries of their tenants and Walmart and give us what we want when they get nothing in return?
Walmart will never hit NYC because there is nothing to gain for the city. And that’s the truth.