Reply #8: It always struck me that their growth in the Southeast coincided almost exactly with ....

[A HERETIC I AM]

the crash of the farming industry back in those days. Remember "Farm Aid"? While I've never read anything to support this, I have always thought that one of the reasons Wal-Mart so easily and rapidly expanded was because they were able to buy land at depressed prices, buying from desperate farmers wanting out. They would buy 100 - 200 acres in the middle of the countryside, equidistant of 3 or 4 towns, thus killing all the downtown businesses in those towns at once. I remember hearing an owner of one of the once ubiquitous "Western Auto" stores saying he couldn't buy bicycles for what Wal-Mart was selling them for.