Responding to a comment in the Amazon/New York City post, PG was reminded of Bentonville, Arkansas, and did a bit of research to catch up on his recollections of the community.
Bentonville, Arkansas, is the headquarters of Walmart.
When PG first visited Bentonville many years ago, it was a small town (about 8,000 people) in a low-income part of the state. Walmart was the biggest thing in town, but Walmart was still pretty small.
At that time, Walmart was growing fast, but had difficulty recruiting executives to work in its headquarters because, for someone from Chicago or New York or Los Angeles, Bentonville was a dump, a backwater, and a hard sell for spouse and children.
Today, Bentonville is a much larger, much nicer city of over 50,000. The median income for households in Bentonville is $79,259, while the mean household income is $106,626. For the state of Arkansas as a whole, the median household income is $43,813 and the mean household income is $61,330.
If you drive around Bentonville, you’ll see some large office complexes filled with offices of Walmart suppliers. You’ll also see a great many large and attractive homes in the Bentonville area. Some are owned by Walmart executives and others are owned by people who provide goods and services to Walmart and its employees.
The Bentonville public schools are the best in the area. Participation in AP exams is very high. Bentonville schools also include a significant number of underserved students and can afford excellent programs for this particular group.
Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport in Bentonville was opened in 1998 and has been expanded substantially since that time. It offers daily nonstop jet service (with first class seats included) to major cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Minneapolis, Washington D.C., Atlanta, and San Francisco. PG isn’t aware of any other city of 50,000 people with such excellent commercial air service and believes Walmart deserves the credit.
On the cultural side, The Walton Family Foundation (Sam Walton was the founder of Walmart) built the 200,000 square foot Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened in 2011. The museum is located in a 120-acre park which is connected to downtown Bentonville by sculpture and walking trails. General admission is free, funded by Walmart, and the museum hosts about 45,000 school children each year. A related foundation, created by an early employee of Walmart and his wife, reimburses schools for out-of-pocket expenses associated with a school field trip, including transportation costs, substitute teachers, and lunch.
At the University of Arkansas, located about 30 miles from Bentonville, you will find an institution that, in 2002, received a $300 million pledge from the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation, the largest gift ever made to a public university in the United States, to establish and support an honors college for undergraduates and endow the university’s graduate school. At the University, you will also find the Sam M. Walton College of Business.
In 2017, the University received a $120 million Walton grant to establish Arkansas’ first School of Art. In 2018, the Waltons gave the University $23.7 million to boost research and commercialization efforts and “to attract five ‘star’ scientists.”
In 2017, the Walton family foundation provided over $500 million in grants to recipients around the world, including almost $200 million for programs to improve K-12 education.
If you’re considering the ancillary benefits of having the headquarters of a large and successful company like Amazon nearby, you might want to remember Northwest Arkansas and Walmart.
It is unremarkable that if you take a small rural town and put the headquarters of a major corporation there, you will end up with a larger town with more amenities. This is, however, irrelevant to discussions of Amazon’s HQ2. Amazon wasn’t looking at small rural towns. It was only looking at middling-large cities and larger, and given how things played out it was probably only serious about the large end of that spectrum. If the subtext here is the cancelled Queens development, none of the benefits Bentonville received from Walmart apply. Air travel to and from New York City would not be improved by Amazon’s presence. Note also that Bentonville didn’t have to pay out billions in tax credits to get Walmart to move there. Walmart’s presence is a historical accident. I also wouldn’t be surprised if it moved, as the next generation of the Walton family takes over. It probably won’t go all at once, with a press conference announcing it. I am talking about a gradual quiet shift of operations to some place more trendy to the billionaire set.
And we are left with the odd scene of the new Amazon building, sitting alone in a once vacant lot in Queens. Blight and urban decay surround it. The neighborhood is a ghost town after 6pm when the Amazon crowd hustles back to navigates subways to get to the trains taking them off to their houses in Connecticut.
Employees agitate for a real cafeteria since the few eateries in the area have been completely overrun by the lunch crowd they were never built to accommodate.
Benny, of Benny’s Beans, has mentioned to his wife a few times that it might make sense for him to expand the business because of all the Amazon people aimlessly wandering the streets. “Expand? You idiot, this is New York, not some hick town in Arkansas! We don’t need no stinkin’ expansion.”
Local property owners are still scratching their heads over why they can’t sell their property for more than a pittance. The civic leaders promised them there would be an economic boom in the neighborhood, but all they have is that one big ugly HQ building.
But, that’s what’s special about New York. it’s like no other place on earth.
I lived in Bentonville from 1991 to 2002; now in neighboring Bella Vista. It’s a great place to live. I’m quite familiar with the Crystal Bridges Museum, as our engineering company designed the site work, and I supervised the flood control work. It’s a great museum, and admission is free, thanks to the Walton Foundation.
Another interesting fact: 15 miles from Wal-Mart HQ is the J.B. Hunt HQ. Fifteen miles from J.B. Hunt is the Tyson Foods HQ. So, in a 30 mile stretch, we have the corporate headquarters of the world’s largest retailer, the world’s largest trucking company, and the world’s largest food processor. That’s an economic engine.
For sure it is, David, but it didn’t start out that way when I visited in the late 1970’s.
Thanks for the travelogue, PG. But I think I’ll stay in California. 🙂
James – It’s way easier go through the Bentonville airport to catch a flight than it is in any airport in California.