What do Sam Walton and Constantine have in common?
Just before the death of Sam Walton in 1991 a major news magazine carried a cover story featuring Walton and his Walmart Retail Stores. The thrust of the article was that Sam Walton had changed the face of small town America by building Walmarts on the outskirts of towns all across America. The article made a case that during the past two or three decades the entire life of small towns followed these giant retail stores to the outskirts of the town. The downtown area, which in the past was the center of the social and commercial life of the town, was affected dramatically and sometimes did not even survive the change. Some would contend, I think with a degree of justification, that Sam Walton did not cause the shift, but only followed the new super highways and by-passes that were constructed between small towns, suburbs and urban centers. Sam Walton may have simply been part of a paradigm chain; he followed the new transportation patterns which had followed the urbanization patterns.
