As the American landscape continues its paving-over and warehouse-building, the question grows ever more pertinent–what’s going to happen to all of these empty shells of Big Box stores when we finally get around to saying maybe something better could be done with all this land? Let alone, why are we allowing Walmart to continue doing this to our communities?

Bulldozing is one option, however expensive, and you can be sure this is a cost Walmart, et. al., will share none of these costs. Converting these stores into futuristic military training facilities for Walmart-adopted youths is also an option, but many of our government leaders just aren’t as forward-thinking as I.

Well, in McAllen, Texas, we find the United State’s largest single floor library, a converted Supercenter. The interior reminds us just how ghastly vast these corporate Leviathans really are:

Unfortunately, there are few pictures of the 70% empty space left in this library–that’s just how hard it is to fill a 124k square foot facility. If anything, the size of the “hallways” give a good indication:

So, we begin with the usual blighted Supercenter facade, as seen here, the Walmart prior to its bibliofantastic makeover:

And here is the after:

Walmart has wasted no time cashing in on public relations, as expected, however, nothing is changing about their build-another-just-like-it-down-the-street mentality that will continue to blight our towns and cities with these abandoned stores. By showing that one little town in Texas, with the help of a massive sum of money and a gargantuan undertaking, could pull off such a renovation is to diminish if not mask the core of the problem, or to quote Oscar Wilde:

“And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it.”

Corporate doublespeak threatens to undermine every effort we make at building truly usable and sustainable communities. Journalist Stacey Mitchell wrote a number of articles on the subject of Walmart’s false promises of sustainability. However, what’s larger than Walmart’s goal of 100% renewable energy use stalling out at around 2% is that they possess a simply non-sustainable mindset, fundamentally.

After all, excess energy use is still excess energy use, even if renewable (last I checked, nobody has invented a perpetual energy machine) and recycling is still not as good as re-using, or heaven forfend, going without, or, say, actually trying to make products that last longer than as short as humanly possible so people have to throw it away (or recycle) and go out and buy another. For example, you won’t find any conventional incandescent light bulbs on the shelves at Walmart made by any other manufacturer than General Electric, and consumers are aware of just how short lived these bulbs are, by design. (On a personal note, I recall phoning my landlord’s maintenance man to complain about the electrical burning out my bulbs in around 3-4 weeks. He squeezed the bridge of his nose and sighed, “are they GE bulbs from Walmart?” They were.)

For those of you who suggest Planned Obsolescence is not a direct component of Walmart’s profit model, I remind you, that’s why they are here. In a price-point race to the bottom with other retails like Target, Venture, and Woolworths, Walmart obliterated these now extinct retailers by inverting Henry Ford’s Industrialist maxim:

Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

Instead proving success with the LOWEST quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the LOWEST wages possible. What Henry Ford understood, and what is now absent from late-game capitalism, the Henry Fords of the world now being extinct, is the notion of quality of life and community, that externalities cost consumers more in the long run than the price savings indicate, and that a Walmart Supercenter sized library somewhere in a sprawling suburb in Texas does not ameliorate the unhealthy relationship this retailer has with American consumers.

I applaud the planners and designers of this new library for their vision, but maybe it is time we should sit down and have a serious conversation about the high cost of low prices, the full documentary you can begin watching now: