Dollar General Hits a Gold Mine in Rural America

On a Friday in April, Bob Tharp, the mayor of Decatur, Ark., takes me to see what used to be the commercial heart of his town. There isn’t much to look at beyond the husk of a Walmart Express: 12,000 square feet of cinder block painted in different shades of brown. The glass doors are locked, as they’ve been for 14 months. “For so many people in this town, to have to see this empty building every day, they couldn’t drive by without getting tears in their eyes,” Tharp recalls. The store had opened on a frigid morning in January 2015, just days into his mayorship. “Pinch yourself and it is true,” he’d posted on Facebook the night before. For the first time in a decade, the 1,788 residents could buy groceries in town. But the reprieve was short. The following January, word came from Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s corporate headquarters, 18 miles to the east in Bentonville, that within the month the store would be closed.

“You rascals!” Tharp remembers telling the executive who called to deliver the news. “You come to these small towns, and you build these stores, and you cause all the mom and pops to close down, and now you’re the only ones left standing, and you want to go home? Why would you do that to our community?”