Wal-Mart’s Hometown

I’ve been in Bentonville, AR, Wal-Mart’s hometown, a number of times in the past several years, but I’m always amazed at the growth that I see taking place, the new businesses opening their doors and the people moving to the area. Thirty years ago, Bentonville was an unknown little town that was considered “out in the middle of know-where.” Wal-Mart put it on the map and is still the driving force of growth, but others are being attracted to, the community. I spoke with several at my talk.

Jim & Michele Rinella lived most of their working lives in CA, working in agribusiness. They lived their last 11 years in Palm Desert, next to Palm Springs in the Coachella Valley. It is a faming, tourism and retirement area. Ag was always the backbone, but the influx of new residents drawn by the 100+ golf courses and other amenities were big plusses.

Even though they could have retired in Palm Desert or even in WA where they owned a second home, they did a nationwide search, researching retirement communities and traveling all over the USA. They concentrated their search in CA, AZ, WA and TX but read about AR. Jim did his military basic training at Ft. Chaffee in Ft. Smith, AR but hadn’t been in AR since those days. They routed one of their search trips thru AR and when they got to Bella Vista (right next to Bentonville) they fell in love with the area.

I asked them about adjusting to life in small town Arkansas. Jim told me, “It was tough at first. Retirement was a new thing for me. I didn’t get that adrenaline rush every morning like I did when I was running a business. But we’ve quickly adjusted.”

Michele explained, “We seemed to lack better dining options and shopping when we first got here, but it’s gotten a lot better in the five years that we’ve lived here. We used to make a lot of trips to Kansas City or Tulsa for our ‘big city fix’, but we don’t do that as much as we did at first.”

Lisa & Steve Lockwood are more recent Bentonville residents. They decided about a year ago that they wanted to move their space-planning consulting business (www.fa-strategies.com) from Minneapolis to a better climate location. “We were looking for a four-season location with plenty of outdoor activities. We also wanted a town that had a ‘sense of place’ and with a great quality of life,” Lisa told me.

Steve explained how they researched where to move to, “We got on the website www.bestcities.com to compare various locations. We could do 3 comparisons at a time, so we used Minneapolis as a base and then started comparing various towns that we were researching. We looked at KY, TN, NC, SC and AR. It was a great way to narrow down the field.”

Neither the Rinellas or Lockwoods are in Bentonville because of Wal-Mart, but they are exactly the type of people that you’d love to have in your community. In talking with them it showed how having momentum from a phenomenon like Wal-Mart can have additional benefits for a small town.