Word: mcconkeys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Senate bill is not perfect, but it is reasonable. Practically, how would you deport 12 million illegal immigrants who are now in this country? -Max McConkey, Tucson, Ariz.Could you actually round them up and send them back? Well, yeah you could. It's possible. But it's not necessary. You can do what I call attrition through enforcement. If you enforce the laws against hiring people who are here illegally, aggressively. Not just with fines, but with jail time for folks who are found to be not just hiring but conspiring to bring people in. Believe me, you'd only...
...months earlier a Wal-Mart store had opened in Maryville (pop. 9,500), 34 miles west, and one month earlier another had opened in Bethany (pop. 3,100), 18 miles east. Their parking lots were full of McConkey's neighbors and friends, lured there through the winter's cold by the powerful Wal-Mart merchandising mystique and retail prices often below his wholesale cost. He thought then, and thinks today, that he and his partner and brother Richard did everything right to withstand the normal merchandising revolution of the past 40 years brought by good roads, city malls...
Back in 1982, James, 28, and Richard, 31, decided they wanted their own business in a community where the McConkey family had farmed and worked more than a century. They borrowed money and bought out the Gamble hardware store, tore out 100-year-old wood shelves, spruced it up, offered long shopping hours and personal service. For three years the McConkey brothers prospered. Sometimes when the square was filled and bustling, friends trading with friends, families greeting families, James thought "it looked like an old postcard." This was a life he cherished. Nobody got really rich. Their wealth...
...January 1989, after another dismal Christmas, the McConkeys gave up. So did four other merchants around the Albany town square. For a while the McConkey store stood empty; then the town bulldozed it with others to make way for a Place's store, a regional general merchandiser that was already on the Albany square. The old Place's is empty. James McConkey is now teaching school and driving a school bus. His brother has a job with a paper-products firm...
Then there is the matter of basic economics. James McConkey can't scientifically prove it, but his hunch is that people who drive 20 miles to a Wal-Mart, and so contribute to the decline of their town, end up paying higher taxes, which is a premium for the merchandise they get. Eventually, the pendulum will swing, the marketplace will adjust. That is what American capitalism is all about, as Mr. Sam knew as well as any merchant of the modern...