Word: ruralism
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...remarkable statement: the best retail company ever created, the largest company in the world, with annual sales of $345 billion, is struggling. So it requires a big, bold fix. The company that Sam Walton created for the rural South is being massively overhauled to compete in the more urban, more competitive universe where it now lives. You might not notice it yet if you shop there, but Wal-Mart is in the midst of a revolution, an audacious three-year plan that will change practically everything the company does: the way it builds and operates stores, the way it buys...
Next year is critical for Wal-Mart: it must deliver on the promises made to Wall Street. In its struggles, Wal-Mart faintly resembles another company that once ruled retailing from a central HQ. Sears, Roebuck grew fat supplying rural and small-town America, but ultimately its culture couldn't adjust to shopping-mall America or to discounters. Shoppers today have little idea how awesome was the power of the Chicago merchant. And before Sears there was the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., the A&P, an urban power that once ran nearly 16,000 U.S. stores. Competitors quaked before...
...jewels of Harvard. Located in the Radcliffe Yard, Schlesinger is an epicurean’s dream, with stacks upon stacks of food writing, from the purely instructional to the anthropological. In the evenings I would return home weighed down with John Thorne’s accounts of diners in rural Maine and Penelope Casas’ explications of Spanish foods and wines. Now that the school year has begun, I have unlimited access to food again. But the monotony has become too much; red spiced chicken is only so exciting the third time around. I am beginning to lose interest...
...Helena, poverty isn’t escapable by the quick swipe of a Charlie Card. The divide here could more aptly be called an “Achievement Abyss”: it’s really deep, and there is no foreseeable edge. Unlike its urban counterpart, rural poverty does not see six-figure salaries every day on the subway. It does not understand how education is a means to success because it sees neither. It does not perceive its own strangeness because it so rarely travels away from the abandoned storefronts and dilapidated streets of Helena...
...would hate to limit my role as an educator to this pedantry, and thankfully, I don’t. Rural teachers, as singular resources in isolated communities, are too important to reduce their impact to a five-step lesson plan. Indeed, my Math Club kids don’t stay two hours after school to listen to me lecture. They want me and Mr. Agrawal, a chemical engineer from Columbia, to make learning fun, one Farmer Bob problem at a time...