Word: urban
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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 it. This is the history of retailing. It says that every company that has reached No. 1, from Woolworth's to Kmart, has eventually spit the bit, unable to cope with market shifts. Wal-Mart...
...First, the claim that Expos is “useless and boring” to students is not borne out by the evidence of considerable satisfaction among those who take the course. The program’s evaluations each semester repeatedly show students referencing and then refuting an urban myth about the “dreaded” Expos requirement. At the end of the term, students say they found the course much better than they had heard it would be. They voice surprise that they actually learned something useful about academic writing and found the intellectual projects they undertook...
...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...
When I tutored in Dorchester, part of my work was helping kids leave their apartment complexes on daytrips to urban educational resources like the aquarium or the museum. But here in the Achievement Abyss, there is no aquarium, only endless cotton fields and rusty farming equipment...