I learned two things about the Walmart coming to Yazoo City this week:
1. There are a lot of people who really, really, really want a Walmart in Yazoo City.
2. There are just as many people who never believed it was going to happen.
There’s been no shortage of news coverage about the forthcoming Yazoo City store.
We’ve covered representatives speaking to the Mayor and Board of Aldermen about the details of the size of the store and what all it will include. We’ve published a story with a photo of the construction beginning on the site of the new store. Construction has been going on for weeks on the site.
Most recently we had a story that the Walmart plans to hold a groundbreaking ceremony soon – even though the ground has already been broken for weeks now. One of the Jackson television stations saw that story online and came down and did a news story.
So when Walmart released a press release this week “officially” announcing that the company is building a store in Yazoo, I figured most Yazooans would consider it old news.
But we went ahead and posted it to the front page of our website and shared it on our social media pages. The response was much more significant than I expected.
It seems that the word coming straight from Walmart was what was needed to ease the skepticism.
There have been rumors that a Walmart was coming to Yazoo for as long as I can remember. Many of those rumors were based more on the fact that some people desired a Walmart than any real interest by the store locating here. In more recent years the recession probably did slow down Walmart’s arrival in Yazoo City.
There have also been all sorts of wild conspiracy theories about why Walmart isn’t already here. The most common story is that some of the mean old business owners driving the local economy conspired to keep Walmart out so they could keep all the money for themselves. One gentleman even once informed me with confidence that he knew the Chamber of Commerce was conspiring to keep Walmart out of Yazoo. City and county leaders have also been included in these imagined schemes over the years.
In fact what has happened is that Yazoo has created an ideal opportunity for Walmart. The forthcoming parkway is the perfect spot of future development in a town where most of the desirable commercial property on Jerry Clower Boulevard is occupied.
The Chawla family took a huge step in setting the stage for Walmart by purchasing the property where the store will be locating and demonstrating their faith in the future development by building a Hampton Inn well before construction began on the parkway.
Now that everyone knows for sure that Walmart is coming to Yazoo City the real excitement will be seeing what other development takes place on the Willie Morris Parkway and how other parts of the city make the most of the new economic activity.
This is a time of tremendous opportunity for our city.
