Toward Wal-Mart

Abstract

The book concludes with an examination of the relocation of department stores to suburban shopping centers and the Sears, Roebuck, and Company affirmative action cases. Mass suburbanization, the rise of discount retailers such as Kmart and Wal-Mart, and urban decay transformed department stores. Black workers found that the gains they had made in downtown department stores had virtually disappeared as department stores followed their preferred clientele—the white middle class—to the suburbs. Here, stores were able to return to their former racial practices in spaces that were inaccessible via public transportation, deemed private property, and prohibited civil rights demonstrations. The Sears cases thus reveal the ways that the department store movement modified its tactics, approaches, and strategies. These cases also exposed the industry’s ongoing transformations, ones that revolutionized, or rather diminished, the status of retail work and department stores, and facilitated the reconsolidation of racial discrimination.