Why Should Walmart Rebuild Football Field an Oklahoma Municipality Sold toThem?

Is this one for the non sequitur file? The city of Luther, Oklahoma sold a parcel of land previously used by a youth football team to Walmart, for the purpose of opening a Walmart Express store. Recently, Walmart concluded that the Walmart Express model is a failure, and closed its Walmart Express stores—including the one in Luther, Oklahoma. Re-enter the displaced youth football team. It and its supporters have launched a a Change.Org petition calling on Walmart to “… do the right thing and rebuild the field and donate it to Luther Youth Football. It was a slap in the face to all these kids to lose their field and source of revenue only to have the store left vacant after less than a year!” Assume, for the sake of argument, that the youth football team was wronged by being dispossessed of its former field. If the youth football team was wronged, it wasn’t wronged by Walmart. Instead, it was wronged by the City of Luther—the agency that dispossessed the youth football team. Yet the petition doesn’t call on the city make amends with the youth football team. It calls on Walmart, the subsequent purchaser of the land, to make amends. One important fact not contained in any of the stories about the Luther Walmart Express is the price paid by Walmart (and the price relative to market value) for the land. If Walmart paid a market rate, it is a bona fide purchaser for value—and therefore an innocent bystander in a dispute that is rightfully between the youth football team and the city. However, if Walmart was given a sweetheart deal by the city, that makes Walmart something closer to an accomplice in the city’s wrongdoing (if, in fact, it is wrongdoing). Absent facts like that, however, it’s hard to see why it’s “on” Walmart (rather than the city) to restore the (or a) football field to the youth football team.    >>>

LINK: Kids Football Team Wants Walmart To Rebuild Field Used To Build Store That Closed In Less Than A Year (by Chris Morran for Consumerist)

Less than a year after seeing their patch of grass transform from a football field to a Walmart Express to a closed Walmart Express, the members of one Oklahoma youth football team are calling on the world’s largest retailer to replace their lost gridiron.

KFOR-TV reports that the city of Luther, OK, outside of Oklahoma City sold the land that included the baseball field to Walmart so the retailer could build a Walmart Express — a smaller footprint version of the big box store — on the site.

That store just opened in 2015, then last week it, along with all the other Express stores in the U.S., fell victim to Walmart’s fickle axe.
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“Walmart should do the right thing and rebuild the field and donate it to Luther Youth Football,” reads the petition. “It was a slap in the face to all these kids to lose their field and source of revenue only to have the store left vacant after less than a year!”

What do you think?

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