Personally I would welcome the little mom and pop stores I grew up with where you knew the people and the money stayed local. The Walmarts drove them all out of business. Same with gas stations the Sheetz and 7-11 and others ruined that as well.
Except Walmart didn't drive them out of business, customers did. Nobody forced customers to go to Walmart. They just chose to do that to save a couple of bucks, and before long lost the option to shop at the local store.
These days it seems people expect Someone Else to solve the problems, not understanding that they (collectively) created the problem and they (also collectively) can solve the problem. If you don't want to see Walmart sprawling all over the place, don't shop there. It might mean you have to buy less stuff but if you want money to stay in the local community then shop in the local community. If people, en masse, stopped shopping at Walmart they'd eventually have to close their doors.
One thing I really miss about the local stores was when the owner and staff actually knew something about what they were selling. I like to be able to go to a hardware store and talk to someone who knows, then leave confident I bought the right tool for the job. Nowadays many big box stores seem to pay minimum wage and have little service other than a comprehensive return policy where you can take it back, even if you opened it, within 30 days. Which is great, but I'd rather talk to someone and get it right than guess at what I need, get it home to find it's wrong for the job (or it's broken or incomplete because there's little quality control these days) and have to make another round trip wasting my gas and my time when I really want to be getting on with the job at hand.
As a rule if I am in a hardware store and have to explain to the staff what the tool I want is, I'm probably not going to be a repeat customer. If the staff can't show any initiative at all, chances are I won't be back. I don't expect every member of staff to know every range, nor do I expect the trainee to be an expert - if I ask about something electrical I have no problem at all with a response "Plumbing is my thing, let me go find you the electrical guy". I do have a problem if the staff just says "I don't know" and doesn't even make an attempt to find someone else who could help.
Of course it's easier to demand that Something Be Done about the problem than to actually do something about it ourself. Maybe it's just too hard to wean ourselves off the piles of cheap Chinese-made junk.
