The Walmart Waltons Strike Again

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

I tell people that I haven't been in a Walmart store in the past thirty years, but that is a lie.  In the late 1990's when my father was in the hospital and we thought he might be dying, I was spending the night in his room when he suddenly awoke and began asking for a peppermint - something that neither I nor the hospital had on hand.  There was, of course, only one place in town where peppermints could be had in the middle of the night - Walmart.  I rushed in and out of the local store, purchasing only one bag of peppermints.  Before that it had been at least ten years since I had been in one of their monopolistic hellholes.

So I am mostly pure, but not completely.

Walmart shut down many of America's Main Street businesses and it destroyed the dreams and aspirations of much of the nation's middle class through its focused efforts at killing off labor unions and paying starvation wages to its own employees.  

But I no longer shop there - and if my neighbors want to keep propping up Chinese manufacturers and their slave labor, well that's their business.

But Walmart stores aren't the only scourge that has been loosed on America by the Walton family of northwest Arkansas, Columbia, Missouri, and Beverly Hills, California.  One of Sam's kids also bought the old Bank of Bentonville, Arkansas, and turned it into a chain bank called Arvest which now has branch locations in many communities in Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas - and I am still a customer there.

I did not become an Arvest customer voluntarily.  I had banked at the small State Bank of Noel (Missouri) since I was around ten-years-old.  A couple of decades ago Arvest swooped in and bought the Bank of Noel (and all of its accounts), and by then I was an adult and had several accounts with them  and just stayed - a matter of inertia as much as anything else.

By the time I retired in 2014 Arvest had opened a branch in West Plains, the town that I was retiring in, and since all of my retirement checks were already being direct-deposited to Arvest I just automatically kept doing business with the new bank in West Plains.  Both of the branch banks - Noel and West Plains - had extremely nice employees, so I tolerated letting the Waltons profit off of my banking activities.

That toleration began cracking last spring when Arvest suddenly announced that it would be closing several branch banks.  The company had learned during the pandemic that people would continue banking with them without having physical access to an actual building, so they said they would be closing, among others, the little bank at Noel, and the Noel customers could drive to some other Arvest location or bank through one of their convenient ATMs.  So long, suckers - but don't forget to make your deposits and payments on time!

(The Arvest in Noel was the town's only bank!)

I had to take a full day to drive to Noel and clear out my safety deposit box, and on the long drive back to West Plains I pondered about all that would be involved in changing banks altogether.  It would be a great deal of work, so by the time I got home I had talked myself out of moving my several accounts (checking, savings, and savings accounts for my five youngest grandkids) to a different bank.

Then a couple of weeks ago I got another letter in the mail from Arvest.  It arrived just a few days after I had received the new, large desk book of checks that I had ordered through Costco - the best place to order checks, bar none!  The Arvest letter told me that they were selling two branch banks in southern Missouri, and one of them was my bank in West Plains.  The new owners, a small affair out of a small town in Arkansas, would be in touch.

I had been bought by Arvest - many years ago in Noel - and now I was being sold by Arvest!  I will have to do all of the work associated with changing banks - changing direct deposits, changing direct payments, and ordering new checks - again!     If I am going to have to do all of that work anyway, I might as well do it for a REAL local bank.  That search begins today.

So long Arvest - and thanks for the shove!