Hey, Litle Hawk... what I said is my local reality about Walmart... I thought the criticism that Walmart is racist was particularly localized, and foolish to escalate into a corporate generality (the Manager of our local Walmart is black... by the way.)

All that said, I am in 100% agreement with your feelings about corporations swallowing all diversity in stores. If you ever go down to the South Street Seaport in New York City, they've done a wonderful job of restoring the buildings and streets. But, there's no sense of stepping back in time because as you walk past the stores, there's a Gap, a Sam Goody, and on and on... the stores are identical to the ones in any mall in the United States. If you were dropped into the middle of a mall you didn't recognize, you wouldn't know if you were in Arizona, Maine or Alabama. When Woody Allan made his flop movie, Scenes From A Mall, it was filmed in the mall where I was living at the time, in Stamford, CT. The movie was supposed to be taking place in California but inside the mall, who would know?
I had two favorite small video stores in my neighborhood for many years. When the Blockbuster moved in, they both went under. Each of the stores carried videos of many classic and hard to find movies... many of them no longer available. And, if I wanted to buy an unusual old video, the owner would order it for me, give me the store discount and I didn't have to pay for shipping. We'd get in long conversations about movies because we had a common love for them. Now, I think that they have a policy in Blockbuster that you can't be over 21 to work there. And the movies? They have a car explosion per minute section, a simulated sex session, a foul-mouthed bathroom humor comedy section and a huge Vapid Teenagers brutally murdered section. The classic films section are likely to be movies released since 1990.

Same with music stores... I used to joke with a friend of mine, wondering if anyone who ever placed a special order with The Wiz or Sam Goody ever got the CD. As far as I know, no one ever has.
Bookstores are the same-- especially the chains in malls, because they don't have the floor space to carry much more than the latest Stephen King or Tom Clancy novel. I usually don't even bother going in them. And, the book chains have really wiped out independent book stores. There are still some independent music stores, and some of the chains, like Tower Records carry six times as much folk music as I've ever seen in an independent music store. But, every independent video store I know of is gone... including one near Walmart... not because Walmart rents videos, and there isn't a Blockbuster (yet) in Derby. It was a young kid who ran it, and I don't think he had a feel (or the zeal) for the business..

Corporate America (and Corporate every other country, by dissemination) is extremely low on my list (or high, maybe). I don't see a way back, but I see some examples of independent stores surviving in the same block as the chains. My favorite music store for many years was only three doors away from a Sam Goody. They ended up having to move because of their landlord and renovation, but I knew the owner, and they were having their best year ever... right next door to Sam Goody's. Maybe there is hope..

Jerry