Success should be praised, not punished

Walmart and Dollar General are the epitome of American success stories.

Both started out as lone businesses in small towns, and ended up as huge corporations.

Walmart, as everyone knows, is the retail king in the United States. Dollar General has been a staple of county seats in this region for decades, is rapidly expanding, and you can find multiple stores in some rural counties where Walmart will never locate. My home county recently got its second DG location. In adjacent Estill County, only a half-hour from the larger retail centers of Richmond and Winchester, there are four of what some old-timers call "General Dollar."

There are some similarities. Walmart got its start in Bentonville, Ark., in the shadows of the Ozarks. Dollar General was founded in Scottsville, Ky., in the Appalachian foothills of south-central Kentucky, after the Turner family began the concept by converting their general merchanside store in Springfield, Ky., into a Dollar General. Both of these are smaller, mostly rural states in flyover country, far from the corporate capitals of the country.

Walmart has remained headquartered in Bentonville, causing that town to grow at a decent clip. Dollar General relocated from Scottsville to the suburbs of nearby Nashville a few years ago, probably because of Tennessee's more-business-friendly tax structure, but still maintains a decent presence in its hometown.

Neither Sam Walton nor J.L. and Cal Turner could foresee what their retail ventures would turn into. They were probably amazed at the success of their concept. There are hundreds of other instances of family-owned businesses growing from a single store or a handful of locations into a regional or national chain.

And it's this kind of success that conservatives should be championing and promoting, not criticizing. There's no reason the next Walmart isn't opening up on some street corner or some strip mall in some small town in some rural county somewhere between the coasts.

That's why it was disturbing to see Republican U.S. Senate candidate Wesley Morgan criticize both Walmart and Dollar General in a recent social media post. Morgan is a former state representative from Madison County who lost his seat when he ran afoul of Kentucky's former House leadership and drew an establishment-backed primary challenger. He owns a handful of liquor stores, including one of the two that opened in Irvine when that city went wet a few years ago. Unless something happens between now and next May, I fully intend to support and vote for him in the Republican primary. But his criticism of two American success stories bothers me.

Morgan is touting himself as the conservative alternative to Mitch McConnell, who's definitely the personification of "establishment Republican." In his social media posting that was critical of Walmart and Dollar General, he said he would be supportive of small businesses. Isn't it possible to support small businesses without being critical of bigger ones?

Oftimes, small businesses can't compete with bigger chains on price, so they have to rely on something else. Dollar General can't sell merchandise as cheaply as Walmart, so it counters by having more convenient locations. If you can pick up something at Dollar General on your way home, it can be worth it to pay a little more instead of driving to the nearest Walmart. And that's often the lure of independent businesses. Pay a little more in your hometown instead of traveling to a bigger city to shop at a big box. Customer service is another drawing card for small outlets, as is stocking unusual or hard-to-find items. Sometimes you can't find some exotic food item in a Walmart Supercenter, but your local grocer either has it on the shelf, or can order it for you.

The point here is that conservatives are champions of the free market. We don't take sides. We let the market sort things out. We support equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. If Sam Walton or the Turner family can find success, there's no reason the hometown entrepreneur down the street from you can't do the same if they see fit.

Some small business owners are happy to run one or two locations and have no designs on expansion. Others would love to take their stores regional or national. We should be supporting them all and criticizing none of them -- and in the case of Dollar General, proud that a Kentucky-founded company is enjoying such success. DG is adding to the employment rolls and tax base in counties all over Kentucky. We should appreciate that.