How Wal-Mart Won Chicago

Bloomberg Business reports:

Today, just 47 of its 4,300 Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores are in big cities, and most of those are in Dallas and Houston. Urban America is the company's last frontier.

Since 2006 a single Wal-Mart has been homesteading in Austin, a mostly African American Chicago community with an unemployment rate of 40 percent, its alderman says. Now the company wants to put two dozen more stores in the city, including a 145,000-square-foot Supercenter on that 200-acre plot.