America is an open and mobile society so that just because you are born in a particular town or city or State, you don't have to spend the rest of your life there. This means, that there are small communities that stay small, or even regress, for a myriad of reasons, with one of them being opportunity and the quality of life. Big multinational corporations are always looking to grow, because they know that if they aren't growing, then that means that someone else is catching up with them or surpassing them. A case in point, is the biggest big box retailer of them all, Wal-Mart, which has a market capitalization of about $232 billion dollars, and sales of nearly $500 billion dollars annually. Wal-Mart employs about 2.1 million peoples worldwide, of which about 1.4 million of those employees are located in the United States of America. To get a better idea of just how big Wal-Mart is, its market capitalization is larger than the GDP of either Portugal or Greece, and its sales are nearly as much as the GDP of Taiwan. This would signify that when Wal-Mart comes knocking at your town's doors, that they are a formidable force.
Depending upon the size of your country, your town, your little city, and so forth, the annual budget for such a community could easily be significantly less than $100 million, with essentially part time civil servants typically making modest pay. The thing about Wal-Mart is that they are experts in understanding the law, politics, taxes, real estate, demographics, and so forth, and consequently only a fool would believe that in a land and tax deal negotiation with Wal-Mart that they would be their equal at that table of negotiation, yet, many communities seem to feel that this is so and while they may smile to the cameras later and get praise often through their local paper, the deals that are typically constructed with Wal-Mart are of questionable benefit for the community at large, as way too often, the civil servants sacrifice the very thing that they most desperately need, which is the fresh money of new tax dollars, in poorly structured deals, that directly benefit Wal-Mart though their property tax set asides, which is not only incredibly unfair to all the other real property owners in town that aren't privy to such tax benefits, but to the residents of the community itself. Sure, no doubt, Wal-Mart will bring to their new locale some employment, but for goodness sake, it's Wal-Mart, so almost by definition, these aren't exactly high paying jobs.
Of course, every town that gets suckered or burnt by the allure of Wal-Mart, says something to the effect, that they had to do the deal that they did, because, this is what is necessary to do business with Wal-Mart and with the legitimacy that Wal-Mart brings, things will get even better. The thing is, once you open up the lockbox for Wal-Mart, all other comers, will want to drink at the same trough, so the time to negotiate the best deal is right there at the beginning, so to speak, with Wal-Mart. The best way for the city council members to negotiate with Wal-Mart is to bring in competition, that is to say, if Wal-Mart is bringing to the table a developmental proposal, than almost for a certainty, competitors such as Target or Costco, or others, would probably too have an interest. The bottom line is that if you want to have any hope of getting a fair deal from Wal-Mart or similar, you have to contact its competitors, and work them one against the other, and if things fall through, they fall through, but there isn't any good reason to give away the store, especially since Wal-Mart never does.