The Times reports that Wal-Mart may have given up on its attempts to build a store in New York City:

Frustrated by a bruising, and so far unsuccessful battle to open its first discount store in the nation’s largest city, Wal-Mart’s chief executive said yesterday, “I don’t care if we are ever here.”

H. Lee Scott Jr., the chief executive of the nation’s largest retailer, said that trying to conduct business in New York was so expensive — and exasperating — that “I don’t think it’s worth the effort.”

Mr. Scott’s remarks, delivered at a meeting with editors and reporters of The New York Times, amounted to a surprising admission of defeat, given the company’s vigorous efforts to crack into urban markets and expand beyond its suburban base in much of the country. In recent years, Wal-Mart has encountered stout resistance to its plans to enter America’s bigger cities, which stand as its last domestic frontier.

In fact, it sounds as though it was more a moment of petulance than a strategic announcement: a company spokeswoman later tried to "amend" Scott's remarks and insist that Wal-Mart would still consider trying to place a store in the city.

Labor leaders, as you can imagine, were not exactly distraught over Scott's "announcement":

“We don’t care if they’re never here,” said Ed Ott, executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council. “We don’t miss them. We have great supermarkets and great retail outlets in New York. We don’t need Wal-Mart.”

But of course, Scott has a petulant response for everything. According to the Wal-Mart executive, New Yorkers don't want his mega store because we're elitist jerks:

But as Mr. Scott sees it, there is another reason Wal-Mart has such a hard time making inroads into some of the nation’s biggest enclaves. Speaking about what he sees as snobbish elites in New York and across the country, Mr. Scott added, “You have people who are just better than us and don’t want a Wal-Mart in their community.”

In a city full of 99 cent stores and street vendors and even some surviving mom and pop stores, an accusation like that is just absurd. Maybe Scott's been watching too much Sex and the City, but the typical New Yorker is not an Upper East Side elite. We're a multiracial city of workers and strivers, and we don't like the idea of the mass extinction of small businesses - it's hard enough for them in this town as it is - or the systematic exploitation of labor. If that makes us snobs, we'll wear the label with pride.