RyansWorld: Ultramarket
From Future
An ultramarket is a combination of a department store, grocery store, and residential quarters. They become popular in Japan, North America, and parts of Western Europe by the early 2030s under the Wal-Mart HyperStore brand name.
It is a known fact that Wal-Mart became the only remaining department store after the retail wars ended around the year 2025. As a result, historians proved that unionized grocery and department stores charged higher prices than Wal-Mart and doomed themselves to bankruptcy (ethanol also partly caused the prices to rise on food and groceries but that no longer applied once second-generation biofuels became commonplace). Organizations like the United Food and Commercial Workers were considered "dangerous," and "subversive". Canadamerica (formerly Canada and the United States of America) would ban labor unions in jobs that would affect the price of food in order to stabilize and control the price of food. It's not that ethanol is evil; scientists needed to use the "food waste" that people and animals didn't eat as opposed to the entire food product.
[edit] Layout
The typical hypermarket has three floors; two floors for retail groceries and consumer items while the top floor is made into residential units for the employees, their families, and their dependents.
Residential chambers for Wal-Mart have all the furnishings of a five-star hotel of the early 2000s completely with free satellite television and a "basement shopping mall" delivering free shoppping, education, healthcare, health/beauty, and banking services to the employees of Wal-Mart and their families. Access to the "basement shopping mall" is restricted to these people and the general public is not given access unless accompanied by a Wal-Mart employee, family member, or a dependent of a Wal-Mart member. Any mentioning of "trade unions" like the UFCW would have an employee suspended of his employment, living privileges, and access to the underground shopping mall suspended from anywhere from a week to a year (depending on the severity and frequency of the offence).
People living outside these "Wal-Mart utopias" would be refered to as Earthbound Ones to the employees of Wal-Mart who would later be refered to as the Enlightened Ones. It would become a later practice to have all employees change their family name to Wal-Mart. In the year 2068, Wal-Mart would declare itself a "nation within a nation" and call themselves The Republic of Wal-Mart. Anyone could become a "citizen" as long as he/she promised to renounce trade unions and family members who belonged to trade unions. Most of the first-generation employees will be born around the year 1982, married, and with one to four children.
[edit] Singularity
During the Singularity, the Wal-Mart HyperStore franchises would eventually replace the conventional Wal-Mart stores except in Alaska, Hawaii, the high arctic, Greenland, Iceland, and in the Sark islands. The first Wal-Mart HyperStore would (ironically) open in Norfolk County, Ontario, Canadamerica on July 23, 2027 built over top of the conventional Wal-Mart placed nearly Ireland Side Road in the community of Simcoe. The mayor would be Dennis Travale's son and would welcome the 500 live-in full-time jobs that would finally solve the welfare problem and close down most of the units on Arthur Street permanently.
