Are Wal-Mart's recently announced closures a symptom of higher minimum wage?

Wal-Mart recently announced that they would be closing 269 stores globally; 155 of them in the US.  This is pretty big news.  I've seen several claims by bloggers, news sites, and others have jumped on this story to claim that these closures were to be expected, as minimum wage raises across the country demanded by angry workers unable to feed their families on Wal-Mart wages have made operations impossible.

It's plausible, but I was curious if the numbers backed it up.  I have found that they do not: overall there is a very weak correlation between minimum wage and the recently announced closures.  I've summarized my findings in a few graphs below.

Visualizing the Data

Predicting closures by minimum wage

On the right is a scatter of the closures vs the state minimum wage.  As you can see, the states with the highest minimum wage also saw some of the fewest closures, there is even a downward trend as minimum wage decreases.  This could suggest that with a lower minimum wage that people consume less from places like Wal-Mart since they have less money.  But with a p-value of well over .05, the model wildly varies.  Texas is also a major outlier, with nearly 30 closures in their state despite their modest minimum wage.  The 5 states with no minimum wage at all still saw a moderate number of closures.  The R-Square of the data is microscopic, the minimum wage is a terrible predictor of the number of closures per state.

Controlling for party control of the state executive and legislative branch

Another interesting point to consider would be which party has control of the state.  Everyone loves to blame all our problems on the dreaded Other Party That Isn't Us™, so let's look at the data again but control for party.  Democrat controlled states do have a fairly strong upward trend to closures, but the significance is well over .05 here as well.  The trend among divided (one party controls executive branch the other controls legislative) and Republican states is mostly flat, with similarly low significance causing wide amounts of variation.  The wide amount of variation can probably be explained by the fact that so few states are fully Democrat, so each data point has a lot more pull.

And here's a few charts summarizing the data:

State minimum wage

Number of closures

Overall you can see that Republicans obviously favor lower minimum wages, with the 5 states with no minimum wage being shown in green on the second graphic.  Purple states typically have higher minimum wage than Republican ones, curiously, and there are even a few Democrat controlled states with lower minimum wages than a few of their Republican counterparts.  Particularly surprising is how bad Wal-Mart is doing in their home state, Arkansas, where 11 stores are closing.

Conclusions

With the data being mostly insignificant, we will have to turn to theories to help us jump to some conclusions.

My theory is that Wal-Mart sucks and people are avoiding them.  Wal-Mart has gotten a lot of negative publicity for their abysmally low wages, food drives for its own employees living in poverty and attempts to stop employees from speaking out about horrible working conditions, and of course the destruction of local businesses through low prices they're able to provide with things like child labor and underpaying employees.  I wouldn't go so far as to call it an outright boycott, but I know I for one avoid going there at all costs.  I usually went just to people watch and wander around.  What else are you going to do in a small town at 2 am?  It's safe to assume that with all the attention being drawn to what a horrible company they are that people are trying to find other ways to support themselves and their community.

The truth may be a little less of a crusade and a little more about shifting economics.  People are shopping more online, which is thought to be eating into Wal-Mart's business significantly.

What do you think?

Data Sources:
List of Walmart closures
Partisan composition of states
Minimum wage by state