Cash cowed: perhaps the state's most retail-heavy town, tiny Pineville experiences sticker shock at the price it's having to pay.

• Author: Maley, Frank
• Position: Feature

Tara Pennix--all 5 feet 7 inches of her--stands between about 75 shoppers and the latest Air Jordans. Nike's Retro 12 basketball shoes go on sale today at Finish Line in Carolina Place mall. The anticipation is too much for some. They've nudged ahead in line, and the early birds are squawking.

Pennix is a Pineville police detective. She's supposed to be at Dillard's, moon-lighting as a guard. That's where she heard mall security radio for help. Now their problem is hers, too. "Y' all need to get in a single-file line or the store's not going to open," she tells the crowd.

Pennix keeps urging shoppers to back up, but nobody wants to be the first. Five more Pineville cops arrive--100% of the force on duty. A teenager scuffles with an officer and is wrestled to the floor. He'll be charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct. The crowd gets rowdier. "They could definitely have overpowered us," Sgt. Wes Rollins would later say.

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He calls for backup from neighboring Charlotte. Minutes later, five more cops arrive. Police herd the crowd behind a rope barrier. Customers are allowed into the store in groups of 10. Some walk out empty-handed--the store had only 50 pairs of Retro 12s.

Responding to calls from stores is business as usual for Pineville police. About 95% of calls come from stores, most for theft. Once a mill town, Pineville is now a mall town--a cash-register community for the Charlotte metro area and perhaps the most retail-heavy municipality in the state. The Department of Revenue tracks sales only for towns with 5,000 or more residents. Pineville's population falls about 1,000 short of the benchmark.

But among the places that Revenue tracks, Hendersonville had the highest retail sales per capita--$67,724, in the fiscal year that ended in June. Carolina Place alone, with only a sixth of the town's 6 million square feet of retail space, gave Pineville about $75,000 of sales per capita in 2003. All those stores help give the town another distinction. Among municipalities with more than 1,000 residents, Pineville had the state's highest crime rate in 2002. Second-place Whiteville's was 40% lower.

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Tucked between Charlotte and the South Carolina line, Pineville has so many stores that the Town Council, which once welcomed retailers with open arms, is now keeping some at arm's length. Twice in three years, it has turned away Wal-Mart, the nation's biggest retailer and the state's largest...