The Empire of Cheap
In an extensive and balanced series of articles, the Los Angeles Times recently investigated just why I felt so guilty a few weeks ago when I bought some blank CDs at a local Walmart. “An Empire Built on Bargains Remakes the Working World” was the first article in the series and explores how the company has grown from a five and dime to having a larger cash flow than most nations on Earth. More notably though, the article discusses the effects Wal-Mart has on people who interact with it, both customers and employees. (Note: you have to register on the Times site to read the article, but my fellow readers can login as “attaboyreader”, password “attaboy”.)
A few years back, I spent some time in the Catskills in upstate New York with a friend who grew up there. We passed through towns like Liberty, NY, where the main strip had decayed to near-ghost-town status. Drive a bit farther down the road in a town like that, and eventually you find the Wal-Mart where all the shoppers, traffic and economic activity happens now.
The fact is, anyone who has even a passing interest in urban studies learns to associate Wal-Mart with the death of commercial neighbourhoods and the decline of mom-and-pop retail. Anyone who worries about labour conditions associates Wal-Mart with third-world factories churning out shoddy merchandise, and minimum-wage workers who can’t support a family on their cashier’s wage.
The Times article is careful to cover all that ground, but it also mentions one thing concerned people often forget to think about. Wal-Mart is an incredibly successful business, and its success is founded on one thing: low prices.
People around the world shop at Wal-Mart because their dollars go farther, and what becomes clear as you read the article is that many Wal-Mart customers actually do think about the negative aspects of the company’s presence, but often they still shop there because they can’t resist saving money. And let’s face it, the average Wal-Mart customer is a lower-middle-class family struggling to make ends meet. It’s easy to criticize the company, but it’s a lot harder to criticize consumers who recognize that they can make their hard-earned dollars go farther. Ultimately, it’s those consumers who have made Wal-Mart so successful.
I like to wax nostalgic about mom-and-pop shops as much as the next decently-paid city dweller, but I realize I’m lucky to live in an area where there are plenty of them, and luckier still to be able to afford to pay the higher prices. My local super-market has priced frozen juice so absurdly that I end up buying the fresh stuff because it seems like a better deal.
The conclusion of the first article relates Wal-Mart’s more recent foray into grocery shopping, and how the big California supermarket chains are running scared. Traditionally, grocery store employees are unionized, and therefore fairly well paid, but Wal-Mart is out to change that. The company is relentlessly anti-union, and it’s grocery workers are paid something like half what others are.
Ultimately, I’m pleased that there are communities and people who are actively questioning, or even fighting, Wal-Mart. Every experience I’ve had there has left me bitter, as I navigated crowded aisles, long check-out lines and a bewildering array of products jammed into the cavern-sized spaces. In general, I decry big-box retail, not only for the fact that it generally offers the least pleasant shopping experience, but also because it encourages more car traffic and pollution and it’s a wreckless use of precious urban space.
People who value saving money would do well to analyze the broader implications of $29 sneakers, and 50¢ pasta. Wal-Mart employs, directly and indirectly, millions of people around the world. We may be saving money at the cash register, but we’re also feeding an economic model that promotes a two-tiered society of haves and have-nots. Those who are paid poorly and who thus must make every penny count — by shopping at places like Wal-Mart — and those who can afford to shop somewhere that isn’t in the middle of a three highway interchange, and doesn’t make you feel like a peasant in a Soviet bread line.
Previously: How to Be a Famous Artist in One Easy Step
Subsequently: I, In My Kerchief
Comments
Also covered quite well in the Fast Company cover story this month, The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know - a ruthless, if fair, company, but one whose ultimate effect on local and global markets is destabilizing.
I think you’d really enjoy reading James Kunstler’s work: he pins all of this down - the shift towards highways as the only way to get around one’s own town in North America, the creation of “unplaces” like highway-related shopping malls, and the ever-metastasizing Wal-Martization effect. All of which is predicated on cheap oil for transportation: as oil becomes scarcer within our lifetimes (see the last George Monbiot column in the Guardian for a good summary of the facts), the economics of big-box retail will collapse like the Soviet Union…
While he can be slightly reactionary, Kunstler’s take on the matter is solid and he’s a rockin’ read. www.kunstler.com - check out the Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle, his ongoing journal about these issues. And his books are eminently readable - if you liked Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus To Our House, you’ll dig them.
— aj | Dec. 3, 2003 — 9 AM