Wal-Mart has been thrust in my consciousness recently more than usual; certainly more than I enjoy.
On one hand, the City has been debating a law which would make it more difficult for Wal-Mart to open stores in City neighborhoods, particularly ones with a lot of viable small businesses.
On the other hand, Wal-Mart has been making news by trumpeting an increased commitment to buying/selling locally grown food. Quite a few folks have asked me what I think about that, suspecting (correctly) that I would be less than impressed.
Sure, there are lots of reasons to deride Wal-Mart: its low prices at the point of sale are made possible by externalizing as many costs as possible. This means that Wal-Mart lowers the prices paid by individual shoppers by increasing the costs to their communities as a whole, via increased automotive traffic, decreased employment in the community, increased numbers of people without health insurance, and by substantially changing land-use and mobility patterns to degrade the very value of cities as a better place to live.
But the real, core issue with Wal-Mart is that its model is based on replacing local economies with a global distribution of globally produced goods, that leverages the low wages of poor people and subsidized distribution channels; while at the same time paying its own employees as little as possible and degrading the economies where it operates.
The globally produced consumer goods that Wal-Mart sells are garbage; locally-produced food grown to their standards of maximum yield and minimum price will, of course, in time, be garbage as well. If all the goods and food distributed in this global network are identical junk, what could it possibly matter from which node on the production/distribution network the item came?
Local, as I’ve asserted before, isn’t important in the sense that an item was made close-by; local is important in the sense that an item was made in a real place, by real people. Wal-Mart is in the business of destroying real places; it follows that nothing in Wal-Mart’s model could possibly be meaningfully local.
One last note: in response to the inevitable, disingenious and fatuous cries of ‘elitism’, understand that my point is that everybody, including poor people, deserves the opportunity to eat good food and buy well made goods. Those who defend and propagate Wal-Mart are arguing not only that working class people should only be able to eat and buy junk; but also that the privilege of being forced to eat and buy only junk should be enjoyed by ever-increasing numbers of people.
I’ll defend Wal-Mart: lower prices. That’s why people shop there. With the current state of our economy, that’s especially important. Of course, I haven’t done enough research to respond to your points on how they externalize costs, so I won’t try (now), but I don’t think it’s quite as simple as you make it to be. For example, increased automotive traffic to a Wal-Mart is not all cost – think increased visibility (marketing) and business to nearby stores, less traffic to alternative stores, needing to drive to only one place to shop instead of to multiple places, etc.
But, I can use reason to respond to your last paragraph. Defending Wal-Mart is not the same as arguing that “working class people should ONLY be able to eat and buy junk” (emphasis added) – you know better than that. I think they should have the choice to eat and buy junk if they want to – that’s freedom. And I have no problem with ever-increasing numbers of people having the privilege to eat and buy junk. But, you threw in a couple words in that sentence that are not necessary to the argument – no one is FORCED to eat or buy ONLY junk. How is force related to people having the option to buy junk? And how does defending Wal-Mart mean that I am arguing that people should only have the option to buy junk? On the contrary, I would argue that people should have the freedom to choose junk if they want it. Everyone has to decide how best to use their limited resources. If someone wants junk for $3 then they can shop at Wal-Mart. If they want higher quality junk for $5, they can go somewhere else. I think you’ve created a straw man here.
Love your restaurant though.
Arek,
Thanks for commenting, and even for disagreeing. I appreciate it.
My argument is that Wal-Mart kills the local economy — which has the potential to create and sell non-junk, while making the community richer — and makes everyone in the community poorer. And that, in turn, leaves everyone in the community 1) poorer, and 2) with no option to buy from a real local economy. That’s what I mean when I say that to support Wal-Mart is to support the idea that poorer people should have no choice but to buy from the globalist (junk) grid, and to support the idea that more people should be poorer.
I argue that that is specifically not what freedom looks like.
Arek, if you would like to understand why people are against Wal-Mart, please read “Big Box Swindle” by Stacy Mitchell. (Or just go to http://www.bigboxswindle.com and see some of the research.) I totally understand people wanting to save money, SoCal is an extremely expensive place to live, and it’s tempting to put low prices above anything else. But Wal-Mart takes more than it gives. Like all big box stores, they are given advantages that small businesses are not: they receive subsidies from state and local governments in the form of infrastructure improvements, fee waivers and other financial incentives, health care and social services required by their low wage employees, extra police protection – to name a few. And please don’t imagine that Wal-Mart creates more choices for people. Its goal is to take out the competition wherever it goes, which it does very well. So once Wal-Mart has killed its local competition, it becomes the ONLY choice, which was Jay’s point. And when there’s no choice but Wal-Mart, people like Jay and me are very unhappy, but the other thing that happens is that Wal-Mart takes the low prices away, along with your argument and, understandably, your happiness as well. Oh great, now we ALL hate Wal-Mart! Ya?