I was in Wal-Mart the other day.
Occasionally, my wife and I tow along our bouncing baby daughter to stock up on diapers and infant sundries. The girls roll off with the cart to browse the glossy aisles; I stumble off in my usual Wal-Mart daze, deepened by stale pop music and the perceptible sixty hertz flicker of the vast florescent sky, reaching to the store's horizon. I negotiate the maze of aisles, stocked to surfeit. While my family shops, I become reflective, tense, bemused, amazed and lost.
There's nothing like a trip to Wal-Mart to get some perspective on where we are in human history. Let's face it---we might as well call Wal-Mart and all the other megastores competing with it Blank-Mart -- one big collective super-mart. Just fill in the blank with your megastore of preference.
Wal-Mart has competition coming from wannabes like Target, Meijer, Fred Meyer, Costco, and many other superstores. Each of these big stores has carefully constructed the same essential impersonal consumer experience. Their shelves are loaded to the corrugated steel ceilings with the same megabrands -- Nabisco, Johnson & Johnson, General Mills, Sony, Black and Decker, etc. Together, the mega-super-mondo-Mount Everest-sized shopping stores produce the same humbling shopping experience, regardless of who's doing the selling. They're big; you're small. Products made outside of your immediate community from as far away as China are cheaply available in a polished aisle near you. "Blank-Mart -- where everyone must shop." It's all the same -- utterly perfected mass-produced products sold in huge stores that could've been designed by Albert Speer.
It's almost as though a giant mountain was discovered, with hinges and a vast seam at its base. It's somehow lifted open like a gigantic, creaking cellar door, revealing the world's source of Blank-Mart wares. "So that's where all this stuff comes from," I imagine while staring at fourteen brands of paper shredders.
Sam Walton was a clever retailer. He realized that a giant store could be a small mall. Actually, the idea of a superstore isn't even his. We will have to give our hyper-capitalist French friends credit for the Wal-Mart retail model. The hypermarché was invented by the retail group Carrefour. They combined a supermarket and a department store to create a mall under one roof, where presumably shoppers could amass all their worldly belongings into one gigantic shopping cart. Hypermarkets are now tickling the toes of many a Main Street, all over the planet---springing up just like Rocky and Bullwinkle, popping out of the ground with the daisies. Poof! Everything and anything for next to nothing.
I don't really propose that Blank-Mart is evil, or should be stopped. Blank-Marts have made a lot of things accessible to people who wouldn't normally be able to afford them. While people stress over Wal-Mart landing outside of their town like an alien space saucer and sucking out the vitality from their little Main Street, they should ask themselves whose fault it is. People vote with their dollars more than any other way. If they really were concerned about keeping a quaint, small-town shopping district in their hometown, they'd simply ignore the Wal-Mart and continue to pay higher prices on Main Street. "Just say no," as Nancy Reagan used to say.
But they don't say no, by and large. Apparently, life is better without a cute Main Street. And anyway, let's say they keep Wal-Mart out of the neighborhood. Well, it's still a Blank-Mart world out there -- WalMart's just a part of it. People will still go to Target and Costco to buy their Crisco. They might even get better deals online with virtual stores like Amazon. I suppose one could argue that Amazon is destroying Main Street too.
So, we have the big manufacturer on one end of the retail equation --say, Nabisco -- and the deal-hungry consumer on the other. Blank-Mart is in the middle, connecting the two. Who's the most empowered in the equation? Could it possibly be customers armed with dollars who have a moral responsibility to make the right choices? Aren't those shoppers just looking the other way when they go to Blank-Mart? Does personal responsibility and morality fit into the equation at all? Or should we satisfy ourselves with condemning the big bad corporations who make our lives dull by having to choose between Blank-Mart A and Blank-Mart B?
Remember Clinton's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy for gays in the military? That's a tag line for this whole postmodern era, one that's right up there with 'Save the Rainforest' as a SUV bumper sticker slogan. Keep the morality vague, and please, just don't ask, OK? Don't judge and don't be judged. I'll bet even the most ardent Wal-Mart protestors have a few hidden receipts for diapers from Wal-Mart. Just don't ask -- because they aren't telling. There's a lot of winking and shrugging in this era of moral relativity. Perhaps the price we have to pay is wearing our eyes inside-out, looking for size three diapers in the flickering light of an anonymous Blank-Mart.
I also think that the argument that quaint Main Streets are dying and being replaced by impersonal Blank-Marts can be petty bourgeois bloviating. Not too long ago, our ancestors would've killed for a Blank-Mart, and willingly rejected the whole quaintness of their kerosene-lit, horse-and-buggy dirt-paved Main Street in return for the packaged conveniences we have now. They had no choice. We do. The talk about preserving Main Street seems to have a lot to do with aesthetics, but not practicality or utility. Preserving Main Street for its own sake seems rather a postmodern obsession. Affordable diapers be damned.
Honestly, I lament the passing of Main Street too. But I wonder: Need Blank-Mart kill a vital, unique Main Street? Couldn't Main Street benefit from Blank-Mart? All those big brand items we find in Blank-Mart are as impersonal and outside of the local community as Blank-Mart itself. Should a tree-lined, intimate, beautiful and historic Main Street really besmirch itself by hawking pricier versions of Depends diapers and Viagra pills? Don't Blank-Brands actually belong in Blank-Mart?
Maybe Blank-Mart gives Main Street the opportunity to be the main street again -- where the community's unique heritage and residents can gather and sell their local treasures. Their stuff wouldn't have to share shelf space with Metamucil or fake houseplants from China. Let Blank-Mart carry the banal but ever-so-necessary products from Nabisco, Johnson and Johnson, General Mills, ADM, and the rest of the behemoth suppliers between here and Asia. I'm glad that stuff is sitting under the glare of fluorescent lights at Blank-Mart. Let Main Street feature art, food and entertainment from the people who actually live there. Removing the mega-corporate products from Main Street and sticking them in a Blank-Mart could make Main Street a relief, not necessarily a post-commercial wasteland trying to compete with überretail hell.
Sometimes, I do wonder about what Blank-Mart represents. I wonder if it denotes the pinnacle of our materialist existence. How much further can consumerism go past this point in history? Is everything else that follows just a refinement on Blank-Mart's hypermarket model?
A personal computer represents the acme of human technological achievement. The first prehistoric tool, presumably some kind of blunt stone, allowed the creation of a slightly more refined tool -- and then so on, and so on -- compounded improvement for thousands of years until there came a humming computer, connected to millions of others into a vast web of knowledge and empowered individuals. At this point, computers can only get still-yet faster, still-yet smaller, still-yet cheaper and presumably more clever and intelligent in the process.
Most of the people in human history would've probably killed for this little whirring box we call garbage after two or three years of usage. Though small, a computer is vast, full of millions of circuits and bits of code. The Mac I am typing on right now isn't fully knowable by any one person anymore -- not in the way that a car engine might be. While it shrinks in physical size, the computer's internal dimensions expand like the Universe itself. The Tool of Tools.
Similarly, Blank-Mart seems like the paragon of material achievement in the same way that a computer is the apotheosis of knowledge and communication. The Store of Stores. All the consolidation that has taken place in the last thirty years or so seems to be pointing to some kind of logical end. I just don't know what it is. I wonder, and I puzzle, and I keep asking about where we are headed with all these modern mega-miracles. Which takes me back to being reflective, tense, bemused, amazed and lost in the highly polished aisles of Wal-Mart.
After walking the aisles, I am reminded of a Star Trek episode called Is There In Truth No Beauty? In it was the Medusan ambassador Kollos, a member of a species that was so ugly that humans would go insane if they saw him. He was kept in a box. People had to wear special blocking visors over their eyes to prevent themselves from going bananas over seeing the Medusan when the box's lid opened. Not even Spock was immune.
I keep wondering if strolling the aisles of Blank-Mart is the same as staring at the insides of the Medusan's little box. Or maybe that's where all the stuff on the shelves comes from, from under that big mountain. Something about all this material wealth is maddening, no matter who gets to sell it.
The next time we need diapers, I could use a pair of those special glasses to keep myself sane.
Need Blank-Mart kill a vital, unique Main Street? Couldn't Main Street benefit from Blank-Mart?
Perhaps you might explore the reasons why Wal-Mart can do what it does. Many of these reasons revolve around government policy. Government policy which encourages trade from abroad. Government policy which discourages the union movement at home.
And who is paying for that government policy: where does Sam Walton's family and foundation spend its money? Which foundations? What policies? Has Sam Walton emulated Andrew Carnegie? Is there a Walton Endowment for Peace?
And remember: "Blank-mart" isn't just a modern version of Carrefour. It's a modern problem for an economically vibrant Republic such as our own.
Here's one example
Xu Jun, Wal-Mart's China director of external affairs, said "If Wal-Mart were an individual economy, it would rank as China's eighth-biggest trading partner, ahead of Russia, Australia and Canada..." Insiders point out Wal-Mart's imports from China have largely influenced the US trade deficit in China, which is expected to reach US$150 billion this year. [...] So far, more than 70 per cent of the commodities sold in Wal-Mart are made in China.
Or if you care about the economic underpinning of our Republic in another arena, perhaps cast a glance at this explanation of what Wal-Mart is costing Vlasic Pickles.
"not long after, Vlasic filed for bankruptcy..."
Sprawl, for environmentalists. Massive trade deficits for fiscal conservatives. Hollowing out of our manufacturing base for economic nationalists. All of these nefarious developments are there, baking on the tarmac of the Wal-Mart parking lot.
And what is our Administration doing about them? Sorry, couldn't hear you. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Sticker,
Do you include the leftist burden put opon the small shops and domestic production that contribute to the flight of jobs and the extermination of the small mom and pop that is taxed at the indevidual rate, and was exterminated by all the leftist jihads against the "rich" ?
The property taxes alone will exterminate the small business, add in all the regulation, and the leftist class warfare tax, and the small shop has been exterminated under the grinding leftist boot.
leaving only the walmarts able to survive.
None of you saw the South Park episode about Wal-mart??? It sums everything up nicely. Worth watching, you could have just refered to it.
Of course none of the limo leftists have told Wal-Mart to stop selling their movie/CD/book/calendar/trading cards or products they've endorsed. Always fun watching leftists telling low income people why paying more for items is good for them.
I live in Portland Oregon, and like fellow resident Michael Totten, I’m a partial of urban planning and zoning restrictions. Portland and the surrounding area is beautiful, and I’m mindful of why.
The New England seacoast town I grew up in was also beautiful, and it remains so with some pretty aggressive zoning and commercial restrictions. There is exactly are only a couple franchise enterprises – a small CVS store and a Dunkin Donuts. Both reside in pre-existing commercial buildings which blend with their surroundings; both have restricted signage. Public lands and parks, not strip malls, surround the main two lane highway which runs through town. The “downtown area” (a single street on the harbor), lined with small, local shops, is thus preserved.
All this runs counter to my economic politics (at least two clicks to the right of Totten and A.L., near as I can tell). I recognize that there are substantial costs to this policy, both in freedom (restrictions on how property can be developed) and consumer prices. The bottom line is that everyone pays more for stuff they need, either in money or travel – a regressive policy, hurting the poorer more than the richer.
I justify my support of zoning by recourse to community values; if a town (and by extension the town’s property tax payers) want to keep a certain look and feel to a town, they should be entitled to do so. In practice this has to be traded off against the rights of property owners – but that’s the point, it’s a tradeoff.
Finally, I don’t think Speer would have appreciated Wall Mart, but Le Corbusier sure would have.
Do you include the leftist burden put opon the small shops and domestic production that contribute to the flight of jobs and the extermination of the small mom and pop that is taxed at the indevidual rate, and was exterminated by all the leftist jihads against the "rich"
Here, again, we run into the fog caused by the overuse of that bugaboo "leftist." What the hell do you mean? Roads? Zoning? Minimum wage? The IWW? (Gosh, I hate the IWW.)
The next note, by a poster I didn't realize also lived in Oregon and whose posts usually are flecked with rhetorical spittle, illustrates the problem nicely.
I justify my support of zoning by recourse to community values; if a town (and by extension the town’s property tax payers) want to keep a certain look and feel to a town, they should be entitled to do so. In practice this has to be traded off against the rights of property owners – but that’s the point, it’s a tradeoff.
Well, after measure 37 passed this past November, we'll see just what kind of tradeoff it will be. Now, government has to pay landowners for the costs of zoning. Care to guess what's going to happen to farmland? Riparian zones? You'll get your libertarian Nirvana. Want to see what it's going to look like? Drive to Tigard, or out to Beaverton. Strip malls as far as the eye can see! Oh, the capitalist wonder! And title-loan shops! And used-car lots! Small farms? Not so much.
Take a look at an Ace hardware store sometimes and you'll see how the small guys can compete with the big box stores without having to give up stocking national brands. Back end purchasing and supply chain management are unified and pricing power ranks up there with Home Depot but the front end stores are all Main Street.
As for Vlasic, they were making things, they had the ability to stop supplying Wal Mart at any time. They didn't do that. Why didn't they do it? Why did they let their brand get diluted? Why didn't they simply stop making the gallon jar of pickles? Why didn't they replace the glass jar with a decorative wooden barrel and charge 5x the price? Why didn't they let some other poor sucker let their brand get kamikazeed and land that corporation in bankruptcy court?
The answer is that they let themselves get too dependent on Wal-Mart. They let themselves get too focused on volume and ignored brand protection, a business 101 issue for any premium brand. You spend all that money promoting your brand and then flush it down the toilet just to get access to Wal Mart's volume? That's ridiculous and the shareholders should have been up in arms over it. They were hogs about it and got slaughtered.
Ah Walmart. Gotta love Walmart because the "Elitist" alarm pegs directly in the red whenever the subject comes up. Dont these silly peasants know what their love of reasonably priced consumer goods does to . God forbid my Saturday drive in my Land Rover is marred by the view of Sprallmart where Old Man Johnson's hog farm used to reside. Cant the pleebs wear their rags just a bit longer, surely some government program will cloth them once they are actually naked. And think of how good i'll feel about that.
"Devastation" comes to mind.
Nonetheless,it seems to me the "Main Street" could have been revitalized-had it not been allowed to deteriorate so badly.
I'm told-by some of the more cynical locals-the deterioration was deliberate:the folks who owned the stores also owned property (or shares of same) in the area where the Blankmart was to be built.
By letting the town center run down,they saved on taxes...AND herded consumers to the new store area. In brief,a win-win proposition.
They continue to nurture the deterioration-for tax purposes,and they shoo away those who could change things for the better.
I always get a kick out of people who put their hands to their foreheads when Wal-Mart is mentioned. If pressed, you'll see that they just go to Cost-Co or Target or any other "Blank-Mart" instead.
Look about your house, if you see Amish products and obsure brand names never to be found at any Blank-Mart, then please, feel free to complain about how corporations destroy Main Street and our world.
Hey Stickler, I'd be willing to bet that you have Band-Aids, Diet Cokes, potato chips, shavers, computers, and Pampers made by the same companies as the rest of us around your house. If you didn't buy them from Blank-Mart, the only diffrence is that you paid a higher mark-up to the store that acted as a middle man...the corporations got their usual cut. That's great if you want to "preserve the downtown" - but in my downtown, there is no parking. I suppose they could bulldoze the local park to make a big enough parking lot so that we could go "downtown" to purchase the exact same products at a higher price. Let's get real, do you think they stock the Amish products if they could move shelves of Pampers instead?
It's just more blame/shaming from the same people, as someone noted above, who put "save the rainforest" bumper stickers on their SUV's. It makes them feel like they are doing something productive to complain that "someone else" should do something.
Hey Stickler, I'd be willing to bet that you have Band-Aids, Diet Cokes, potato chips, shavers, computers, and Pampers made by the same companies as the rest of us around your house. If you didn't buy them from Blank-Mart, the only diffrence is that you paid a higher mark-up to the store that acted as a middle man...the corporations got their usual cut.
Of course I have the same crap in my house that you do in yours. But I didn't buy it from Sam Walton's store. Why? Because I think their policies are bad for their employees, bad for their communities, and bad for the country.
Too many of their employees are part-timers earning minimum wage. That cuts into prosperity. Only 38% of Wal-mart employees have health insurance; that means the rest of us pay when those employees go on Medicaid. Wal-Mart all by itself is responsible for more than $10 billion in Chinese imports to this country.
And, finally, every Wal-Mart I've ever vistited has been filthy, ill-lit, and full of very angry employees. Customer service and quality of products on offer -- both abysmal. Why support all of this crap?
Costco may be full of made-in-China garbage, too, but at least the employees are well-paid and fairly helpful. And the prices are better.
Costco should not be lumped in with exploitive, union-busting companies like Wal-Mart. They treat their employees and their customers right and you can see it in their faces and in their products.
You're exercising your rights as consumers. Good on you. Just dont try to take the same rights away from the rest of us. It doesnt keep me up at night that the 17 year old bagging my slippers isnt forced to shell out to be in a union he has no use for.
I enjoyed this essay as it bounces back and forth on the blankmart vs main street issues. Walnut Creek is an interesting side step as they revitalized their downtown by making it an outdoor mall - so there are national chains like Pottery Barn and the Apple Store right there in the downtown. It does lack the charm of a more unique shops - but it also is a lot more appealing to me than an inside mall.
My reasons for disliking Walmart are simple. They don't pay their employees benefits. I like Target becuase they do and they are more aesthetic. But these are simple comments on a complex issue. I do worry about a world that boasts numerous Red Lobsters all throughout Texas. What does this do to the supply of lobsters? How out of balance is that?
I shudder to think of what our have to have everything everwhere all the time mentality is really doing to this planet. At the same time I do very much enjoy the benefits of our capitalistic society. I use regular diapers and eat at McDonalds - though by all accounts if I were to read some of what is out there I would not! But the chicken nugget kiddie meals sure are convenient.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that our votes are in the dollars we spend. I am not a politically active person at all and my spending is not perfect but I do make some choices. I think it is the best way to really make a difference. The idea needs to be stated and restated constantly.
"Honestly, I lament the passing of Main Street too."
I miss Main Street, too. I miss the small grocery stores and the pharmacies where locals gathered for a lemon-coke and a pack of Nabs in the afternoon. The clerks were our neighbors and family, people we trusted for advice on products and purchasing clothes at locally-owned shops.
But time changed everything, including sanitation laws, which put an end to tin boxes with rows of unpackaged cookies, just use your fingers, get a baker's dozen. Kids snitched the broken ones.
As more products came on the market even hardware stores expanded into gifts and home decor to compete with stores in nearby larger cities, the automobile changed shopping trips.
We can't blame Blank-Mart for everything, although their buying power put a lot of small shops out of business, as well as Rubbermaid. Another company which depended too much on Blank-Mart, then tried to go it alone again.
I shop at Blank-Mart because I'm retired and have to make ends meet on a small income, especially the costs of medications. Food in their Super Centers is only about 17% lower, but their prices do go up, they aren't consistent. You still have to shop around. When I want a good product, electronics for example, I do NOT look for them at Blank-Mart. They stock the bottom of the barrel. No one goes to Blank-Mart for an exciting buying experience with atmosphere. It's more like shopping for plumbing fixtures.
If you leave a Blank-Mart store feeling you will take a shower when you get home, you were in the wrong place. You won't run into your congressman there either.
"Sometimes, I do wonder about what Blank-Mart represents. I wonder if it denotes the pinnacle of our materialist existence."
What Blank-Mart provides is a store were low-income folks can shop without feeling out of place. Sometimes I wonder where they shopped before Blank-Mart came to town.
"The talk about preserving Main Street seems to have a lot to do with aesthetics, but not practicality or utility. Preserving Main Street for its own sake seems rather a postmodern obsession."
It's an expensive hobby for elitists with pull. An effort to make Main Street a tourist attraction.
"Let Main Street feature art, food and entertainment from the people who actually live there."
Yes, and they will be out of business in no time because the demand for "art" lost it's luster years ago. Locals do not buy art in Main Street shops they buy art at shows and festivals.
Mr. Martin touches the elephant in the room:
I shop at Blank-Mart because I'm retired and have to make ends meet on a small income, especially the costs of medications.
But he doesn't name it. Why is it that so many retirees are hemhorraging cash to buy necessary medications? Wasn't the recent Medicaire drug act supposed to solve that?
It didn't?
Health care -- and, again, here's Wal-Mart -- is the issue of the next five years. (Well, that and Iraq.) Either a third or a half of our citizens have no health insurance, and them what does have the fear of losing it. Retirees are in many cases spending more on drugs than on housing.
Health care spending is going up, year after year, by double digits. Companies like Wal-Mart are unaffected since they hardly even offer health insurance. But the rest of us pay and pay big-time.
Oh, thats it. Health care. How could we have missed that obvious nonsequiter?
Stickler's argument is straightforward and seems relevant. He believes an aging poulation + expanding medical costs is forcing more and more people's discretionary income down, and making the Wal-Marts of the world more necessary despite what he sees as their drawbacks.
That may be so, or not. Let's see the evidence. But from here, it looks like a coherent argument form.
Health care is a problem in the U.S. (as in every Western society, certainly including Canada my home). Wish I had some good idea of what the fix looks like, but I don't. All I see is different problems depending on the choices made.
As for Wal-Mart itself, I think most of our commenters have it right. Everyone gets to make choices, so exercise yours and by all means talk about why. Remember that the situation isn't always what it seems, though, as demonstrated by the Main Street property speculators story. Finally, be careful about taking away others' choices, especially if you're taking them away from low-income people for reasons of aesthetics or abstract "public good."
Preach it, Brother. (About not taking choices away from those with less income.)
Of course, it's a trap to generalize too much ... as I wrote last summer, I've seen Hummers in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart near me even though most of the clientele are Hispanic immigrants or low income families from the small city nearby.