12/04: I like Walmart?
Category: American Culture
Posted by: A Waco Farmer
Yes. I confess. I like Wal-Mart. Not because I reject the widely held belief that Wal-Mart is an essential element in the decay of American manufacturing, labor and popular culture. For the most part, I agree with all those assertions. Wal-Mart helped kill Marlin, Texas. Wal-Mart helps Asian despots exploit their populace. Wal-Mart is unfair to authors and artists. Yes. All those things and more (for an NPR discussion of the "Wal-Mart Effect," click here).
Perhaps old habits die hard. A few years back, when I was in the customer service business, Sam Walton was our guru and Wal-Mart was the standard. Back then you could walk into any Wal-Mart, USA and ask for the motor oil in the home and garden section and the Wal-Mart employee would smile at you and assure you that any rational person could have made that mistake and graciously lead you to the automotive section and deposit you in front of the motor oil. “Here you are, sir,” he would say, “forty-eight different brands to choose from. Give me a yell if there is anything more I can do to help.”
Also, Wal-Mart was the place to meet people in your community. In those days, if you stayed in one place in the Wal-Mart long enough, you would eventually encounter everyone you knew.
Today Wal-Mart is a different place with a different ethos. Sam Walton is dead. It has been many years since I have found an employee in Wal-Mart sensitive to serving customer needs or knowledgable of the store inventory.
Wal-Mart as a public space has changed as well. I never see my liberal friends in Wal-Mart anymore. Staying out of Wal-Mart has become a liberal badge of honor; being seen in Wal-Mart is a source of grave embarrassment. And it is not just socially conscious liberals. Green Conservatives (or “Crunchy Cons”) are increasingly critical and judgmental of Wal-Mart, seeing the massive corporation as the symbol of soulless and destructive hyper-consumerism.
Today only the market-oriented, Wall Street Journal types seem likely to defend Wal-Mart, although I seldom see those people in the store either. Perhaps we would expect to see some neo-cons buying maps of Iraq and Syria or the latest Harry Potter book or DVD, but they seem to be staying away as well.
And that is part of the charm of Wal-Mart today. Wal-Mart has been abandoned by the elites. Once it was kind of hip and trendy for wealthy people to go to Wal-Mart. Now conscientious liberals and "crunchy" conservatives, who are prepared to pay $39.99 at upscale department stores for miniature sport shirts for their toddling children, stay away from Wal-Mart for humanitarian reasons, where working-class people of varying colors buy entire wardrobes of clothes for their children at affordable prices.
The People have taken back Wal-Mart. There is no risk of running into a upwardly mobile executive in a hurry or an obnoxious parent from your child’s private school or a self-important colleague with a new theory. Those folks are gone. Now at Wal-Mart it is just you and the real people of “fly-over” America. Vive Wal-Mart as sanctuary!
Perhaps old habits die hard. A few years back, when I was in the customer service business, Sam Walton was our guru and Wal-Mart was the standard. Back then you could walk into any Wal-Mart, USA and ask for the motor oil in the home and garden section and the Wal-Mart employee would smile at you and assure you that any rational person could have made that mistake and graciously lead you to the automotive section and deposit you in front of the motor oil. “Here you are, sir,” he would say, “forty-eight different brands to choose from. Give me a yell if there is anything more I can do to help.”
Also, Wal-Mart was the place to meet people in your community. In those days, if you stayed in one place in the Wal-Mart long enough, you would eventually encounter everyone you knew.
Today Wal-Mart is a different place with a different ethos. Sam Walton is dead. It has been many years since I have found an employee in Wal-Mart sensitive to serving customer needs or knowledgable of the store inventory.
Wal-Mart as a public space has changed as well. I never see my liberal friends in Wal-Mart anymore. Staying out of Wal-Mart has become a liberal badge of honor; being seen in Wal-Mart is a source of grave embarrassment. And it is not just socially conscious liberals. Green Conservatives (or “Crunchy Cons”) are increasingly critical and judgmental of Wal-Mart, seeing the massive corporation as the symbol of soulless and destructive hyper-consumerism.
Today only the market-oriented, Wall Street Journal types seem likely to defend Wal-Mart, although I seldom see those people in the store either. Perhaps we would expect to see some neo-cons buying maps of Iraq and Syria or the latest Harry Potter book or DVD, but they seem to be staying away as well.
And that is part of the charm of Wal-Mart today. Wal-Mart has been abandoned by the elites. Once it was kind of hip and trendy for wealthy people to go to Wal-Mart. Now conscientious liberals and "crunchy" conservatives, who are prepared to pay $39.99 at upscale department stores for miniature sport shirts for their toddling children, stay away from Wal-Mart for humanitarian reasons, where working-class people of varying colors buy entire wardrobes of clothes for their children at affordable prices.
The People have taken back Wal-Mart. There is no risk of running into a upwardly mobile executive in a hurry or an obnoxious parent from your child’s private school or a self-important colleague with a new theory. Those folks are gone. Now at Wal-Mart it is just you and the real people of “fly-over” America. Vive Wal-Mart as sanctuary!
Tocqueville wrote:
In his article, Thwarting the Killing of the Corporation: Limited Liability, Democracy, and Economics, 87 Nw. U. L. Rev. 148 (1992), conservative law professor Stephen Presser writes eloquently about the role small business plays in our democracy. Presser explains that corporations were endowed with limited liability precisely so as to encourage the growth of small business:
The popular democratic justification for limited liability is rarely observed by modern scholars. Nevertheless, it appears that to the nineteenth-century legislators in states such as New York, who mandated limited liability for corporations' shareholders, the imposition of limited liability was perceived as a means of encouraging the small-scale entrepreneur, and of keeping entry into business markets competitive and democratic. Without limitations on individual shareholder liability, it was believed, only the very wealthiest men, industrial titans such as New York's John Jacob Astor, could possess the privilege of investing in corporations. Without the contributions of investors of moderate means, it was felt, the kind of economic progress states like New York needed would not be achieved.
The author of the most comprehensive study of New York legislative policy toward corporations in the nineteenth century concluded that New York's policy of limited liability, and its policy of encouraging incorporation by persons of modest means "facilitated the growth of a viable urban democracy by allowing a wide participation in businesses that could most advantageously be organized as corporations." "More importantly," he suggested, New York's general incorporation statutes "helped equalize the opportunities to get rich. The passage of general incorporation laws for business corporations was the economic aspect of the political and social forces that democratized the United States during the Age of Jackson, 1825-1855."
By trampling small businesses underfoot, through its mix of volume pricing and subsidies, Wal-Mart and its ilk undermine the possibility of "wide participation in businesses." Prospective entrepreneurs are thus pushed out of fields like retail.
Of course, maybe Wal-Mart makes up for that by buying products from small entrepreneurs in places like China. But do we really want to encourage our nation’s most likely future superpower rival to further build up its economy with massive trade deficits?