A group of bloggers, including Kevin Brancato of Truck and Barter, has started a weblog dedicated to all things Wal-Mart. I saw it via Virginia Postrel’s weblog, and was eventually led to this post on Catallarchy discussing an Esquire article (subscribers only), which notes that, popular media accounts to the contrary (which imply that Everybody Hates Wal-Mart), Wal-Mart is, in fact, wildly popular. This got me thinking about Wal-Mart again. Why do they inspire such vitriol from those who could just choose not to shop there? I see a few reasons that aren’t all that connected to Wal-Mart itself:
Elitism: It’s undeniable, at least to me, that a significant percentage of the Wal-Mart boycotters are put off by the places Wal-Mart locates and the people who shop there. It’s the blue state elites vs. the red state consumers. Overgeneralized, sure, but those that do all their shopping at quirky boutiques or Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma, for that matter, are unlikely to have all that much sympathy for someone who wants to save money on merchandise from Wal-Mart in rural Arkansas. They see Wal-Mart expansion as a way for “those people” to invade their cloistered world. Wan’t proof? Why hate Wal-Mart but not Best Buy or another bix box store that sells to a higher-end market? We don’t call them limousine liberals for nothing. Of course, the elites see themselves as protecting the little people from themselves, which leads us to…
Labor activists and fellow travelers: You won’t get rich working at Wal-Mart. You won’t get free health insurance. You probably can’t support a family on a Wal-Mart salary. Of course, you can’t do any of those things working for another company in the discount retail space, either, nor frankly should you be able to. A realistic assessment of the relative contribution of these jobs to the American economy should suggest as much, but nobody wants to admit that some jobs are just less valuable than others. Wal-Mart does provide health insurance, and I don’t see why they should be expected to do it for free. Vastly increasing Wal-Mart’s operating costs would do little to help its employees (many of whom would lose their jobs as Wal-Mart’s costs increased), and would certainly harm many who are able to live the way they do only by saving money at Wal-Mart. That’s never stopped those who believe that capitalist enterprises are pots of free money waiting for the taking by The People. Similar in many ways to…
Urban Planning Fantasists: Like the labor activists who believe you can conjure up jobs paying $40,000 with free health care for Wal-Mart employees, some Wal-Mart haters think you can wish away half a century’s experience with flight to the suburbs. This group sees the success of Wal-Mart as both contribututor to and beneficiary of suburban “sprawl.” They argue that Wal-Mart could not succeed but for government subsidies to roads and other infrastructure, tax give-backs, construction of homes further and further away from the cities by shifting costs to existing residents, and so forth. I don’t have statistics, but I’d guess that most governments offering explicit subsidies to Wal-Mart do so believing that they’ll get more than they give through increased job growth and tax revenue. The other “subsidies” are inherent in the system, and don’t have much to do with Wal-Mart specifically. I have long believed, however, that even if you limited the subsidies, you’d still have sprawl. People moved from the cities for a reason: they want to avoid crowding, crime, congestion, bad schools; they want to gain larger homes with lawns to play in, they want good schools for their kids and the recreation opportunities that go with suburban life. Many, many people simply don’t see urban life as something to be praised, and gladly accept suburban sprawl as a bearable burden, if not an asset.
Downtown Defenders, or Blinded by the Haze of History: This is another class of fantasists, who see Wal-Mart as a threat to the mom and pop stores of a vibrant downtown. They’re fantasists because the downtowns they praise don’t in any large measure, actually exist. Downtowns have been dying for a long time, threatened not so much by Wal-Mart as by population shifts from the cities to the suburbs. In addition, many of the areas served by Wal-Mart are suffering from economic shifts and dislocation of workers from 19th and mid-20th century industries to a 21st century economy. The downtowns that have flourished are those that have filled market niches, filled with retailers that serve markets not served by big box merchandisers (and which are not threatened by Wal-Mart in any event). Other downtowns have shifted from a retail focus to other areas of economic activity. The idea that if Wal-Mart went away tomorrow, small downtowns would thrive is silly. It may be true that a general merchandiser can’t compete from downtown on price, but there are many other businesses and ways to differentiate one’s market offering.
NIMBYs: Never discount the power of NIMBYs and BANANAs. This isn’t so much an attack on Wal-Mart as a wish that land not currently used for productive economic activity remain thus evermore, at no cost to those that benefit from the open space. Wal-Mart’s just a convenient target, but ultimately this seems to be a free rider problem, although many NIMBYs also fall into categories listed above.
There are many other issues related to Wal-Mart, of course, and Wal-Mart certainly doesn’t deserve unqualified praise (I wouldn’t call them a Randian hero, for example). Real economic analysis has been sorely lacking, and it’s nice to see the blog as a central repository.
April 28th, 2004 at 8:05 pm
Hating Wal-Mart
Always Low Prices–Always featured a guest post today from Frederick Ochsenhert on the origins of Wal-Mart Hatred. I suppose if anybody’s a Wal-Mart hater then I am, so I
April 30th, 2004 at 1:24 pm
You won’t get rich working at Wal-Mart
I don’t know why Zwichenzug even bothered to address the post about Wal-Mart. But he did, and so I read it, and I found that there was something there a
May 12th, 2004 at 4:37 pm
TO ANYBODY WHO READS THIS
DO NOT LISTEN this is propaganda from the upper class designed to keep you consuming non rhetorical goods. Think about It. When you but something from Wal-Mart most of your money goes to executives not workers. And who is this guy to say that any person has a right to have a better life than anybody else simply because of where they were born and the opportunities that were given them. We must rise above this medieval system of birth privilege and capitalism. DON’T SHOP WAL-MART you only hurt yourself. The money you “save†will come back to you in the form of you losing your job and getting poorer and poorer as the upper class grows more and more powerful/