I have something in common with Wal-Mart. We were both born in Arkansas. So when folk tear her down, well, its kinda like they're goin after kin. So I read with interest Professor Schaff's recent post on the Pack-Man of retailers, and the links he provides.
To some extent Wal-Mart is the target of a congenital American (and maybe human) irritation with anyone who gets too big. IBM, oil companies, and Microsoft all suffer the same problem, and heaven knows its often justified. But more than most giants, WM has kept its good old fashioned entrepreneurial virtue: it remains just as committed to efficient marketing as when it first started out. That's rather rare.
As for some of the more interesting criticisms, I admit that I don't know much about how Wal-Mart affects "organic urban communities." I have no experience of inner city poverty. But I know small town poverty reasonably well. It was in the small towns that Wal-Mart laid its foundation. Most summers for the last 30 years I have gone camping and back-packing in the Ozark National Forest, in North Central Arkansas. The last sizable town before Highway 14 climbs up into the pines was Mountainview. When I began that habit, in my teens, it was a small hole in the cliff-face with a small claim to fame: it was the site of the Ozark Mountain Folk Festival. There were two small stores there where we could stop for batteries, ice, and other essentials. They were expensive, and there wasn't much to choose from. When Wal-Mart came in it very quickly drove them out of business.
But from our point of view it was an immediate improvement. The goods were cheaper, and a full range of camping supplies was available. This was the most important thing that Wal-Mart brought to Mountainview: you could get stuff in town that was formerly only to be found hours away in larger communities. I also noticed that Wal-Mart employed a lot more people than the two dollar stores had. I don't know what those stores paid, but I bet it wasn't a lot more than Wal-Mart did. I know that there were a lot of folk living in that beautiful area who would rather have stuck around if they could get any work at all, and WM provided that.
Another thing I noticed is that as soon as Wal-Mart set down, the town began to grow. Folk from a wide area came in to shop instead of going to Little Rock or somewhere else. And while they were there, they liked to get a bite to eat. Fast food joints sprouted like mushrooms after a good summer rain, and then a catfish house or two. There is no reasonable doubt that Wal-Mart was good for the town as a whole.
I think a lot of the hostility toward Wal-Mart on the part of the intellectual left arises from something they share with many conservatives: a snobbish disdain for those enterprises that give the most humble people exactly what they want. They want cheap goods and jobs that easy to start out in.
I have seen the same snobbery directed at chain bookstores like Barnes and Noble, and its second string competitors like BooksaMillion and Hastings. Conservatives like my friends who live in urban areas whine about the disappearance of small, quaint bookstores. But I grew up in Jonesboro Arkansas, and there weren't no quaint bookstores there when I was a teenager, unless you count the Bible Bookstore. Until I got old enough to drive to Memphis, my bookstore was a rack of paperbacks at a local card shop. Now when I visit my ancestral manor (a three bedroom, two car carport a little older than I am), I can stop by Hastings and find books on Buddhism and sociobiology. The great chains have done far more good for far more people than the quaint bookstores and dollar stores ever did.
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