Image above from Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
Always entertaining are Journal Sentinel columnist Patrick McIlheran's periodic love letters to Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart gets slammed here regularly, but that's not to say that Walton's Warriors aren't getting the message and cleaning up their act to some extent. So, in his latest piece of Wal-Mart P.R., does McIlheran pat them on the back for recently upgrading health insurance programs for its employees? Tout recent environmental measures the company has adopted?
No and no, because that would be admitting that Wal-Mart was grossly deficient in those areas in the first place - - and the conservative Hive Mind takes its cue from Bush/Cheney in never admitting errors.
Rather, he pulls out the tired playbook and deploys his old favorite rhetorical tools: oppose Wal-Mart and you're a "snob"; since low prices and poor quality are "popular" with the discerning masses, Wal-Mart is heroic in meeting that need; well-liked Aldi must be something like maligned Wal-Mart because both feature low prices (that's particularly brilliant); the "made-in-China" straw man is deployed (well, other stores sell products made in China...); you're just "bossy," darn it!; and, "if you don't like it, don't shop there."
Yeah. That'll show 'em.
In McIlheran's world, evidently, there are simply no community impacts resultant from dropping a giant, fairly unkempt big-box into the middle of a suburb - - one that might be attempting to construct a certain manner of community that rises above garage-to-parking-lot purgatory. (McIlheran: "adorable little commuter-rail 'burb." Sense him snarling?)
Never mind Wal-Mart's habit of abandoning stores and leaving them to rot. Or, for that matter, their massive tax avoidance, indifference to local sensitivities, ability - and regular tendency - to strangle suppliers, wage and benefit policies (now finally being addressed to some extent after lots of "liberal whining") that flood state social services (pdf link), gun-to-the-head negotiations with befuddled and overmatched local municipalities, regular and clear violations of local zoning ordinances, etc.
Snobbish concerns, I guess.
For a perspective that arguably veers toward the "snobbish," McIlheran could read "How Not To Like Wal-Mart," which is written by a guy who seems to agree that Wal-Mart is not the big bad wolf, but nonetheless a powerful reinforcer of all that is sub-par and just-below-adequate - - reason enough to avoid their influence and motley presence in any community you care about. If all that worldwide economic/social impact nonsense doesn't do it for you.
McIlheran: "The hallmark of Wal-Mart isn't that it sells Chinese goods; it's that it's cheap."
Wrong. The hallmark of Wal-Mart is not simply that it is cheap; it's that Wal-Mart is a powerful beacon for the victory of enormously profitable banality at all costs. We mourn the loss of excellence and sense of pride in something beyond a company bottom line that rewards only those on the top rungs.
On a related note: The new Eagles' album is currently stocked exclusively at Wal-Mart.
Cents and sensibility in retail
By Patrick McIlheranWal-Mart wants to put a big store in Cudahy. As it would fill a brownfield now broken only by the rusting hulk of a half-built ice skating center, you'd think people would be OK with this.
"I am not a fan of Wal-Mart," Mayor Ryan McCue said. Last winter, when running for mayor, he said Cudahy has an image problem and Wal-Mart would only make it worse.
Yeah? Rusting, abandoned projects don't do much for glamour, either. A Wal-Mart Supercenter - those are the ones with full-size grocery stores - would probably be a rung up the ladder. Of the seven such Supercenters within 40 miles of Milwaukee, every one is in a ZIP code with higher median household income than Cudahy - 38% higher, on average, in the 2000 census.
In the past, McCue's said Wal-Mart doesn't fit in with transforming Cudahy into a high-end, adorable little commuter-rail 'burb. If that's the vision, I don't see where my usual Cudahy shopping haunt, Aldi, fits in. The grocery chain has one of its small, stripped-down stores at Packard Plaza. I shop there a lot because it's cheap, selling house-brand staples and staffing so lean that the managers help clean the place. High end, it's not, but I like it.
But Aldi doesn't seem to arouse bad feelings while Wal-Mart does. A whole complex of retail snobbery and trade angst has arisen around it. "We do not need another outlet for cheap Chinese crap," said one man at a Cudahy meeting this month, neatly packaging the mess of rage.
So Cudahy needs, instead, costlier Chinese crap? The hallmark of Wal-Mart isn't that it sells Chinese goods; it's that it's cheap. The union-funded Economic Policy Institute, fount of anti-Wal-Mart data, can't say whether the chain has more Chinese goods than Target or Kmart. Robert Scott, EPI's point man on the issue, won't venture a guess, but he says his impression is that all discount retailers rely heavily on China.
For that matter, Kohl's imports from China. You just pay more. My wife's $79 iPod was made in China. I bought it at Mayfair Mall. Does that qualify as an outlet for cheap Chinese crap?
"The dividing up of the supply chain makes it harder to target particular countries for your personal boycotts," says Daniel Griswold, a trade scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute. People rail about Wal-Mart, though Griswold says that its niche - bargains - happens to align well with China's specialty, which is low-cost stuff from low-value labor. One of Cudahy's specialties is jet engine parts made by high-value labor in the big Ladish Corp. plant. Ladish sells about half its goods overseas, so you'd think neighbors would see a stake in trade.
Besides, Wal-Mart Supercenters are mainly about groceries. Groceries are mainly domestic. The Wal-Mart milk I bought at a Supercenter in Germantown came from the same Sheboygan plant as the Dean's I got elsewhere. The difference is price.
That's what this really is about: the prices of groceries and the cost of unionized grocery labor. Most traditional grocers are unionized. Wal-Mart, like most other retailers, isn't.
"You can date the union pushback on Wal-Mart to the time they entered the grocery business," says Griswold. One of the biggest anti-Wal-Mart campaigns is sponsored by the United Food and Commercial Workers.
Unions contend that Wal-Mart workers need one, as they're oppressed, though the chain pays wages and benefits on a par with other big discount retailers. If anything, the staff at the Germantown store Sunday seemed preternaturally friendly. The checkers at Aldi are even friendlier, and they're non-union. The chain makes a point of paying well so it can get by with a small, happy, flexible staff. So much for the value to the customer of unionized help.
That may be why the grocery unions aren't touting their merits to customers: The value proposition is hard to see. Instead, these defenders of the working class are in the odd position of making a snobbery attack on a chain that grew by saving working-class customers a fortune.
It is as topsy-turvy an argument as another one you hear, that consumers already have a perfectly sufficient number of choices and so do not need a Wal-Mart that will instantly lure them from those perfectly sufficient choices.
It's all cheap bossy crap, to repurpose a phrase. How about just letting people shop where they want? Wal-Mart appears to have a clue about what customers want. If you don't like it yourself, don't shop there. If you don't like the wages, don't work there.
If your neighbors feel otherwise, that's their business, not yours.
Patrick McIlheran is a Journal Sentinel editorial columnist. His e-mail address is pmcilheran@journalsentinel.com
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