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:: "Exhortations to a more enlightened and rigorous public discourse as regards Wal-Mart", or "Wal-Mart: suck it" ::
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
WaPo: Los Angeles to Wal-Mart: Bigger's Not Always Better:
In a show of hostility toward a company promising to bring hundreds of jobs and rock-bottom consumer prices to poor, blighted neighborhoods, the Los Angeles City Council this month may ban Wal-Mart from opening its popular "supercenters," sprawling new stores that sell discount groceries along with many other bargain goods.
Wal-Mart polarizes everything. Either you only shop there or you never shop there. One town aldermen shows up in the local papers shaking the hand of WM's regional manager and praising the unbeatable pairing of new jobs with lower prices while another raises hell and passes preventative ordinances, casting WM as a retailing pariah. Free market fanatics exalt Sam Walton's genius while anti-globalization proponents spit on his grave. One economic study links his stores to unemployment and strained public services, the other purports hundreds of dollars in savings per family per year (though in this example the two findings may not be mutually exclusive people tend to focus only on the study corroborating their viewpoint).
The architect in me abhors the blight of those big blue boxes with hectares of asphalt for doormats. The economist in me thinks there might be something to say for the efficiency gains inherent in economies of scale such as this. The trust-buster in me is angered by the way WM predatorily stiff-arms wholesalers and OEMs. The conscience of the spoiled upper-middle-class preppy kid in me asks if it's not more than a little smug and elitist to only hate them if you have the luxury of not shopping there. The free-speech crusader in me is driven nigh to the point of blind rage by their prudish desire to capitulate to the highest common denominator of squeamishness. The technophile in me is interested in their pioneering use of RFID. The technophobe in me is terrified stiff by that same practice.
There's also an interesting left v. right dynamic: social welfare dukes it out with unabashed capitalism.
In the end I'm leaning more towards the side of razing every Wal-Mart, recycling the scrap metal to construct a giant futuristic panopticon in Bentonville where every former employee from the management level on up will be incarcerated until such time as they complete a logorrheic treatise on the virtues of modesty, and looting their corporate coffers to fund a massive global campaign to strike any mention of their existence from all historical records public and private. But that's just me.
Posted by morland @ 12:45 AM
:: Comments ::
Hey! How come free-market types are 'fanatics' while those opposed to globalization are awarded the vaguely positive 'proponents.' Can one even be a proponent of an anti-, particularly given the lack of coherent alternatives in that camp? I don't mean to imply that the free-marketeers don't have fanatical fringes; I simply feel that it is my duty to call attention to any deviation from the iron-fisted impartiality of Morland the Blog.
Best,
The Quibbler
Posted by: The Quibbler on February 4, 2004 10:08 AM
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