Cross-posted at the Writing on the Wal.
So Wal-Mart's making political-style commercials. I am not surprised as they already went negative weeks ago. I'm also not surprised that the content of the commercials seems as deceptive as anything Karl Rove could imagine:
"Our low prices save the average working family $2,300 a year," says the narrator of one ad. "Which buys a lot of things -- and a whole lot of freedom."
You can buy freedom at Wal-Mart? Who knew? Do they make it with Chinese slave labor?
Seriously, this is typical of a line of argument I've read many times now. Here's the occasionally amusing
Ben Stein's take on the same idea:
The truth is that Wal-Mart is a major blessing for most Americans who live close enough to one to shop there and for the people who work at them. My smart friend C.L. Werner in Omaha made the point really clearly. When a Wal-Mart opens in a town, he said, it's as if everyone in the town got a raise.
No Ben, it's not. If you get a raise, you can spend the money anywhere. In order to get the Wal-Mart wage premium you have to shop at Wal-Mart. [Yes, I know that the savings from Wal-Mart supposedly extend to price cuts from its competitors, but limiting your purchases to goods in direct competition with Wal-Mart is almost as bad as shopping at Wal-Mart quality-wise and certainly isn't "freedom."]
It's as if Wal-Mart is the new company store (the only place workers could shop a hundred years ago when their employers paid them in scrip). Shop there, says the management class, because you're not worth any better.
Let's look at one product at Wal-Mart that I've covered extensively before: Meat. At Wal-Mart there are no butchers (a few of them at a store in Texas decided they wanted a union once, so Wal-Mart canned them all nationwide). Therefore, all you can buy there is case-ready meat, which means you have no idea what the quality is before you take it home. Unlike Burger King, special orders do upset them so at Wal-Mart you have to take what you can get. If it smells funny when you open it, you're out of luck. Don't working-class customers deserve the services of a meat cutter? Not at Wal-Mart, they don't.
Coincidentally, I've been reading a terrific book called Revolution at the Table by Harvey Levenstein. In it, he explains the work of the turn of the Twentieth Century chemist Wilbur O. Atwater who argued:
that the distinction between cheap food and expensive food disintegrated under chemical analysis. Whatever food they come from, there was little perceptible difference in the way carbohydrates, fats, and most proteins were metabolized by the human body. The important thing was not, as most Americans thought, to ingest as large or small an amount of undifferentiated food as the body required, but to eat only as much of the necessary nutrients to perform their specific tasks.
The Boston businessman Edward Atkinson read Atwater's work and concluded:
[I]f workers could be shown how to spend less on food, a larger share of their wages could be devoted to better housing and clothes. In this way, the slums could be cleared, ragged children could be dressed, and workers could live a decent life without the need for raising wages.
[Emphasis added]
I'm beginning to wonder if history is repeating itself here. Are Conservative Republicans and crazy Libertarians rallying around Wal-Mart because they think that Wal-Mart's cheap plastic crap and fatty meat keeps pressure down on wages from the labor side? Consider the first line of a story from the NYT a few days ago:
With the economy beginning to slow, the current expansion has a chance to become the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages for most workers.
Perhaps Wal-Mart is encouraging this trend in two ways: 1) By discouraging unionization in retail and, by example, other industries. And 2) By keeping the working class more satisfied with the lousy wages they have. But the $64,000 question is, "Are American workers really satisfied collecting their wage increase at Wal-Mart?" The Republicans seem to think so.
And they call us elitists?
JR