Cross-posted at the Writing on the Wal.
Robert Greenwald's Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price is great. You should see it too. Better yet, buy it here and loan your copy to your Wal-Mart shopping friends and family.
I know, it deserves a much better review from me than this, but really I am the worst person in the world to review this movie. Besides seeing it long after it premiered, it was inevitable that it wasn't going to surprise me. OK, the Waltons' bunker in Arkansas in case the apocolypse comes surprised me, but I knew the other arguments already.
What Greenwald has done that nobody but a filmmaker of his talent could do is put these arguments in the words of ordinary people rather than activists. I didn't count the number of self-identified Republicans in the movie, but it seemed very large. When Wal-Mart attacks Greenwald, they are really attacking a cross-section of America.
Another thing that Greenwald did that nobody else can do is get the case against Wal-Mart down to an hour and a half. That is an extraordinary feat of editing, because there is simply so much to blame Wal-Mart for. As you can tell from the title, the movie makes the case that the costs of shopping at Wal-Mart are greater than the benefit of low prices. I've argued for a long time that Wal-Mart's "low prices" are a myth, but I can understand why Greenwald doesn't want to attack that one here with so much other material to cover.
The thing is by doing it this way, the film doesn't explicitly answer the question of why Wal-Mart, of all companies, merits an entire movie. When the filmmakers interview pastors leading community opposition groups near the end of the film you begin to get that answer. Wal-Mart cares about profits not people, they say. But then there are still a lot of other companies that fit that description.
I think an earlier piece of tape from a Lee Scott speech really answers the question of "Why Wal-Mart?" I have to paraphrase again here, but Scott argues at one point that Wal-Mart must stay the course to keep helping its customers, the communities its located in, and, most laughably, its employees. Seriously, has there ever been a company that is so reluctant to admit that it's a for-profit enterprise? Can't they just say, yes we do like to make money? To me, the fact that Wal-Mart is destroying America in our name is why the officers of this company deserve a special place in Hell.
I think this argument is the same as the following:
"Little Red Riding Hood asked me to eat her," the Wolf said at a press conference today. "My services cost less than that of other predators, so she saved lots of money while dying."
"I ate grandma too," the Wolf admitted. "She was old and going to die anyway, so I figured it might as well be me to finish her off."
"I realize that Grandma's house is now vacant," the Wolf explained, "but in order to help the future people who I plan on eating, I'm moving to a bigger house two miles away. My friend Weasel is a licensed real estate agent and will make every effort to see that Grandma's house is sold quickly."
"Oh yeah," the Wolf remembered, "I want a big property tax break on my new place of business, otherwise I'll be taking my population control services to the next town over."
JR