One day when I was in high school, my dad brought home a blue hippopotamus. He told me that it is a copy of an Egyptian piece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and that
his name is William. I found out later that William is actually the unofficial mascot of the museum.
Later that evening, my mother told me that this was a big day because Dad never bought anything for himself. She explained that Dad remembered seeing William in the Met when he was a kid so this was very special to him. William is now very special to me, because he was so special to my father.
Don't get the wrong idea about Dad. He wasn't a cheap man. His idea of a night out was at the $25/plate French restaurant in town, while my brother and I just wanted to go to Friendly's. And it's not that he never bought anything. One time, the family got a new car and new refrigerator on the same day! It's just that Dad was a man who didn't need material objects (besides books) to make him happy.
Which brings me to Wal-Mart. Thanks to
the Boxtank , I can repeat to you the story of a recent Wal-Mart opening in Shanghai:
"This is chaos, just utter chaos. I've never seen so many people show up for a store opening and we're struggling to make sure things remain stocked," store assistant Yang Yihua shouted above the cacophony, as shoppers grabbed cans of porridge from her hands before they made it to the shelves.
Customers chanting "cheap, cheap" milled around employees...
[emphasis in original]
Isn't that a creepy image? It reminds me of something from "Night of the Living Dead." Think scenes like this only happens at Wal-Marts in China? If so, you'd be wrong. This is from the BBC in 2003:
A US store chain has apologised to a woman knocked unconscious as shoppers rushed for a sale of DVD players.
Patricia Van Lester was knocked to the ground in the frenzied dash for a $29 DVD player at a Wal-Mart Super Center in Orange City, Florida.
The 41-year-old had been first in the queue when the post-Thanksgiving sale opened at 6am local time on Friday.
"She got pushed down, and they walked over her like a herd of elephants," said her sister, Linda Ellzey.
Paramedics called to the store found Van Lester unconscious on top of a DVD player, surrounded by shoppers seemingly oblivious to her, Mark O'Keefe, a spokesman for EVAC Ambulance, told Associated Press.
[emphasis added]
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Wal-Mart is the cause of this kind of behavior, but they do encourage it; first and foremost by their constant fixation on low prices to the exclusion of almost everything else. But then there are also more subtle ways that Wal-Mart gets its materialist message across. Here's Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott speaking at Town Hall Los Angeles earlier this year:
"[O]ur success comes from delivering quality merchandise at everyday low prices in ways that raise the standard of living of the millions of Americans who shop in our stores each year...
Need some examples? $1.86 may not sound like much to you, but at Wal-Mart it buys a family two loaves of bread instead of one. $37 doesn't sound like much money - yet at Wal-Mart it well get a family a darned good DVD player."
Notice that Scott expects all those savings to still be cycled back to Wal-Mart. Buy two loaves of bread; you can afford it! Whether the family actually needs two loaves of bread is completely beside the point. At Wal-Mart, savings are meant to spent rather than saved.
In essence they are saying that the American standard of living depends on how much you own, not how happy you are or how much time you have to spend with your family. When did the American standard of living change from being measured by how good we have it to being measured by how much we have? They are not the same thing. Shop at Wal-Mart because of their allegedly low prices and you are buying into their mindset.
Lee Scott and Wal-Mart think that a $37 DVD player is some kind of service to humanity. I call it the natural result of mass production. Manufacturers produce huge volumes of stuff in order to get the price down and HAVE to discount it in order make money. This is their business plan, not a public service. Wal-Mart's financial health depends upon Americans getting hooked on what the singer Nanci Griffith once called "unnecessary plastic items."
And what about those two loaves of bread? Assuming one loaf of bread is enough for your family, are you going to spend your money on another loaf or on a giant bag of Cheez Doodles? In his July 8th column, Paul Krugman quoted a magazine published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on obesity:
"Americans' rapid weight gain may have nothing to do with market failure," the article says. "It may be a rational response to changing technology and prices. ... If consumers willingly trade off increased adiposity for working indoors and spending less time in the kitchen as well as for manageable weight-related health problems, then markets are not failing."
Or as Krugman explained this argument, "because people freely choose obesity in a free market, it must be a good thing." That is so sick it just left me speechless. Obesity is materialism expressed in food rather than objects. As Wal-Mart sells both food and objects all over the country, it is easy to see them as a symbol of this new gluttony. Dieticians who aren't Republican ideologues tell us to eat healthy, not to eat more. Why shouldn't we shop healthy too? A discriminating consumer (like my Dad was) is Wal-Mart's worst customer.
Wal-Mart's version of the American standard of living is literally killing this country, physically and mentally. Yet Wal-Mart is ready and willing to offer every American the means of their own destruction. But you have free will. You can still turn down them down.
JR