Wall-to-Wall Wal-Mart
Catallarchy Blog
The May issue of Esquire has an excellent article about Wal-Mart: “Viva Wal-Mart!” (subscription required). Here are a few excerpts:
EVERYBODY HATES WAL-MART. Recently, three business magazines ran “Wal-Mart is bad” stories. Union employees at three California supermarket chains launched strikes because of the effect Wal-Mart might have when it adds groceries to its West Coast repertoire. Stock analysts can’t imagine how WMT could continue to grow—a third of them rate it a “hold” (analyst slang for “turd”)—and rush to diss the company. And even the government is mad: The Feds recently raided Wal-Mart, looking for illegals. (Shockingly, they discovered a few mixed in among the 1.2 million employees.) How can a store visited by 138 million people each week be so damn . . . unpopular?
The answer, of course, is that it’s not. In fact, it’s wildly popular. Saying that Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer ever doesn’t really tell the story. It is three times bigger than its nearest rival. It generates eight times more revenue than Microsoft. It sells more than Target, Sears, Kmart, JCPenney, Walgreens, and Kroger combined. It has net sales greater than the GDP of Sweden. It sells one out of every three diapers sold in the United States. And the behemoth plans to open a whopping thousand more supercenters in the U. S. alone over the next five years. That’s not because people don’t like to shop there.
Magazine writers, brokerage analysts, and social critics who lament the Wal-Martization of America probably aren’t among the 82 percent of Americans who bought something at Wal-Mart in 2002. Eighty-two percent! Elitists don’t count pennies at Sam’s Club. They don’t care that Wal-Mart’s practices have raised the standard of living for hundreds of millions of people. …
The supercenters presumably have smaller profit margins than retail stores, but that doesn’t bother Wal-Mart. Its inventory-control and information-technology systems are so far ahead of competitors’ that it can enter a business with lower margins if the top line is sufficiently attractive. Wal-Mart, with only ten supercenters in 1991, is now the nation’s largest grocer. (It is also the nation’s third-largest pharmacy.) …
Recently, I heard a professor on a radio program tsk-tsk that Americans don’t appreciate the “real costs” of shopping at Wal-Mart, claiming they suffered from “mass hypnosis by bargain culture.” Yuck. As if Americans need to be hypnotized before paying a dollar for something others sell for two. Look, I live in a quirky old house and shop at charming mom-and-pop stores. These things matter to me. But I can’t stomach the notion that my taste should dictate to others. It’s despicable for elites to decide their cultural values are more meaningful than Wal-Mart’s diaper values.
If one were looking for a shining example of a Randian protagonist, Wal-Mart is it. Wal-Mart is hated for no other reason than being so damn successful. |
