VACANT VISION
By RYAN SAGER
NEW YORK Post Opinion
November 4, 2005
IN the closing minutes of the new documentary "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," triumphant activists proudly point to vacant lots in their various communities. Their message: They were going to build a Wal-Mart here, but we stopped it.
Vacant lots. What a victory.
And what a perfect symbol of what's wrong not just with the anti-Wal-Mart ideologues, but the whole anti-development, anti-globalization, anti-everything left.
"High Cost," which opens today in New York City and Los Angeles, is only a documentary in the most generous sense. It's more propaganda from Robert Greenwald, director of "Outfoxed" (which took aim at Fox News, a corporate cousin of The Post). As Greenwald explained at a Union Square screening of the new film on Tuesday, it's meant as a recruitment tool, made to order, for the various unions who are launching a war against the vigorously non-union Wal-Mart.
But you don't have to like Wal-Mart to realize that its enemies are driven by faith, not facts.
For instance, the first 10-minute segment in "High Cost" — about a hardware store closing down in Middlefield, Ohio, when Wal-Mart moves in — takes such a, shall we say, relaxed approach to the truth it's laughable.
What's more, the real story proves exactly the opposite of the point Greenwald is trying to make.
The narrative revolves around Don Hunter, who founded H&H Hardware in 1962 and passed the business onto his son Jon in 1996. As Greenwald tells the story, everything was running smoothly until Wal-Mart's bulldozers rampaged through the town — "Wal-Mart descends on Middlefield" the titles scream — destroying every small business in sight.
One (huge, gaping, insurmountable) problem: As first reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, H&H Hardware closed down nearly three months before Wal-Mart opened one its "supercenters" around the corner.
"I think Wal-Mart hurts a lot of small businesses," Don Hunter told the Plain Dealer earlier this month. "But it's not the reason we closed. Absolutely not." Jon Hunter, according to the paper, told the filmmaker not to tie H&H's closing to Wal-Mart's opening.
Greenwald's spokesmen replied to the Plain Dealer story by pointing out that the movie isn't specific about the timeline — but that's sort of the point. The story only works if the facts are obscured beyond recognition.
The real story is that H&H had been having financial difficulties for a few years before Wal-Mart arrived in mid-May of 2005. It closed down in February. And only five months after Wal-Mart arrived, a new hardware store opened in H&H's old location.
Jay Negin, owner of the new store, Middlefield Hardware (an ACE franchise, like H&H had been), talked to me yesterday about the film and his new store.
"In all honesty . . . it was not Wal-Mart," Negin said of the closing of H&H. "We knew this was a gold mine."
Negin's store had its grand opening on Oct. 23, and since then he says he's had 4,500 customers through his register, which he considers great traffic for his location, serving a mix of Amish and "Yankees."
Negin's no Wal-Mart booster. "I am not a Wal-Mart shopper," he tells me. "I don't agree with their employment practices."
But he says he wishes Wal-Mart well. The stores certainly compete (Wal-Mart's only about two miles away), but he's confident his store can find its niche. People won't come to his store for groceries or clothes, but he expects they won't go to Wal-Mart for their hardware needs.
His is "a true hardware store," he says. "We excel in personal service." Wal-Mart may sell some hardware, but it's Negin's store that will cut and thread pipes, install locks and make keys, repair chainsaws and do various other specialized things that a multi-national corporation just isn't interested in doing.
"The community so far has embraced us," he says. "I'm not dead. Hell, we're bigger than we were before!"
In Greenwald's defense, there are almost certainly small businesses that have taken far more direct hits from Wal-Mart. He just didn't find one of them.
What he wasn't even looking for in Middlefield, however, is the story of just how dynamic the free market really is. In Greenwald's world, every business that closes is a tragedy and every low price conceals a low wage.
But the real world doesn't look like that. Businesses close all the time — just as trees fall in the woods, making room for new, younger, stronger growth. And as prices fall, everyone's quality of life improves as it becomes easier and easier to afford life's daily essentials.
A vacant lot may represent a temporary victory for unions trying to control where people are allowed to shop, but it also reveals an empty philosophy, offering little more than a pathological fear of change.
E-mail: rsager@nypost.com
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