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labor standards and stifling the middle-class aspirations of workers everywhere. |
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Using its sheer size, market clout, access to capital, and massive advertising budget, the company also is squeezing out competitors and forcing its remaining rivals to adopt its price-is-everything approach. |
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Even the big boys like Toys R Us and Kroger are daunted by the company's brutish power, saying they're compelled to slash wages and search the globe for sweatshop suppliers in order to compete in the downward race to match Wal-Mart's prices. |
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How high a price are we willing to pay for Wal-Mart's "low-price" model? This outfit operates with an avarice, arrogance, and ambition that would make Enron blush. It hits a town or city neighborhood like a retailing neutron bomb, sucking out the economic vitality and all of the local character. And Wal-Mart's stores now have more kill-power than ever, with its Supercenters averaging 200,000 square feet-the size of more than four football fields under one roof! These things land splat on top of any community's sense of itself and devour local business. |
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By slashing its retail prices way below cost when it enters a community, Wal-Mart can crush our groceries, pharmacies, hardware stores, and other retailers, then raise its prices once it has monopoly control over the market. |
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But, say apologists for these Big-Box megastores, at least they're creating jobs. Wrong. By crushing local businesses, this giant eliminates three decent jobs for every two Wal-Mart jobs that it creates-and a store full of part-time, poorly paid employees hardly builds the family wealth necessary to sustain a community's middle-class living standard. |
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Indeed, Wal-Mart operates as a massive wealth extractor. Instead of profits staying in town to be reinvested locally, the money is hauled off to Bentonville, either to be used as capital for conquering yet another town or simply to be stashed in the family vaults (the Waltons, by the way, just bought the biggest bank in Arkansas). |
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It's our world |
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Why should we accept this? Is it our country, our communities, our economic destinies-or theirs? Wal-Mart's radical remaking of our labor standards and our local economies is occurring mostly without our knowledge or consent. Poof-there goes another local business. Poof-there goes our middle-class wages. Poof-there goes another factory to China. No one voted for this . . . but there it is. While corporate ideologues might huffily assert that customers vote with their dollars, it's an election without a campaign, conveniently ignoring that the public's "vote" might change if we knew the real cost of Wal-Mart's "cheap" goods—and if we actually had a chance to vote. |
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Much to the corporation's consternation, more and more communities are learning about this voracious powerhouse, and there's a rising civic rebellion against it. Tremendous victories have already been won as citizens from Maine to Arizona, from the Puget Sound to the Gulf of Mexico, have organized locally and even statewide to thwart the expansionist march of the Wal-Mart juggernaut. |
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Wal-Mart is huge, but it can be brought to heel by an aroused and organized citizenry willing to confront it in their communities, the workplace, the marketplace, the classrooms, the pulpits, the legislatures, and the voting booths. Just as the Founders rose up against the mighty British trading companies, so we can reassert our people's sovereignty and our democratic principles over the autocratic ambitions of mighty Wal-Mart. |
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More of Jim Hightower's writing can be found in his monthly newletter, The Hightower Lowdown.
For more information, see
www.jimhightower.com |
