Wal-Mart Guilt

<http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11449>

Coy Barefoot, AlterNet
September 5, 2001

The guilt hits me as soon as I pull into the parking lot. What am I doing
here? This is wrong. I know better than this.

But I don't let it get to me. I push it away and think of other things,
like how do they stack those red and blue coolers so high, or how much does
Coca Cola pay that race car driver to use his photo on their soda machines?
I try not to think about the array of security cameras scanning the parking
lot for unsavory characters. I look straight ahead and slip through the
front door along with everybody else.

"Welcome to Wal-Mart."

I smile politely at the grinning old woman in tortoise-shell specs whose
job it is to greet people. Truth be told, she doesn't say hello to
everyone, but who can blame her? Sometimes she just nods. Other times she
wears an empty expression, staring into the middle distance. Her job makes
me think of life in the old Soviet Union, when the State used to pay meager
salaries to the elderly for helping people on and off escalators, anything
to claim that it's employing folks, taking care of them.

Everywhere I look is an advertisement for something. Pictures of happy
people enjoying products. Plenty of red, white, and blue. The message is
loud and clear: freedom is about consumption. The more you buy, the freer
you are. It's not about democracy anymore; it's about lower prices.
The "Wal-Mart TV" blathers incessantly, as does the kitsch Muzak (I wonder
if there are subliminal messages in there). And wherever you look up, the
Eye in the Sky is looking down, watching.

Wal-Mart has a nefarious way of making me feel like Winston Smith from
1984. At any minute I expect O'Brien to step out from behind a display of
cheap, sweatshop-produced undershirts and haul me off to the Ministry of
Love for some good old-fashioned rehabilitation.

At other times I'm John Savage from Brave New World, just a few Shakespeare
quotes away from knocking over the display for Britney Spears' new CD. I'd
stomp on the cardboard cutout of Britney and her air-brushed cleavage and
holler: take that sanctimonious grin off your face, you corporatized tart!
As Mr. Savage, I imagine myself running all over Wal-Mart, dumping all the
CDs, paint cans, garden hoses, fishing poles, 2-litres of soda, Go NASCAR
t-shirts, and whatever else I can find into a monstrous pile. I climb to
the top of the pile and cup my hands around my mouth and yell to all the
shoppers:

Wake up! Wake up! Don't you see what's going on here?!
In my fantasy I am met with an constellation of confused stares from Alphas
to Epsilons. They don't get it.

A Wal-Mart fellow wearing one of those elf-like vests tosses a net over me
and I'm left mumbling something like: Take your paws off me, you damn,
dirty ape!

In reality, I don't attract attention to myself. Like a good little
shopper, I get in line like I'm supposed to, pay for my things, and slip
back out into the world with a collection of blue plastic bags clutched in
each hand like so many dead chickens.

Behind me, a mob of zombie shoppers files into the megastore. I'm one of
them, I think. The asphalt stretches to the horizon. Where did I park?
I really should know better. I consider myself an educated progressive. I
read Noam Chomsky, Molly Ivins, and Howard Zinn. I listen to Alternative
Radio. I voted for Nader. I know how Corporate America is having its way
with Lady Liberty.

And I know the truth about Wal-Mart. The biggest private sector employer in
the United States (nearly one million employees, three-fourths of them
women), Wal-Mart is the largest, most profitable retailer in the world
(nearly $4 billion last year).

I know all about the store's predatory pricing: how they like to build two
big-boxes in a small area so they can be their own competition, then
typically close one down, leaving it vacant; how 80 percent of the clothes
they sell are imported, often produced under horrible conditions in
sweatshops in poor countries, despite that "Buy USA" mumbo jumbo and the
over-the-top nationalism; how a study showed that three local jobs are
killed off for every two that Wal-Mart offers; how they hire many workers
on a part-time basis so they can avoid full benefits; and even if they can
get it, the employee health care plan, with its mammoth co-pays, is too
expensive for most of the workers.

I know that a massive federal lawsuit was recently launched against
Wal-Mart alleging rampant discrimination against their female
employees. The case, which potentially represents as many as half a
million women could prove to be the largest discrimination case of its kind
in American history.

I know all of this; and yet still I shop there. The guilt is palpable, yet
for some reason it doesn't stop me.

Capitalism is about real competition, a level playing field, and doing
right by your employees. Capitalism this ain't. The poster child for Big
Business at the Dawn of the Corporate Age, Wal-Mart is something else
entirely something that smacks of Orwell or Huxley, something sinister.
Wal-Mart is not the inspiring story of an entrepreneur who invented a
better mousetrap.

It's the sad story of us mice who know better but walk right into that trap
anyway, thinking only about the cheese, the glorious, glorious cheese.
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Coy Barefoot is a writer based in upstate New York. His next book, Thomas
Jefferson on Leadership, will be released by Penguin Putnam in the spring
of 2002.