Because You Never Asked

(11/09)

     Anyone using their visual capacities to stare at a television in America these days will soon realize that the beast of retail has been inundating the airwaves with its latest advertising campaign. Walmart’s clout in the world is so gargantuan, it almost naturally invites both suspicion and resentment as to how it has cornered such a huge percentage of the world’s consumptive habit. This suspicion has spawned a whole host of negative studies detailing the unsavory aspects of its corporate personality, including its less than admirable labor practices, its “Big Box” invasion of small town America which has left the urban cores of so many picturesque places dead or barely breathing, amongst other things. This has put Walmart in a perpetual public relations battle in defense of its solid citizen corporate reputation. Its primary defense is that, “yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah, we’ve heard it all before, but the bottom line is that we sell everything cheaper, so rotate on that”.

     This has proven very effective, and its latest advertising blitz plays heavily upon this theme, perhaps more than ever. We’ll get back to this later.

     (Just as an aside, the town where I live has a decent cross section of corporate retail outlets, including Sears, K-Mart, CVS, Walgreen’s, Home Depot, Office Max, Radio Shack, Ross, Champ’s, yadda-yadda. There is no Walmart. And yet, the bombardment of Walmart television advertising could be compared to what England endured in WWII, while the outlets actually doing business here seem to have no or little air force at all. What this says about the omnipotence of Walmart’s commercial power is unclear to me, but I’ll let the reader chew it over anyway.)

     The art of lying, in the socio-economic system currently pinning the world to the mat, has reached its most sublime levels ever (see essays “The Demoralized Zone” and “Industrial Size Lying”, amongst others). The competitive persuasion needed to win over a consumer has created a marketing industry far larger than the industrial mechanisms needed to produce the products. It is not the job of this industry to tell the truth. At times, the truth and the persuasion coincide, but that is totally coincidental and not relevant. The persuasion is the only thing relevant.

     The best kinds of lies are ones where nothing untrue has actually been spoken. This kind of lie will focus on a very constricted space of reality and say something obviously true within the confines of this limited space. This narrow little truth --- a “little white truth”, if you will --- is used as a diversion or smokescreen meant to focus one’s attention away from the Big Lie the liar wants to go unnoticed. The consumer who is the target of such tactics only has direct access to the narrow little space where the little white truth is penned up. The only data available to this consumer corroborates what the advertiser is saying. But it ignores a much wider range of factors this consumer has no access to, or, due to its complexity, has neither the time nor intellect to unravel. Once unraveled, the little white truth becomes a big, fat lie.

     I will now try to unravel it.

     Walmart’s latest Pavlovian exercise in mind control is an excellent example of this. Obviously, in its perpetual public relations battles against those criticizing its business practices, the low cost to the consumer has been its most powerful weapon of justification. Its latest round of advertising makes cost its only justification. This is where they’ve decided to dig in. This is their Maginot Line. Nobody will ever pierce this low cost entrenchment.

     These new commercials, after a more general trumpeting of this low cost persona, claims the average family can save $3,000 a year shopping at Walmart. How such a figure is arrived to as well as its veracity, is always k-ching for thought, but let’s give our upstanding corporate citizen the benefit of the doubt. At the very least, we can all agree Walmart does sell cheaper than others, so ---

     within this narrow terrain of operations, that being retail cost, the advertiser has spoken no falsehoods.

     But there is a much wider range of factors to take into account. Walmart is only showing us the bright side of the moon. It wants us to not only forget the dark side, but to not even acknowledge it has ever existed. If the dark side actually did not exist, the moon would lose its equilibrium and spiral out of control. The same would happen to Walmart if its dark side, the side they do not want us to know about, did not exist.

     What is this dark side, the side that keeps planet Walmart in orbit, which makes it function in such a profitable way?

     When one talks about “savings”, retail cost is only one side of the coin. The other side is purchasing power; how much money do I have to spend? What percentage of my income is being used to buy the mundane things I buy at Walmart? How much is left for other things or savings? Over the last 25 years or so, the time frame where Walmart has conquered the world and the current form of neo-liberal, “savage capitalism” has put the world in a headlock that has brought it to the brink of disaster, to claim income has kept up with prices, even in Walmart, would be a very hard sell. This is especially true amongst the average Walmart shopper who works for a living, earns a wage, gets a salary, sits in the bleachers at Wrigley Field, and did not invest with Bernie Madoff (Walmart is one of the demographic centers of “average”).

     If, over this quarter century of personal fiscal struggle, the $3,000 Walmart claims to save you annually is offset by a $4,000 loss in purchasing power --- do the math. (These figures are hypothetical, but make the point).

     “But gee, we’d be even worse off without them. Can we blame Walmart for this?”

     Quite frankly, the answer is yes.

     Walmart is not only the world’s biggest retail business, the last I heard, it was the world’s biggest corporation! To think a business enterprise of these dimensions could be a benign force in how the world functions would be something like believing the world is flat. Walmart has been a trend setter in developing the kind of capitalism now operating globally. Although there are some commendable aspects of its business model that do lower costs for everyone --- primarily its distribution systems --- this is not the foundation of its success. That resides in a third world labor force, a labor pool not employed by Walmart (what, me worry?), that makes almost every product you buy in the “Big Box” (see essay “Walmart or The Stupid Economy”). It is a labor pool earning a wage an average American family would have trouble living on for hours, let alone provide a decent living. It is a business model that has sucked good paying manufacturing jobs out of the “homeland”. It has made an end run around unions and more or less defeated them. Its own employees are used in such a way that many benefits that used to accompany such work have been erased from the blackboard. Undoubtedly, other corporate retailers are or will begin to emulate this business model pioneered by Walmart. This has a ripple effect through the global economy that depresses wages in the developed world as well. It is ironic ---

     that Ronald Reagan, one of the original heroes of this economic model, asked, in getting himself elected, what is the proper question to ask right now,: “are you better off now than 4 years ago?” All Walmart consumers should be asking themselves if they are better off now than before the days of Walmart. For most of these consumers, the answer would probably be no.

     The little white truth becomes a big, fat lie.