Everyday low prices

It’s hard to imagine that trying to save money while stocking your pantry can be taken as a social statement. But for some people, politics infuses everything.

Walmart is America’s biggest retailer, a weekly staple for tens of millions of consumers. But for several thousand others with a flair for being dramatic and uninformed, Walmart’s wide air-conditioned aisles are just a coal mine with too much fluorescent lighting. Add the inevitable truth that a low-price retailer will attract working-class customers (among plenty of upper-class customers), and for many, Walmart thus becomes Exhibit A in the Everything That’s Wrong With Unbridled Profit display.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’re doing your microscopic part for the Gross Domestic Product by patronizing your local Korean mom-and-pop grocery instead and paying its comically high markups.

For the most part, corporatization is the ultimate result of Adam Smith’s division of labor. Not to go Economics 101 on you, but the gist of the dead Scotsman’s argument is that the best way for an economy to thrive is that everyone do what they’re best at. In the early days of motor vehicles, there were dozens of manufacturers – some with factories not much bigger than a 4-car garage. The manufacturers who figured out how to best cut costs without impacting quality were the ones that survived and flourished. That hired the most people. And whose descendants signed suicidal union contracts that eventually rendered said manufacturers limp, but that’s another story.

Objections to Walmart range from the preposterous to the starkly so. For instance:

a) “They pay slave wages.”

Working at Walmart is voluntary.

a1) “Yes, but they should still pay more.”

Again, voluntary. The biggest economic myth of our lifetimes is that a third party (the union boss, the Department of Labor sycophant, mommy) is entitled to have an opinion on an agreement between two principals – in this case, the employee and the employer. Walmart can offer its employees 4¢/hour if it wants. No applicant has to (or will) accept it.

Besides, you think Walmart’s smaller and less-successful competitors are showering their employees with gold doubloons and rides on the company jet?

Numbers courtesy of PayScale.

b) “Disgusting people shop there.”

Yes, and only neurosurgeons who run ultramarathons shop at other grocery stores. Here’s an upscale lady waiting in line in the pharmacy at Smith’s.

Yes, that’s toilet paper hanging out of her butt. No, it’s unclear that it’s clean. Yes, hopefully it is. No, this doesn’t count as taking pictures of unsuspecting women for salacious reasons. She was the retail equivalent of a green flash – a fleeting phenomenon that a camera had to be quick to catch.

c) The consensus favorite, “They prey on people who don’t know any better.” Including yours truly, apparently.

Shop wherever you want: the very point of capitalism is that you have choices. $400 Cole Haans and $5 shower flip-flops serve the same purpose, as do a new Infiniti QX and a 1985 Hyundai Pony. The richer you are, the more options you have and the greater justification and rationalization there is for spending more.

We get disdainful looks from friends when the topic of willingly shopping at Walmart comes up. We respond that while we’re not poor, we’re not so rich that we can afford to have a grocery-buying philosophy that transcends price, selection, 24-hour convenience and freshness. Not coincidentally, paying a karmic premium is something that few truly rich people do. What, the generic 10-ounce can of cooking spray at Safeway lubricates a skillet that much better than the equivalent Walmart one? Or is it just the intangible feeling of knowing that the extra 19¢ you pay for the former will help provide an Ivy League education for the Safeway employees’ kids, when divided among 197,000 of them?

If you’ve been conditioned to consider Walmart as emblematic of everything evil, a logically sound 800-word screed isn’t going to change your mind. Meanwhile, “Everyday low prices” sounds like a pretty convincing and airtight business strategy to a rational person.

Walmart shopping is a powerful barometer of what some amateur sociologists* have dubbed The Rwanda Test. Here’s how it works: you take a Rwandan, present him with a first-world moral quandary, state your position, then see if he wants to punch you in the face. Complaining that a parolee beat your daughter to death is legitimate. Complaining that the millions of dollars you make playing dress-up leave you unfulfilled is not. The next time you take a stance against America’s largest seller of breakfast cereal (of which there were 220 varieties at my neighborhood store yesterday), think about who’s listening. Then think about the billions of people on the planet for whom refrigerated milk to pour on the cereal is an untold luxury, let alone refrigerated milk that someone went to the trouble of removing the fat from (without increasing the miniscule price of the milk, no less.)

*alright, one friend, who was possibly medicated at the time

**This post is featured in the Carnival of Wealth #8**