Sam's Choice, Our Consequences

On Thursday night, bethje and I watched Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. By a bizarre coincidence, it turned out that the most recent episode of Bullshit! was also about Wal-Mart, and mostly took the opposite position, even mentioning and criticizing the creator of the documentary. So I guess I've now heard both sides. {g} I probably agreed more with the documentary, although I had gripes with some aspects of it. It didn't really help that the Bullshit! episode was one of the ones that seemed to be of the "let's beat up on the idiots who take the opposite position, and ignore anyone who might actually have a valid counter-argument" variety, which are usually the weakest episodes. Mind you, they DID find some idiots, who stereotyped all of the customers and employees of Wal-Mart. That seems to me to be largely comparable to the morons who complain to the teenager behind the counter at McDonald's about the destruction of the rain forest. Yeah, I'm sure that minimum-wage employee was the one responsible for that. I don't know. When I go to a discount store, it'll more often be Target or Kmart. I'm not sure how evil they are, but Target is a lot prettier than your average discount store, and I have a weird loyalty to Kmart due to going there so often as a kid. (I might well have ended up with the same loyalty to Jamesway, had they not gone out of business.) I've never particularly cared for Wal-Mart. The one I go to most often always seems to be understaffed, with less than half of the registers open no matter how many customers are waiting, and pallets of unopened boxes lying in the aisles. But I'll shop there occasionally, and I don't really condemn other people for doing so. For many people, it's hard to find or afford other places.

Much of the documentary was about how Wal-Mart makes people work long hours under crappy conditions for little money, and doesn't really care about their employees. While I believe this is true, how many businesses nowadays really DO care? In this respect, I suppose you could say that Wal-Mart isn't technically any more evil than any other retailer, just better at it. If American businesses are allowed to pay people way less than a living wage, do you think they're going to NOT take advantage of this? But The High Cost of Low Price went on to mention other problems with Wal-Mart, including racism, sexism, clean water law violations, lack of security in their parking lots, and being anti-union to the point that they actually spy on their employees. One of the things that I found most interesting, however, was how they'll encourage their employees to go on welfare, and accept grants from local governments. If Wal-Mart is really capitalism at its best, as some people claim, why are they taking advantage of so many socialist-type programs? Not that I (unlike Penn and Teller) am opposed to socialism per se. The free market is good as far as it goes, but unchecked laissez-faire capitalism seems to me to be a largely self-destructive system. I'm in favor of more government regulation of business. But then, since the government seems to be largely in the pockets of big business anyway, maybe that wouldn't really make much difference. But when administrations like Reagan's and the current President's try to deregulate everything and give tax cuts to mega-corporations, allegedly trusting that they're going to use all the extra money to "stimulate the economy," that's just so ridiculously transparent.