This is just a project written for my Sociology of Economics class. Hiding the entire thing behind a break because it's fairly irrelevant to the fiction-centric nature of this blog, but I wanted to throw it on the interwebs.
Department stores are nothing new. Entities such as Target, K-Mart, Sears, Wal-Mart, and so on, have been around since Bainbridge (now John Lewis Newcastle) first opened its doors in England in 1838. Since then, they have grown exponentially in size and function, with today’s department stores offering services as varied as eye care, laundry services, and grocery. Perhaps more importantly, the department store has become ubiquitous, existing seemingly everywhere a large number of human beings live in a reasonably well developed society.
Department stores are nothing new. Entities such as Target, K-Mart, Sears, Wal-Mart, and so on, have been around since Bainbridge (now John Lewis Newcastle) first opened its doors in England in 1838. Since then, they have grown exponentially in size and function, with today’s department stores offering services as varied as eye care, laundry services, and grocery. Perhaps more importantly, the department store has become ubiquitous, existing seemingly everywhere a large number of human beings live in a reasonably well developed society.
Without delving into any serious social or economic research on the matter, the key characteristics of department stores seem to be convenience and price. Convenience falls naturally from having a single store that contains everything one might reasonably need to purchase—but how are department stores able to offer the prices they do? Wal-Mart, especially, is renowned for offering dirt-cheap products to its customers. Incidentally, Wal-Mart is easily the most successful department store in the world, with new stores frequently cropping up both in the U.S. and abroad. Their success is no mystery—while their convenience is debatable, their low prices are not.
That said, Wal-Mart has become the poster-boy for the evils of corporate America, in particular the phenomenon known as globalization. Globalization, in a nutshell—a severely shortened, extremely brief nutshell—refers to the spread of production across the globe. Corporations purchase goods from factories in nations where wages are astronomically low, conditions are poor, and the price of goods are rock bottom. An easy example of this is the “Made in China” sticker found on a great deal of household goods, ranging from vacuum cleaners to televisions to shoes.
What’s bad about this process? What’s good? And where does that leave Wal-Mart? To answer these questions, among others, let’s turn to two documentaries, filmed separately and released on the same day—Ron Galloway’s Why Wal*Mart Works: And Why That Drives Some People C-R-A-Z-Y and Robert Greenwald’s WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price.
The two films are very similar in presentation. Neither of them bears much in the way of flair, both choosing to skimp entirely on any narration and to focus exclusively on interviews. Because of this, each film boils down to a series of talking heads, and the quality of these films is reliant entirely on which heads are talking.
This is where things get tricky. As a list of grievances against the colossal corporation, The High Cost of Low Price functions effectively. The movie relies entirely on sentiment, featuring relatable tragedies, such as abused employees, displaced shop owners, and disenchanted managerial staff. In this way, the movie’s focus become quickly clear—this is not a film that features “experts”, rattling off facts and statistics about the global impact of Wal-Mart’s policies. It contains no single individual who is a professor of anything. It neglects entirely the notion of professional discourse in favor of the human impact of seeing an endless stream of downtrodden individuals.
The movie goes so far as to attack Wal-Mart for crimes committed in its parking lots. While it may truly be a valid point that a security camera with nobody watching it is fairly useless, this accusation does little to address why Wal-Mart, in particular, is at fault—surely, Target, K-Mart, Best Buy, and many others have had similar issues, and none of these chains are prone to hiring armed guards to wander their parking lots at night, either.
Still, Greenwald’s film does manage to present some legitimate concerns. The stories from employees, especially those who worked in management, are particularly bothersome. As viewers, we are presented with the following assertions: that Wal-Mart offers inferior health care and systematically encouraged its employees to seek government health care instead of their own, that it vastly underpays its employees for their hard work, that it turns a blind eye to blatant racism and sexism, that it spends millions of dollars on preventing employees to unionize, and that it threatens employees into working unpaid hours.
Other grievances are far more sentimental. Thanks to its outsourcing and low overhead, Wal-Mart is purportedly able to out-compete any of the small, family-run businesses in any of the cities it moves into. We are treated to several heart-breaking stories featuring elderly shop owners forced to close down decades-old family businesses because they have been undercut by the local Wal-Mart. We are shown that Wal-Mart, a business with billions of dollars of revenue yearly, receives government subsidies—while independent, family-run business does not. And we are led to believe, largely by implication, that the loss of family business is bad for the United States as a whole.
So, what does Galloway’s work have to say about this? In truth, not much. Rather than focus on directly counter-attacking the assertions of The High Cost of Low Price, this film centers around a high-brow, professional view of Wal-Mart as a whole. In this way, it both proves and disproves its point—that Wal-Mart is just another corporation, and that it has been singled out simply for being the most successful of the lot.
To start with, Why Wal*Mart Works is almost entirely composed of expert opinions. Professors of economics, government health experts, and more are referenced. In fact, as if to set tone, one of the earliest scenes of the film features a man in a suit explaining that America’s “social mood” has grown increasingly negative over the past decade, and that as a whole, it has become somehow fashionable to be fearful of, and angry about, corporate success.
The film goes on from there to present some very competent arguments. Perhaps the most useful with direct reference to the previous film is that of a health care expert, who describes why Wal-Mart’s health care, despite allegations, is surprisingly good. Evidently, relative to other department stores, Wal-Mart offers more coverage at a lower price. What’s more, where most businesses present their employees with one or two plans to choose from, Wal-Mart offers eight. This is a damningly rational approach to a topic that has been the subject of so much ire, both inside of The High Cost and elsewhere.
The argument about small businesses being pushed out is addressed in a number of ways. One of them was clunky—in a series of interviews, one of the directors asserts to a small handful of young men and woman, all vocally anti-establishment, that the tiny, quirky specialty stores they cling so tightly to would not exist had Wal-Mart not pushed more mainstream grocers, hardware stores, and so on out of the downtown area. He asserts that their culture is largely a product of Wal-Mart’s success, but offers no voice other than his own to hold this argument.
More convincing is the expert who discusses the impact of Wal-Mart’s success in China. The point is raised that a farmer, who works his or her fields in rural China for a month, will generate roughly $40 for all his or her hard work. The vast majority of factory workers in China are individuals who have left the countryside to come to the city and find work that pays better. In fact, the average factory worker, according to this man, earns roughly $120 a month—three times as much.
Is that really so bad? Who loses, in this situation? American factory workers, evidently, along with the owners of the private businesses that Wal-Mart’s prices push under. Yet the number of people harmed by this process is vastly outweighed by the number of people helped, and one is left to wonder if Wal-Mart is doing something good not just for American consumers, but for Chinese workers.
So, this still leaves the most important question—is Wal-Mart bad? Is it really the terrible, soulless corporation it has been made out to be?
Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Certainly, enough people have been wronged by Wal-Mart. The interviews with quite a few former Wal-Mart managers, district managers, and even a man who travels the world back and forth to represent the American branch over in China, provide some very harrowing stories about the levels Wal-Mart is willing to stoop to. Countless angry faces, many of them women and minorities, are all too willing to share stories of how hurt they have been.
Therein lies one of the problems with Why Wal-Mart Works. In choosing to take the academic route, the film both gains a cool rationality that asserts some very compelling arguments, and loses the intimate experience with the corporation that makes High Costs’ assertions so unsettling. True, we are treated to the story of how one branch of Wal-Mart helped restore a city in the wake of a natural disaster, saving hundreds of lives in the process. We are even given testimony by one old Caucasian woman who has been treated very nicely, and one young African American who feels so strongly about her (managerial) position with Wal-Mart that she is driven to tears discussing it.
Yet the majority of the film hangs on the shoulders of a small handful of white, middle-and-upper class men. Every expert presented is a white man in a suit, who works in an office studying social and economic events from afar. While their race and sex do little to dampen the legitimacy of their testimony, the film’s incapability of producing a single minority expert raises an important question: who do we side with? The massive public outcry, or the handful of suits insisting that such outcry is silly and misplaced?
Perhaps the answer isn’t as clear as either documentary would like its viewers to believe. Surely, the rational arguments of Why Wal*Mart Works are important. After all, how many people have saved countless dollars shopping at Wal-Mart? Dollars that, in today’s economy, may mean the difference between going hungry and feeding their children? Yet is it okay for an African American man to feel he has to quit his job because, despite constant formal complaints, the associates threatening to lynch him have not been fired? And when a hardworking female associate is told by her manager that “people like you” will never climb the corporate ladder, isn’t there a real problem to address?
Both films together, then, help to highlight the real truth of the problem. Wal-Mart is bad, but good people still benefit from its existence. The moral complexities of such an entity are incredibly difficult to boil down into a simple, coherent argument, and the result is a public outcry that is, perhaps, misguided and disproportional to the actual truth of the problem. Wal-Mart is not alone in its shortcomings, and many of the assertions made about its policies could be applied to other corporations, perhaps even more effectively. That does not, however, excuse it from turning a blind eye to the suffering of so many people under its own careful watch. A corporation capable of calculating the exact profit generated from a particular unit of shelf space has little business claiming ignorance to the difficulties faced by its own associates—the people that make Wal-Mart work.
Here is food for thought—Ron Galloway later recanted his pro-Wal-Mart position when the corporation imposed wage caps in 2006. Evidently, a few years prior to this action, Wal-Mart hired a slew of employees under the promise that no wage caps would ever halt their upward progress along their pay scale. Wal-Mart’s justification, according to the document dispersed to its managers to aid them in dealing with their disgruntled employees? That Wal-Mart is a company based on change, and that wage caps are a reflection of that ethic.
If even Wal-Mart’s staunchest supporters are turning against it, should we?
Perhaps more importantly—can we afford to?
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