HEATHER MALLICK
Cheap and convenient come at a cost
April 28, 2008
Last night I dreamt I went to Wal-Mart again. And I was happy there.
This worried me because the day before, I had gone to a Wal-Mart for the first time in my life, my real life, and I was badly frightened. I was checking out the store — sorry, industrial hangar exoskeleton — because developers want to build a Wal-Mart near my sort of cute, ramshackle, little-shops Toronto neighbourhood and I was there to see my future.
As it turned out, my future was my past. This Wal-Mart, a "Supercentre" the size of the Bermuda Triangle in a dire area called Scarborough, had flung me back in time to my youth.
Wal-Mart is a place I know in my soul. It is every Zellers in every small town I ever lived in; it is Woolworths in Kapuskasing writ large. (Note: the Woolworths in Kap is now a Wal-Mart.) I was thrilled to shop in cheap stores for tarty ratty clothes when I was young — I can still remember every polyester garment I ever purchased in Reitman's — but that's the joy of being a teenager in a small town. Everything is thrilling by definition. On weekends, we'd gulp homemade Harvey Wallbangers and vomit in a snowbank; that was our idea of a night out.
But the fact that something is pleasing to you says more about you than the thing itself. The fact that Wal-Mart is cheap ("Save money, live better!") and convenient (18,000 parking spaces! Free!) are two puny words against the torrent of invective I and any other Canadian interested in airy concepts like "quality of life" could instantly pour upon Wal-Mart.
I am not alone in this: over the years many Canadians, from Halifax to Vancouver, have been vocal about which neighbourhoods do and don't want to plant a Wal-Mart.
The price of cheapness
Wal-Mart is a giant American corporation (2006 revenue of $315 billion) run out of Arkansas that devastates every town and neighbourhood in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Britain where it plants a store. I urge you to watch Robert Greenwald's famed 2005 documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price to understand why cheap and convenient are adjectives of condemnation, not praise.
Yes, Wal-Mart is cheap. CEO Lee Scott's statement in the 2008 annual report is so obsessive about prices that he sounds like Howard Hughes on germs or Lou Dobbs on Mexicans. Here's a sampling of his phrases: "affordable, money-saving, price-leading, price-reduced, dollar-saving, budget-stretching, ends-meeting, driving down costs, reducing costs, saving money, spending less, low prices, price-leading, reduce prices, less money, save money, on par with price, lower costs." That's not cheap, that's psychotic.
I love to shop and I do shop carefully. But as I wander around Wal-Mart, it becomes apparent that their prices are low because much of their merchandise is — cheap. Whatever happened to "well-made" or "worthwhile"? Their own-brand clothing, curiously called "George," is made of thin fabric harsh on my fingertips, badly shaped and sewn, and style-free. Gap and H&M sell cheap clothes too, but they aren't this badly constructed, and those two chains make an effort at rendering the customer physically appealing to fellow human beings. George clothing actively works in the other direction.
Disposable goods
I balk at buying cut flowers, which are farmed overseas under dreadful conditions. I buy silk fakes instead. In Wal-Mart, the artificial flowers are stunning, so amateurish that they don't resemble flowers, more like polyester extrusions. Their colours are previously unknown to humanity and the petals feel like starched toilet paper. But my god, they are cheap. When was the last time you saw a store sign blaring "98 cents"? Ask your parents.
Wal-Mart's name-brand goods may well be slightly cheaper than in other chains. Their style is pressuring manufacturers and squeezing smaller companies dry — why? because they can — but pinching blood from a pebble doesn't always pay off.
These goods are still designed as disposable. I've owned more toasters than I have toes. This is why we have a garbage crisis: repair shops no longer exist and we blow far more money buying repeat goods than one well-crafted product that will last for decades.
Of course Wal-Mart is cheap. Its ethos is to sell the lowest priced, not the most durable, goods. So we can change our descriptors to "convenient but temporary."
A cynic, Oscar Wilde said, is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Coming from a genius who was worth kingdoms but died penniless in exile, it's a quote for our times.
In convenience
I don't find it convenient to have a 1,700-space parking lot near Lake Ontario, I find it repellent. It would be lovely to have picnic grounds or dog runs, restaurants, stores or something lively in an area where, magically, we can actually live well without owning cars. We have great public transit here. Why build a car magnet when gas is set to hit $2.25 a litre in four years? Wal-Mart, purely designed for car owners, will lure thousands of polluting vehicles to a new paved parking lot in an area that already has so little open ground that when it rains, the earth can't absorb the water. Local basements annually fill with raw sewage runoff in a repeated horror that I will not describe.
I'm surprised that only 300 people showed up at recent protest against the planned big box power centre containing Wal-Mart — we'll call it Lubyanka for short. Passivity has infected every citizen.
So instead of walking down to main street for a shovel, nail gun, ice cream, prescriptions, head of lettuce, shrubbery, can of paint or pair of deck shoes, everyone will drive to Wal-Mart and come back with disposable things bought for next to nothing from dingy foreign factories. We will do this at a hidden cost to clean air, precious fuel, neighbours' basements, owners and employees of smaller stores, wages (Wal-Mart pays rock-bottom and keeps people part-time for years), the view of Lake Ontario, tax revenue, Canadian-owned manufacturers, esthetics and fitness.
I believe Wal-Mart is evil. But sometimes there's payback. The last time I saw Scott, he was on video patting the buttocks of pale male Wal-Mart executives dressed as big ugly women screaming and dancing at a corporate function. That video wouldn't be public had Wal-Mart not for decades hired Flagler Productions to record its corporate events. When the retail giant dumped Flagler in 2006, putting it out of business, Wal-Mart wouldn't negotiate a price for the video archive. So Flagler offered the videos to the free market, which now has amazing footage being pored over by wrongful death lawyers, etc.
I have to leave aside the viciousness of the company laid out in Greenwald's documentary: its blockade of the promotion of female employees, the murders, rapes and kidnappings in its cheapskate unguarded parking lots, its abuse of part-timers and non-white employees, outrages that include suing an employee brain-injured in a car crash for her private insurance payout, its secret altering of employee records to avoid paying wages, its notoriously lax environmental safety … none of my sentences about Wal-Mart ends happily. They just build, like Wal-Mart itself.
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