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February102005

(2.14/21.05 issue) Sam's Big Club

Filed under: Looked Into   Tagged: , ,

In the Financial Page this week, Jim Surowiecki muses on the seemingly unstoppable power of Wal-Mart and the futility of companies like Gillette and Procter & Gamble's trying to gang up on the price-cutting behemoth:


It's certainly true that manufacturers have a lot less pull in the marketplace than they used to. But they haven't lost it to Wal-Mart and Target. They've lost it to you and me.... In a sense, Wal-Mart is the elected representative of tens of millions of hard-bargaining shoppers, and, like any representative, it serves only at their pleasure.

It seems only fair to point out that Wal-Mart routinely declines to serve the cost-conscious shoppers closest to it—its own employees, who are denied adequate health care, proper wages, and the opportunity to advance for those who happen to be women (the company's aggressively saccharine ads notwithstanding). Any attempts by those people—many of whom started working at Wal-Mart for precisely the reasons Surowiecki describes, as reported in my friend Liza Featherstone's must-read book Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart—to actually choose a representative for their interests (a.k.a. a union) are promptly squashed hard. Yes, workers are consumers too. But they can't consume much at minimum wages; Henry Ford figured this out in the '20s, when he decided he had to pay his workers enough money to buy his cars. Wal-Mart's done a brilliant job of imitating Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, handing out dollar bills to the panicked masses when the bank goes bad. Trouble is, we're all living in Pottersville. (The FBI's COMPIC investigation ruled Capra's movie communistic for seeking to "discredit bankers" and "deliberately malign the upper class.") When the likes of P&G look like meek David eyeing a slavering Goliath, you know we're in trouble.

Down and Out in Discount America [The Nation]
Wal-Mart: The Facts [NOW]
Our Committment to People [Wal-Mart]
Film Industry Surveillance FBI Files [Paperless Archives]
All Hail Pottersville! [Salon]

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Wal-Mart just closed one of its two unionized stores, the store in Jonquiere, Quebec. WM insists that it’s because the store wasn’t making money, but a look at its pattern of anti-union activity and store closures says otherwise. There’s a great piece on this on the American Rights at Work website: http://www.americanrightsatwork.org/unionbusters/walmart.cfm

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