A new book explains how one company has changed how we shop and live-and what a proposed new store could mean for Santa Fe.
Last week the city Planning Commission gave its approval to a proposed Super Wal-Mart. The night before, members of the month-old Coalition to Limit Big Box Stores In Santa Fe met to consider its strategy.
The new Wal-Mart, Santa Fe's second, will take up approximately 150,000 square feet of the 265,000 square feet in the Entrada Contenta development, designed to serve the growing number of residents in Tierra Contenta.
The large numbers of proponents at the meeting depicted the new Wal-Mart as a project that will provide services, jobs and more consumer choice.
Opponents of the project, on the
other hand, knew going in that last week's Planning Commission meeting would not be the ideal forum for expressing their concerns, particularly those relating to Wal-Mart's corporate reputation. They began, before the meeting, with a press conference headlined by former Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall, who told SFR afterwards, This is just the beginning. I'm small business- and small community-oriented and I'm shocked by the direction this country is going in."
The project is expected to come before the City Council next month.
The issues engendered by a new Wal-Mart are complex-touching on everything from
labor to sprawl to the global economy.
At this point, local opposition to the new Wal-Mart seems small, but organizers believe that will change. "I think there's a lack of understanding about the impact Wal-Mart can have on a community," Arthur Padilla, chairman of the Coalition, says. In
speaking to people last week at the Unitarian Church, David Kaseman of The Santa Fe Alliance, which promotes the importance of local and independent businesses, added: "We can stop this. If we don't do it, nobody's going to. It's not just an economic issue, it's a social justice issue."
Many of those issues-and others-
are reported in
John Dicker's recent release,
The United States of Wal-Mart
. This week, SFR presents an excerpt from that book, as well as an interview with Dicker about Wal-Mart's impact on local economies and the changing face of American consumerism.
[Editor's note: the excerpt is available in the print version only. Please contact our offices at 505-988-5541 ext 201 to obtain a copy.]
Rabble-Rouser
The author of
The United States of Wal-Mart
talks about the new consumer culture.
How did you get interested in Wal-Mart?
It's kind of weird. I wrote that thing for Salon about working at a Kmart center as a union mole and an editor at The Nation read it and invited me to pitch stories. So I was wracking my brain on stories they would be interested in. The Wal-Mart union campaign
was getting going and I had noticed The Nation hadn't done anything on it. So that got me interested in Wal-Mart and led to this book project. I
wouldn't have pitched a book like this as my first book, it's an intimidating topic. But Penguin came to me and said, 'Hey, we like some of the stuff we've read. Would you be interested in writing a book about the Wal-Martization of America?'
The soundbite in your book is probably, "We're all Wal-Mart's bitches." Care to elaborate?
There are three ways you can be Wal-Mart's bitch. In state after state, you're basically supporting their operations through your tax money. Any state that's tallying this data is finding that of all the people who are working and using the public healthcare system, Wal-Mart's employees are among the largest group. Access to getting this information has become a political battle unto itself. Wal-Mart is very opposed to this information being tallied. They think it's a smear campaign. That's one way you're Wal-Mart's bitch. Another way is if you work for one of Wal-Mart's 500 largest suppliers, they're requiring those companies to become RFID [Radio Frequency Identification] compliant. The technology hasn't been tested and the prices of these RFIDs are still pretty high and Wal-Mart is going ahead with this system in three distribution centers. A lot of these
companies can't justify that as a business plan, if it wasn't for the fact that it's Wal-Mart, there's no way they'd do this. A third way you're Wal-Mart's bitch is when Wal-Mart comes into your community it's under the banner of giving shoppers more choice and freedom, but what happens when a Supercenter opens is usually, within a few years, two regular grocery stores close so you have less choices.
You set out to explain how Wal-Mart has changed how customers shop and what citizens tolerate. Explain how you see both.
It used to be that stores like Costco, when they first came out, it was a novelty that you could get these crazy prices, these deep discounts. Now it's become an entitlement. There's a superstore for every product category. One of the advantages is they sell for a lot less, and that's become part of the consumer culture you expect. And yet as far as what citizens tolerate, people might not like these shopping ghettoes, these big commercial strips. In postcards from Santa Fe, no one is going to have a shot of the big strip, no one's going to take a postcard of
that. Yet more of America is looking like this but we tolerate that because we can go to Best Buy, Sam's Club and get stuff cheap. It's a trade-off, we don't like what it looks like, the traffic. It's ugly, but we like cheap stuff.
When communities protest Wal-Marts it's usually because of the effect it will have on local businesses, but your book also goes into detail about the effect Wal-Mart has had on the global workforce. Is there a "think globally, act locally" message here?
For most people taking on Wal-Mart, the hardcore leftie progressive activist types who have bumper stickers with the aforementioned slogan, it's a no brainer. But in some cases it's a question of what is Wal-Mart offering versus what is in the community. If you're way out in the sticks, Wal-Mart is something that's going to be open 24 hours, and have something you'd have to drive pretty far to get, then it's a
debate. If you're in Santa Fe or the greater Denver area, what Wal-Mart offers isn't that unique and it can cause increased traffic, sprawl, numerous other impacts. So for communities that don't need Wal-Mart, there's a lot of reasons to oppose it that have no connection to the anti-globalization movement.
Do you consider yourself anti-Wal-Mart?
I'm trying to show it's very complex. There are certain Wal-Marts going up that I don't think you want to contest. On the
west side of Chicago it's replacing an abandoned candy factory. Do you want to get into an argument in an already depressed area with high unemployment that no Wal-Mart is better than a closed candy factory? That's one of the reasons Wal-Mart is going to have success getting into inner cities, because mainstream groceries have abandoned those places. Arguing, especially if you don't live in that community, that Wal-Mart jobs may not be that great-you know, a job that's not great is better than no job at all. That's what happened in places like Chicago, where the liberal
establishment and labor unions are on one side and people who are usually black and Latino and actually live there have whole different opinions. If you're trying to build a big tent and have a broad tent, being anti Wal-Mart isn't always the best idea, you might end up alienating people.
So talking about Wal-Mart's identity isn't a good way to oppose Wal-Mart?
I'm not always right on this, but in general it's a bad idea if you're trying to keep Wal-Mart out to talk about whether Wal-Mart is good for America or not. If you're trying to speak to the county planning board or the city council they don't care about the trade deficit with China. They can't talk about a gender discrimination lawsuit even if it's the largest gender discrimination suit ever, so they sometimes get annoyed with activists who grandstand and sermonize. People who are effectively resisting do it by digging into the nitty gritty of the proposal-analyzing the traffic study, the environmental impact, looking for inconsistencies with that, looking at groundwater runoff, at how the Wal-Mart plan is in sync or not in sync with county or city master planning, that's how you win. Community
after community have been able to find things that are questionable.
You mention in the book that Wal-Mart has become what UC Santa Barbara Professor Nelson Lichtenstein calls a "template industry." Can you explain that further?
He said it sets a standard for what you can get away with. Recently they closed that store in Jonquiere, Quebec after they voted to unionize. Wal-Mart claims it's because it was performing poorly and can you get away with that? Wal-Mart's proving you can and other industries take that as a cue. Lichtenstein uses the example of GM in the '50s, they provided more than a living wage and it was really a sustainable industry. You had people raising families, buying house who worked for GM. As Harold Meyerson said in The Washington Post, where is the housing boom for all the new Wal-Mart workers? Where do you see the expansion for people who work for the company? The only place you see that is for its executives and Bentonville. I was there in June; it's totally exploding.
