The ULTIMATE Wal-Mart Apology

(By apology, btw, I mean as in "apologetics", not Clinton-esque "I'm sorry you caught me this time -- I'll do better in the future.")

The boffins over at the Mises Institute have come out swinging in favor of Wal*Mart. I haven't had time to finish the article yet, but so far it's spot on the money. People really hate Wal*Mart the same way many people really hate Amazon: because they've done lots of logistics homework and ironed so much cost out of their operations that they're nearly impossible to compete against. There's a reason K-Mart is dead, Sears is on life-support, and all my bookselling friends have heart-conditions: you can't fight economics, and these companies know it.

But let's face it: they're cheap. Really cheap, in that numbing, soul-less IKEA kind of way that makes you feel like your behavior there has been optimized on a spreadsheet (hint: it has!). If you buy Levi's Jeans at Wal*Mart, you're not buying real Levi's, but cheaper knock-offs that Levi's puts their label on, specifically so Wal*Mart can sell them more cheaply than real Levi's. Snapper won't sell lawn-mowers in Wal*Mart, because Wal*Mart refuses to sell them at a price-point that will let Snapper keep up their quality standard. This has led to a ton of class-based prejudice against Wal*Mart (usually from leftists, ironically enough), whereupon Wal*Mart is seen as the place where cracker hick welfare Moms go for shoddy trash while the more clueful run next door to Target (just as soulless but a higher price-point. My late Mom used to make fun of this prejudice by pronouncing Target in the pseudo-frog "tarjay"). But just like peope get so mis-led watching the difference between the rich and the poor that they don't notice how relatively well off the American "poor" are (ask any of my Chinese or Indian co-workers about poverty in America and they'll burst their spleens laughing at you), it's really easy to miss the real significance of Wally World -- sure, the goods are low quality, but it's better to have a low-quality version of some good than to have to do without.

If you want to see a real-life enactment of Socialist Heaven, look no further than your local Wal*Mart, because Wally World is the social leveller of Carl Marx's wet dreams. The real reason people hate Wally World is, of course, that while Socialist Heaven may look really good to a Nigerian surgeon making $7,500/year (supporting an extended family of 20, on average), those of us who are accostumed to free-market capitalism really hate being treated like proles. And, make no mistake, Wal*Mart treats both customers and employees like proles in a spreadsheet. We don't like soul-less mechanization of our society! We want to treated as uniquely special individuals, not trackable widgets in the Great Machine. Soul-less, dispassionate Wal*Mart is adept at providing those Great Machine heebie-jeebies socialists pine for, complete with an insincere smiley-face to remind you of how happy you are to be there.

For those of us who don't make ends meet on $8.50/hour, there are other options. I, for one, will never buy a cordless drill in a Wal*Mart. But I would buy a crescent wrench or an Excedrine there, and that's the flip-side of such cheap goods. Our manufacturing and shipping technologies have gotten so good that for many items, "cheap" no longer implies "shoddy". Our little Toyota Echo, at a thousand times the expense of a crescent wrench, is shoddy as hell (and hopefully will be replaced two years from now), but the six-dollar crescent wrench in Wal*Mart, while not up to the standards of a professional garage, will certainly serve me well enough throughout my lifetime.

Not everything in life is supposed to be a Lotus X180 (my dream car). Neither is Wal*Mart.