Wal Mart
Note from Team Cho: Margaret is on vacation from the country and her computer. She has asked us to fill in. This entry is from loveisloveislove.com’s Webmistress, Keri Smith.
Yesterday, the voters in Inglewood, CA told WalMart to take a hike which makes me kind of happy. If you don’t know the background, Walmart had decided to circumvent the Inglewood City Council (which also told them to take a hike) by paying petition gatherers to get enough signatures to put the question on the ballot: could they build one of their supermegagiant stores on 60 acres of land there, pretty please? The thing is, by going around the Inglewood City Council, Walmart wouldn’t have had to follow any of the city’s environmental or zoning regulations. They would have exempted themselves completely from the rules that everyone else has to follow. Inglewood’s clergy, community leaders, city council members (all but one) and the always awesome Representative Maxine Waters came out against Walmart’s backdoor attempt to move into the city. Yesterday there was high voter turnout, and residents voted to tell Walmart NO, all despite the million dollars Walmart dropped for publicity of their initiative.
I’m going to admit that I have a love/hate relationship with the Walmart Monster myself. I am from the south, where there are Walmarts everywhere. Shopping at Walmart is affordable and that’s important when you don’t have a lot of money to spread around, so I love it for that reason. But the last time I went home to visit the folks I saw they’d just cut down a shitload of trees to build a new Walmart, only a couple of miles from ANOTHER Walmart down the street, and that makes me livid. So, yeah, I’m disclosing that I have mixed feelings towards Walmart right off the bat. Similarly, people have had a lot of different reactions to Inglewood’s slap down of Walmart yesterday, and I can agree that there are both pros and cons to the situation, but I’ll tell you why I am more swayed by the cons.
Yeah, Walmart gives consumers low prices and convenience, and it provides jobs, but on the negative side it also drives down competition, putting locally owned stores out of business, and the jobs it creates are low-paying jobs, with few benefits. The average Walmart worker makes about $8.00 an hour and grosses less than $15,000 a year. How are you supposed to support yourself, much less a family, on that (or what’s left of it after your taxes are taken out)? Most of Walmart’s workers qualify for foodstamps, most can’t afford the company health care program, female management trainees make less than their male counterparts, and if you even think the word ‘Union’ your ass is fired. More Walmart Monster stats here.
Ultimately, Walmart is just mimicking the McDonald’s prototype: increase your profits by paying your employees crap and you don’t have to worry about treating them with respect, paying them a living wage or maybe thinking about the fact that they’re human beings with families to support because they’re ‘disposable,’ especially in a poor economy like the one Dubya has created. And even in good economic times there is always someone you can replace them with: if not a parent trying to make ends meet or put a kid through college, then a teenager who’s trying to pay for school or maybe just needs the extra spending money. That’s the McDonald’s-Blockbuster-Walmart creed: you are expendable, so we don’t have to meet your needs. And this creed is spreading; just look at what happened to grocery workers in California recently.
To tell you the truth, Walmart is starting to scare me. I know there are people who think this is hooey & that the Walmart pros outweigh the cons, and I can see where you’re coming from, though I disagree. But if you’ve never worked a low-wage job a day in your life, if you’ve never felt the love/hate relationship with Walmart either because you’ve never needed to shop for low-priced goods or because you don’t care if they screw employees over, or if you’re one of those Republicans who like to characterize the working poor as lazy then I think you need to shut the fuck up because you don’t know what you’re talking about. Let the people this would affect decide what’s good for them and their city: and they have. Democracy in Action.-Keri