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The Washington Post has a story running in its Christmas day edition about a woman who got a job in the one of the first WalMarts to open in DC and is happy, even thrilled, to be able to buy presents for her children, having spent last Christmas in a hotel room paid for by the city with no money for anything. WalMart came into DC under a threat: if the city council passed a living wage bill, it would refuse to expand in the city and might close the two stores under construction. The council passed the wage bill any way and the mayor vetoed it. WalMart is open.
This sequence of events touched off a hot debate across DC and into the suburbs. If WalMart did not come in, then people in the city would be denied to chance to buy cheaper (and often cheap) goods and several hundred people wouldn’t get the low paying jobs. Which is worse, a low paying job or no job at all? If you are unemployed, if you are struggling to support yourself and some young children, then there is no question. You will take a low paying job and, at least for a time, be glad to have it. People who have been employed all their lives and are doing well can argue all they want to about higher wages, but desperate people will take what they can get. (More than 20,000 people applied for the 600 jobs opening at the two District WalMart stores, according to reports. The woman in the Post story is 24 with 3 children, one an 11 month old baby, which means that her path out of poverty would be very, very steep without or without a WalMart job.)
The woman in the Post profile has used a good deal of the money she is making to buy presents for her kids. I understand that. I understand compensating for doing without by suddenly buying everything you can. Yet, I also have noticed that people on the lower end of the economic situation often tend to spend every last dollar at Christmas time, apparently trying to make up for the bad times they have faced during the year. Sometimes, this helps to bring on more bad times in the year that follows.
When I was a kid, we have some relatives who consistently had financial trouble. It was always something, whether layoffs, an injury on the job or leaving one job only to get fired from the next. When Christmas came along, all the stops were pulled out. They would go into debt eagerly trying to offer a big Christmas to the family, especially the kids. (This was an era before credit cards became common, when debts were taken out at local stores and paid off during the year.)
To my childhood eyes, these relatives were trying to demonstrate something that couldn’t be demonstrated: that they were a prosperous, middle class family living like the rest of America. They weren’t. They were always in one kind of trouble or another, having cars repossessed, having to move from rented houses because they couldn’t pay. They would take three steps up the economic ladder and then 2 1/2 steps, or more, back.
Right now, all across America, children and their parents are waking up to Christmas morning, storming down to the tree, ripping open package after package, trying to find out as quickly as possible what gifts are being presented. Likely as not, millions of those families have done exactly what our relatives did at Christmas times long ago, they have taken out debt, pulled money out of a savings account or, in some cases, borrowed money from other family members trying to put on a big show at Christmas time. In a week, when everyone has gone back to work, the kids back to school and the wrapping paper thrown away, the memories of this morning will have faded. Some of the toys the kids got will already be broken, others discarded into piles because they weren’t exactly the kind of toy, or electronic thing, that the child wanted to play with after a day or two. Paying off the debts, or doing without because the savings were spent, will last a lot longer.
The compulsion to live the life of material abundance comes from seeing thousands of television commercials and seeing what people all around are doing. This is a time of year when people ask themselves: what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I have all the things that others have routinely? These, of course, are the wrong questions. It would be better to ask this: why can’t I be happy with one present? Why can’t I be satisfied to get the one thing I need and why can’t the kids make it on two or three new toys? Why must they have 10 or 15? Why do we pretend to be prosperous at Christmas when, in fact, we have virtually everything we need already without spending more? What are we trying to prove to ourselves or others?
It is this desire for material goods that feeds WalMart and has made the offspring of Sam Walton billionaires. The poor, the near poor and barely middle class want to have the same things that the rest of the country has, even if they only get cheaper, inferior versions of a lot of things.** They want it all. Few ever stop to think about what is necessary, what is truly needed versus what is just something extra that isn’t going to make more than half a moment’s difference, a moment of acquisition pleasure, in their lives.
WalMart meets a real need in America, but it is not always one that is met well. To some extent, this most successful of American stores represents false bargains, selling inferior products at low prices, products that require either much earlier replacement or ones that wear out or don’t fit well. In the process, people get to shop in an ugly, glare lighted environment that has all the charm of an abandoned airport hanger. As one third, or more, of the nation slips into a kind of continual, barely surviving grind of low paying jobs, WalMart, which provides low paying, part time jobs, is more needed than ever. The low pay economy feeds on WalMart.
Why did WalMart happen in the first place? The small town merchants couldn’t, or didn’t, meet the needs of their communities, at least not well enough. They didn’t form buying cooperatives so that they could get goods at lower prices and pass some of that along. Small town stores marked up the goods significantly and they expected people to pay the price. They operated independently and if you went into stores in a modest size town like Jacksonville, Texas, whatever they had was all you could buy in that area. If you needed something different or something more, they could get for you, in a week or two. When WalMarts moved into modest size towns across America, goods became more available than they had been previously. It was no longer necessary to drive to a larger city just to find something you might need.
Those who fought for WalMart in DC spoke repeatedly about the jobs the stores would create. It would be interesting to see in three to five years how many other merchants are forced out of business in the city. Will there be a net creation of jobs over time? Maybe. It is more likely that WalMart will kill off a good many low end retail jobs as well. Could WalMart pay more? Could they offer more full time jobs with less abuse of the employees with shift changes and other tactics? Of course they could. But then, the whole scheme might start to fall apart.
A lot of things in life are good for a short while, and then turn out to be not so good or even destructive. WalMart has a history of taking tax breaks to locate new stores and then shutting down and moving when the tax breaks run out. They are run as a ruthless business, as ruthless as anything one can find outside of a loan shark or a drug selling ring. They try to keep as many employees as possible in part time positions and count anyone working 28 hours a week (?) as full time. Many employees are on food stamps and other public assistance, which means that we, the taxpayers, are helping to keep WalMart in business and make big profits. Is this right?
They pound their suppliers for lower, and lower, prices, in the process, perhaps, driving down the quality of goods for the whole nation, changing our views toward a lower standard. In time, we might not be able to get anything better than WalMart quality without paying ten times more. WalMart seems perfect for the 1% society: those at the top get only the highest quality and the rest get the lowest. VALUE is price+quality, durability, etc. If one is poor, there is great pressure to think of value as price alone. This is false, but I understand the pressure to think this way. It is the misunderstanding of the value equation, however, that is part of what helps keep poor people in their situation and WalMart in a thriving business.
Meanwhile, the WashPost makes clear in its story that some families from the poverty hit areas of DC are having a little bit better Christmas this year. For that, we can be glad. Can people claw their way out of poverty on what WalMart pays? A few can with promotions and actual full time work, but it would be very interesting to see a follow-up story on what happens to WalMart workers after a few years. I suspect strongly that most of them wind-up like WalMart shoppers: trapped in a low end economy, buying inferior goods and without much hope for change.
Doug Terry, 12.25.13
Merry Christmas! I mean that.
Here is a link to the story in the Washington Post
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