A common meme in recent years has been “People of Wal-Mart.” It has manifested itself most commonly in photos of Wal-Mart shoppers who look, dress, or act in ways that are outside the norm. We laugh at the ridiculous photos often with a smug attitude of superiority.
These photos have two underlying themes. The first is to ridicule the people in them. The second, less obvious, is to disparage Wal-Mart itself—the fact that such odd people shop at Wal-Mart reaffirms the low opinion of many about the store itself, that Wal-Mart is a place that sells cheap goods to the masses.
While I don’t like the cruelty implied in the “People of Wal-Mart” photos, I don’t like Wal-Mart itself and avoid patronizing it because I believe that Wal-Mart damages communities through its strategy of using its size and efficiency of scale to offer a wider variety of products and at lower prices than are commonly available at small local businesses. The great success of Wal-Mart and its ilk such as Target, Staples, and Home Depot is due not just to the efficiency of scale of such enterprises but also due to our society’s preoccupation with the lowest price as the main criterion for where to shop.
Of course, low cost and wide variety of products are also fundamental to the appeal of Amazon to many people. Further, Amazon and other internet retailers offer ease of shopping: one can browse, select, and purchase countless things without having to leave home—and at a low price, too. What a bargain!
Yet that bargain does not include another cost we have to pay: the loss of community. When we shop at Wal-Mart, Office Depot, or Lowe’s, or online through Amazon or Whatever net store, we deal either with a low-paid “sales force” or faceless computer screens managed by similar drones. We no longer know the proprietor or long-time employees of the local bookstore or hardware store or lumberyard. What’s more, in many places such stores no longer exist because we have driven them out of business by abandoning them for their big box or on-line brethren.
Rather than laughing at the many “People of Wal-Mart” photos on the internet, we might consider “People of Amazon” images which are just as common and perhaps just as ridiculous. One only has to look in a mirror.
Well said!
The situation is even worse because many local businesses have not been able to survive the onslaught of big-box national chains and on-line retailers. As a result, it is increasingly difficult to be able to shop locally. For example, stationers, bookstores, and lumberyards are endangered species in many communities, small and large, leaving us with Office Max, Barnes & Noble or Amazon, and Home Depot as terrible alternatives. We should mourn what we are doing to ourselves.
Guilty as charged. That said: everything is a trade-off.
Certainly everything is a trade-off. I shop at big box stores or on-line, sometimes for convenience or economy (a questionable term in itself) but more and more often because there is not an alternative. Nevertheless, my point is that such large enterprises damage community and exemplify an increasing impersonalization of our lives in which we don’t know our neighbors, our local merchants, our customers. In exchange for convenience or lower cost we have lost the intimacy that nurtures community.
It’s a compromise, for certain. We are going to be compelled to find alternative ways to develop community. I like to patronize local business whenever feasible. I get my auto serviced at Sooter’s (here since the 1920’s…!) and I usually go to the local bistros.