Where do you buy your Salmon?
Attention, Wal-Mart shoppers: Let your conscience be your guide
By Kathleen Parker
Jan 25, 2006
If you love buying cheap salmon from Wal-Mart, you might not after reading Charles Fishman's new book, "The Wal-Mart Effect."
Few issues in American life, except perhaps the war in Iraq, are as polarizing these days as how Wal-Mart sits in our landscape, our economy and our consciousness. Fishman, a friend and former editor - but more important, the kind of reporter for whom no detail or decimal is too small to fascinate - tells the Wal-Mart story in such intricate detail that you'll never see your local store the same way again.
Wal-Mart isn't just a company. It's a global market force - a nation unto itself.
Ponder this: Americans spend $35 million every hour at Wal-Mart, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Wal-Mart is so huge and so powerful, you'll wonder how you failed to notice that the company affects not just how we shop, but how we think and live - even if we never set foot in a Wal-Mart store.
Not everyone has missed the Wal-Mart effect, of course. The company has plenty of critics, but Fishman puts in perspective not just the power of Wal-Mart, but the good that the mega-corporation does and could do. Recently, for instance, Wal-Mart announced energy- and fuel-saving plans for its stores and trucks that, if successful, could serve as a model for the nation. No one will cheer louder than Fishman if that happens. Such is the kind of global good Wal-Mart can and should do, he says.
On the home front, Fishman argues that critics are wrong when they say that Wal-Mart puts little people out of business. We (consumers) put little people out of business, he says. We vote with our wallets, and we're the ones who choose Wal-Mart over local stores. Wal-Mart, in that sense, is the ultimate model of democracy.
Consumers also have made possible the company's phenomenal growth. In 1990, Wal-Mart had just nine supercenters in the U.S. By 2000, there were 888. Wal-Mart is the No. 1 grocery retailer in the world. Between 1990 and 2000, 31 supermarket chains sought bankruptcy protection, including 27 that cited Wal-Mart as a factor.
Ah well, we say, so it goes in love, war and business. Compe ion is the engine that drives a capitalist society. But Fishman argues that Wal-Mart's power and scale hurt capitalism by strangling compe ion.
"It's not free-market capitalism," he says. "Wal-Mart is running the market. Choice is an illusion."
Wal-Mart not only changes the way we buy, but the way we think, Fishman says. If Wal-Mart charges $5 per pound for salmon, then shoppers wonder why a restaurant charges $15. We expect salmon to cost only $5. Or a microwave to cost only $39. The Wal-Mart effect first changes our expectations, then changes the quality of merchandise, which is cheap, because it isn't always well- or ethically made.
Take salmon. Wal-Mart, which buys all its salmon from Chile, sells more than anyone else in the country and undersells all other retailers by at least $2 per pound. That's a lot of market power, which prompts Fishman to ask: "Does it matter that salmon for $4.84 a pound leaves a layer of toxic sludge on the ocean bottoms of the Pacific fjords of southern Chile?"
Salmon in Chile are raised in packed underwater pens - as many as 1 million per farm - and fed prophylactic antibiotics to prevent disease. Here's a fact you'd rather not know: A million salmon produce the same amount of waste as 65,000 people. Combine that waste with unconsumed food and antibiotic residue, and you've got a toxic seabed.
Does it matter?
Only if consumers say it does, says Fishman. Wal-Mart listens to "voters." If shoppers say they won't buy salmon until Wal-Mart insists on higher standards from suppliers, then Wal-Mart will make those demands. Incentive is the engine that drives the company that promises low prices - "always."
Fishman also raises questions about worker wages, health insurance and working conditions in other countries where Wal-Mart suppliers treat human workers little better than Chile treats fish.
In the final analysis, he asserts that the scale of Wal-Mart makes it a different species of animal than we've ever known before and that, therefore, horse-and-buggy business rules no longer apply. He insists that transparency, which corporations (and especially Wal-Mart) resist, is key not only to preserving the capitalist system we value, but to ensuring fair and humane business practices here and abroad.
Ultimately, Fishman's book posits a question of values: What kind of country are we going to be?
It is a worthy question that consumers will have to answer.
Kathleen Parker is a popular syndicated columnist and director of the School of Written Expression at the Buckley School of Public Speaking and Persuasion in Camden, South Carolina.
Copyright © 2006 Tribune Media Services
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Find this story at: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/colu...25/183714.html
Interesting article.
I have experienced the exact phenomena discussed in the article.
I generally try to avoid shopping at Walmart, not out of principle (although I do not agree with their employment practices), but mainly because I don't like large crowds and Walmart is always crowded. But then when I go to another store (Target, HEB, etc.), I feel like I am overpaying for items because Walmart has them cheaper.
Ok, but ultimately It's not just non-durable and durable goods that are subject to the 'Walmart Effect' - low prices through artificially low (some say slave wages) foreign labor. If you've watched the Movie, Syriana I think it provides an excellent example of the 'Walmart Effect' on Middle East Oil and it's effect on regional politics.
Whatever....people will find anything wrong with everything. I don't shop there, but I would. I have before and I'd do it again.
South Park has a great episode on Wal-Mart...I recommend everyone watch it.
Sounds to me like consumers have the choice...as it should be.
What a business model, eh?
People are going to shop at where they get the best price. Airlines, buses and
car mfg are all learning this the hard way. I read a good little article this morning
about the Chinese are coming out with a car in 2008, being shown in Detroit as
we speak, that seats five, gets good gas mileage and will cost about 10,000 dollars.
That ought to wake some folks up. And my bet is that sometime in the near
future, our folks will come up with a car that will use some kind of fuel other than
carbon based. Most don't remember the WWII and rubber. But the alternative they
came up with is what we make tires out of today. Put some countries out of
business in the rubber industry. Just a little food for thought.
That movie was very good. I finally had a chance to sit down and watch it.
I am curious to know if the governments in those countries allowed the filming of said movie in their provinces only because they knew it would shed America in bad light...
Great movie though.
Wal-mart's is a complicated situation. While the avg salary is a horrendous $17K/year with very few if any benefits, Wal-mart also saves its clients, esp low-end clients, lots of money, what they don't give to their employees as salary they give to their clients as low prices.
all items in target are made in the usa and everyone they employ makes 15-20 an hr for scanning items...
and once a day all employees sing baya...
Two things I see with Wal-Mart:
The first is its growing stranglehold on the marketplace, regardless of whether they gained such a stranglehold ethically or not. Even in a "free market", you want to avoid any single en y establishing a de facto monopoly position as it will ultimately lead to a decline in overall social welfare (social welfare as an economic term, not a term to describe some government program).
The second, which is not too unlike the first, is that as Wal-Mart is (somehow) able to capture new economies of scale or scope, they potentially lower the cost of scarce resources below their otherwise normal economic value encouraging more consumption of that good to the point where it is no longer available on any kind of viable scale. For an anology, think of $10 oil until there is any kind of supply crunch, then it quickly shoots up past $70 where it holds firm.
I don't know the solution is, but I think Wal-Mart has a social and corporate responsibility to not allow these things to happen. The social and the corporate go hand in hand... if they allow social welfare to be damanged significantly, they put their business at risk to be broken up by anti-trust regulators - not good for the company.
what about wal-mart and sam's having the cheapest gas? who es about that?
I buy all my tea at WalMart.
eh, it's big so there's something wrong with it.
I do. I bought gas at Wally World (Murphy USA) once... just once. IT SUCKS, that's why it's so cheap.
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