- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Seriously, I find it sad and amusing that so many educated folks I know seem to feel it's okay to boycott Wal-Mart... and then merrily skip off to shop at Target. Obviously Target's not as bloated a corporate Jabba-the-Hut as Wal-mart is -- not yet, at least -- but its cheap international labor sources are the same. The only real difference between the two is marketing and design. Wal-Mart plays up the dumbed-down, always slightly chaotic look that made it indistinguishable from KMart etc. back in the 70s. Target, on the other hand, touts its clean, simple, vaguely-Euro esthetic against Wal-Mart's aw-shucks Middle American schtick. Target lures customers away from Wal-Mart by making them feel slightly superior to their Wal-Mart peers. Shopping at Target can stand (falsely) as an act of absolution -- by opting for Target, the "discerning" shopper is absolved of his/her share of the massive cultural guilt of shopping at Wal-Mart (great marketing strategy, Target). This may sound a bit histrionic -- it is, I admit -- but in a consumer economy whose psychological baseline remains deeply mired in guilt/sin-centric religions, it's a relevant point.
One of the inescapable realities of a capitalist economy is that, if you don't build in growth restrictions, corporations will bloat... and bloat... and bloat... and people can come up with all sorts of ways to debate the validity or invalidity of such corporations -- cheap goods vs. sustainable local and global development, progress vs. independent retailers, etc. -- but I think the greater question is simply one of size. The larger a corporation gets, the more possible it becomes for the corporation to weigh its own interests against those of the republic -- i.e. US, ALL OF US, including the employees of said corporation -- (and if this seems like I'm reading too much sentience into the idea of a corporation as a single entity, go look up "emergent intelligence" and read a bit) -- and Washington is full of several generations of lobbyists who are there to facilitate this sort of irresponsible self-aggrandizement, and to ensure that the majority of Americans remain too wrapped up in the little questions to actually take on the big ones.
On the other hand -- I earn a decent income, I have no kids, and I can still barely afford to shop at the independent retailers in my inexorably gentrifying neighborhood. The independent retailers are continually forced to jack up their prices as rents/etc. in the neighborhood rise due to the continued influence of -- you guessed it -- bloated real estate development and property management corporations. I don't often shop at Target or Wal-Mart (or Gap, Old Navy, ad nauseum) but I did, unthinkinkly, when I was poor and before I made the effort to read up on the subject.
And what if we did all manage to successfully boycott Wal-Mart et al? What would we then say to all those faithful Third World sweatshop workers -- "Hey, kids, school's out -- you can go back to being peasants now?" Point being, when corporations are allowed to bloat, untethered, they create these bizarre symbiotic relationships that connect so many mutually-co-unaware populations, the economic reality is only a hair shy of the famous "butterfly effect" -- and the corporations are never held accountable. We don't even possess the rudiments of the sort of judicial consideration it would take to build that degree of global accountability into the system.
