Wal-Mart: Metaphor for America

By Thomas H. Naylor (Vermont, USA)

In a hard-hitting cover page article entitled “Is Wal-Mart Too Powerful?” Business Week said “Low prices are great. But Wal-Mart’s dominance creates problems for suppliers, workers, communities, and even American culture.”

And the National Trust for Historic Preservation agrees. The Trust recently designated the entire state of Vermont as one of the eleven “endangered historical places” as a result of the assault on the state by the $260 billion Arkansas-based retail Goliath. When the Great Satan of retailing finally bullied its way into picturesque Bennington ten years ago, it was a major defeat for thousands of Vermonters who had fought its entry into the Green Mountain state tooth and nail. Vermont was the last state to succumb to the heavy-handed retailer – the enemy of small towns and small merchants everywhere – now the largest employer in America and the largest company in the world.

Tiny Vermont was no match for the 5,000-store Wal-Mart empire with its seductive low prices, 150,000-square-foot stores, 1.4 million employees, and 20 million shoppers per day. Vermont now has four Wal-Mart stores and seven more are planned. As long as Vermont remain in the Union, Wal-Mart is virtually unstoppable, even if a majority of Vermonters would like for it to cease and desist. The interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution makes it almost impossible for a state to keep Wal-Mart out.

In addition to low prices, Wal-Mart is known for its anti-union practices, race-to-the-bottom wages and fringe benefits, environmental insensitivity, the way it squeezes its suppliers, and its creation of urban sprawl. It has been accused of violating child-labor laws, ignoring state regulations requiring time for breaks and meals, coercing employees to work off-the-clock, employing illegal aliens, and violating the Clean Water Act in nine states.

Wal-Mart’s sales are fifty percent greater than those of Target, Costco, sears, and Kmart combined. If Wal-Mart were an independent nation, it would be China’s eighth largest trading partner. Even so, it wraps itself in the flag and pretends to be an All American company – a company which has probably contributed more to the outsourcing of American jobs than any other.

To put Wal-Mart’s impact on tiny Vermont in perspective, consider the fact that between St. Johnsbury and Newport in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont there are virtually no stores in dozens of villages. They have all been sucked up by the Wal-Mart across the Connecticut River in Littleton, New Hampshire. There is even a spur of Interstate 93 which extends into Vermont to make it more convenient for Vermonters to travel to Littleton.

Not unlike the United State government, Wal-Mart is too big, too powerful, too intrusive, too mean-spirited, too materialistic, too dehumanizing, too undemocratic, too environmentally insensitive, and too unresponsive to the social, cultural, and economic needs of individual citizens and small communities. It is beyond reproach and beyond the law. Is Wal-Mart a metaphor for America? Or is America a metaphor for Wal-Mart?