[lbo-talk] Walmart flak Andy Young joins the Gibson-Allen brigade

[ylle521 at highstream.net]

Yay, Doug.  This brouhaha with Young prompted me to go looking for 
writings on Wal-Mart and I was reading some of your spouse's stuff 
earlier today.  She's the only journalist that I know of who actually 
has some understanding and compassion for the low-income people who 
patronize WMT and get by that much easier on little money.   I 
appreciated her quoting a Wal-Mart customer's letter to the editor in 
a community Wal-Mart was looking to enter; when told that the pay for 
full-time workers there was as little as $15,000 a year, she 
responded that she didn't think that was such a bad income, compared 
to how poor she and others she knows are.    Another woman chimed in, 
that her income is half of that, that 15 grand a year would be great!

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050103/featherstone

Does that make Wally World suck any less?  Of course not.  But it's 
been my observation that the Wal-Mart battle lines are clearly 
divided by class; referring again to the editorial page, last year 
there was organized opposition to building another one around here, 
and a letter in the local rag put it vividly, if crudely, calling the 
anti-Wal-Mart leaders "boutique bitches".

Liza F. highlights the fact that the root of this is the way 
Americans (with the rest of the world is catching up with us) see 
themselves as not workers or citizens but mere consumers, who can 
make only consumer decisions and actions and don't really see a role 
in life beyond that.   Typical Americans are so craven (how else can 
you describe it?), they've been willing to work like world-class 
galley slaves, hold down multiple jobs, send all the adults out into 
the workforce, have little time and energy to raise their kids, get 
zero help from the govt unless you're destitute and even that help is 
given grudgingly, and allow the powers-that-be to utterly screw them 
by rejecting political struggle instead of embracing it as a citizen 
would because: quite frankly, *they can't imagine living any other 
way.*   Doing anything that could risk reducing your capacity to 
consume is like something from another dimension: it's not just 
threatening, it's inconceivable.

Maria


>Young's remarks were stupid, but they obscured a valid point - poor 
>people pay small businesses enormous markups at retail, and Wal-Mart 
>offers some relief from that. Of course, WMT's employment practices 
>suck, but if you're a poor person, you might welcome some 
>alternative to the petit bourgeois on the corner.
>
>Doug
>
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