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Headlines : CorporationsThe Wal-Mart Thought Police
Crucial, and hopefully successful, as these campaigns are, another lesson to take from Wal-Mart’s censorship policy is the danger of corporate conglomizoration that stifles free media under the misleading name of radically conservative “family values.“
[Posted By ShiftShapers]Republished from Alternet News
Wal-Mart, America’s largest retailer, prides itself on being a “family-friendly” store, with smiley faces guiding stressed-out breadwinners to a land of low-cost, guilt-free consumption.
Indeed, there are mega Wal-Marts that inhabit spaces the size of five football fields, and the total square footage of all of the Wal-Mart stores nationwide tops 25 million square feet.
As you have probably heard, the “everyday low prices” at these concrete boxes of utopian consumption have tremendous costs for our environment, our workers, our wages, our communities, and the public coffers. But they also come at the expense of free speech and artistic expression, as the corporation targets items that often include progressive criticism of conservative values.
Based in Bentonville, AR, the brand behemoth has become the self-appointed culture police by screening the music, books and magazines that many Americans will be able to access — in a number of communities, Wal-Mart is the only convenient store in the area stocking culture products.
Take, for example, Wal-Mart’s refusal to sell Sheryl Crow’s self-titled album in 1996, citing objections to a lyric that criticized Wal-Mart for selling handguns (a practice that the chain has since discontinued), which they felt was “unfair and irresponsible.”
Much as Crow probably appreciated the paternalistic…
Posted by ShiftShapers
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More leftwing anti-Wal*Mart stuff. I hope they banned the chicksy dicks for their anti-US stand. After all the store serves the American public.
Just to split hairs, Schiller probably shouldn’t sully her argument with statements like:
Technically, Walmart is not engaging in censorship. As it is not a government organization it cannot censor. And while the division between government and corporation can certainly be debated this is not a case so far as I can ascertain in this situation.
Walmart can sell whatever shit they choose to in the current system – is it censorship if my local bookstore chain won’t carry Coulter’s books because they are selling to bay area “liberals”?
Whatever, Walmart is part of the death machine^tm^ that is killing the planet. If you can realize something as simple as that then don’t fucking shop there, but don’t tell me you are better off shopping at Kmart/Target/BarnesandNoble because they carry Sheryl Crow or Jon Stewart’s book or whatever.
Izzy – After all the store serves the American public.
They serve the stockholders and CEOs you dipshit. They could give a fuck about you.
i’d ban the chicksy dicks just because their music sucks. j/k
PS they serve the global first world, not just the American public, Iffy. Wal-Mart recently opened a mega-mart right next to the ancient Mayan sacred site of Teotihuacan in Mexico. how cool
what next…remove condoms from shelves not allow pharmacy to sell birth control. about a year ago i snapped a picture of a shirt on a hanger in the girls section not womens, with the words“Just Lick It” with a pic of a tootsie pop.
if you have young kids,you can let them pick out a cd and be pretty sure its safe for kids to hear
Technically, Walmart is not engaging in censorship. As it is not a government organization it cannot censor. And while the division between government and corporation can certainly be debated this is not a case so far as I can ascertain in this situation.
Just to split some more hairs, I wouldn’t agree that censorship is purely limited to governments, see the same wiki article’s link for religious censorship. A dictionary entry allows any institution to wield it. Maybe the term sanitization would be more appropriate. Anyways, I agree with you that there are more important reasons against Wal*Mart than their sanitization of products/art.
also, it has been argued that such practices by a mega-corp with the enourmous leverage through mass “buying power” can serve to influence what is produced. in other words, (it has been argued that) dissent is discouraged because it won’t be carried and sold. but this, in my opinion, is an erronious analysis, as any truly dissident and challengingly critical material will be produced with intent other than that of the marketplace, and that any material produced with the consideration of the marketplace will never be truely subversive. besides, i’ve heard they sell Michael Moore’s movies and books at Wally world. can anyone confirm this?
right (moondancer) if you want your kid listening to Jessica Simpson and Britanny Spears, learning how to be materialistic sexual objects, so long as it’s curse-word free
ryz – touché. I do agree with the religious and corporate connotations, but like the “main” definition to remain as it is (so much as we can separate government from the other two). Yeah, I know I am being a structuralist/traditionalist jackoff.
My main problem with the article is that, as much as I hate Walmart, I see them as merely a symptom of the problem. Sure, they perpetuate it and are one of the major monstrosities on the sprawl landscape, but the people buy it and feed the machine no matter where they shop in the strip mall/big-box fantasyland. The whole chain-store, globalist, need-new-plastic-shit consumer mindset needs attacking, not just one example of it. Whatever, peak oil will have some benefits after all.
i agree, sis –
in small towns like mine, when Wal-Mart shows up, at least half of the business is taken away from the small independent business owners. seriously. in a big city you wouldn’t notice it as much. we have one small main street business district, two city markets, and an albertsons in town. Wal-Mart is a mile out of the main part of town, past the industrial park. everyone shops at Wal-Mart now. main street is dead, save the up-scale tourist shops where no locals go anyways. though city market (kroeger corp.) and albertsons are little better than wal-mart (though they are only grocery stores) they have suffered a lot, but not as much as small independent clothing or toy stores, for instance. many local business owners have been forced to shut down because they just cant compete. wal-mart artificially deflates wholesale prices with their enourmous buying power, to the point that small businesses just can’t compete. wal-mart is able to sell many items cheaper retail than small businesses are able to buy them wholesale. that i see as a problem.
recommended reading: NO LOGO by Naomi Klein
Value and Values at Wal-Mart – Behind That Implacable Smiley Face
by Lee Drutman
WAL-MART. Speak this hyphenated word, and you’ll get an instant response.
To some, the name of the world’s largest retailer stands for everything that’s wrong with corporate capitalism. Declining wages, suburban sprawl, cheap foreign goods’ destroying American jobs, reckless corporate welfare, disappearing unions … You name the malady, and there’s surely a way to implicate Wal-Mart.
For others, the behemoth’s “always low prices” are the gateway to consumer bliss. Where else can you get a $38.76 DVD player or a $42.44 microwave oven? Wal-Mart may be widely reviled, but there’s also a reason why it rakes in almost $300 billion a year.
Wherever you stand on the Wal-Mart debate, with anti-Wal-Mart campaigns popping up as fast as Wal-Mart stores (well, not quite that fast; Wal-Mart opens about 275 Supercenters a year), it’s clear that the company is a force to be understood.
Though there are many books out there trying to make sense of Wal-Mart, John Dicker’s informative and entertaining new The United States of Wal-Mart (Tarcher/Penguin, 245 pp., $18) is one of the best. Instead of merely disparaging Wal-Mart (which seems to have been Dicker’s initial temptation), Dicker makes the effort to understand Wal-Mart’s appeal. And in doing so, the narrative, which begins in mere bemusement (“We’re all Wal-Mart’s bitches”), evolves into a more nuanced sort of befuddlement (“Wal-Mart is a lot like the country where it was born — a little good, a little bad, a lot confusing”).
By the end, Dicker looks in the mirror and reaches a surprising conclusion: “The ugly truth is that we’ve become a nation that values little above a bargain.” He writes, “As long as we remain blind to those consequences [of Wal-Mart’s practices], we will also remain blind to the costs we pay, not at Wal-Mart but in our own conflicted souls.” We have met the enemy, and it is us.
Of course, Wal-Mart is pretty bad, and Dicker doesn’t spare the emblematic anecdotes. For one, there’s the response of former Wal-Mart CEO David Glass to allegations of child labor in foreign factories. “You and I might, perhaps, define children differently,” Glass told an NBC Dateline interviewer, then said that since Asians are quite short, you can’t always tell how old they are.
Dateline investigators also found clothing made in Bangladesh sold under MADE IN THE USA signs in Wal-Mart stores.
Then there’s the bit about how Wal-Mart refused to sell Jon Stewart’s America: The Book, but it sold the anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (which says that Jews drink the blood of Christian children). Wal-Mart gave the following description: “If . . . the Protocols are genuine (which can never be proven conclusively), it might cause some of us to keep a wary eye on world affairs. We neither support nor deny its message.” Considering the extent to which Wal-Mart serves as cultural gatekeeper, this is quite scary.
Wal-Mart’s aggressive anti-unionism is legendary, but the company went so far as to close a store after the employees had voted to unionize. In the process, Wal-Mart fired one of the yes-voting employees on the pretext that he had eaten a pre-weighed banana in the checkout line.
Other irritating Wal-Mart traits include locking its workers in overnight; hiring illegal immigrants; foisting its employees’ health-care costs on taxpayer-funded programs; and selling so many cheap Chinese imports that it threatens the survival of American manufacturers.
Such appear to be the trade-offs for what Dicker dubs “a near maniacal quest to create costless profit.”
Yet to Wal-Mart’s credit, the company has found retailing efficiencies, through technology, that benefit the consumer.
The investor Warren Buffett once called Wal-Mart the greatest asset for poor people in America. Dicker finds evidence that numerous low-income people want Wal-Mart in their community. He notes that many of Wal-Mart’s 136 million weekly customers probably care little about the company’s rap sheet.
Meanwhile, a McKinsey & Co. report credited Wal-Mart as a major source of U.S. productivity gains in the 1990s. Some experts say the company has kept inflation down.
What all this means, of course, is that those who hope to challenge Wal-Mart’s ways have a long road. As Dicker writes, “it’s one thing for a woman in Manhattan to refuse to go into Starbucks to protest. . . . It’s quite another to ask millions of working-class people to stop patronizing a store that stocks everything — everything — on their shopping lists, at lower prices.”
Truth is, Wal-Mart offers millions of Americans the cheap goods they crave, while discreetly hiding its unpleasant trade-offs behind its implacable yellow smiley face. The appeal, unfortunately, is irresistible.
Yet even if Wal-Mart could be brought down, there are plenty of other big-box discounters waiting to take its place — spreading sprawl, importing cheap goods, paying low wages. The real challenge, it seems, lies not so much in confronting Wal-Mart as in confronting the trade-offs implicit in Wal-Mart’s success.
Ultimately, the issue is both simple and difficult: a choice between value and values, which at some point are bound to conflict. Dicker understands this tension, and, more important, he seems to see that though it’s fun to make cracks about Wal-Mart, we should figure out why the material for the cracks exists in the first place.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy (Berrett-Koehler).
if you have young kids,you can let them pick out a cd and be pretty sure its safe for kids to hear
Yeah and you can achive the same goal & show your kid you give a shit about them by saying “let me see that CD” after they’ve picked it out and look at it and read the song titles & checkout the cover art & if it has a parental advisory sticker and judge if you think it will be ok or not for them to hear, but you have to do all that extra hard work, instead of letting Wal-Mart filter the music to their standards and just going along with their opinion. I would never buy a kid an album at wal-mart because I don’t trust wal-mart to do a good job “protecting” the kid from the music.