Jerry Heaster thinks that when media elites go after WM with activist attack dogs, they igore a much more interesting story:
What Wal-Mart's critics don't appreciate is that it's as much a cultural phenomenon as a retailing colossus. Wal-Mart's revenues last year amounted to about a quarter of a trillion dollars. To put that in perspective, the Sears-Kmart merger will create a company with annual sales of $55 billion, thereby making it the third-largest retailer, after Home Depot.Read the whole thing. I believe that the last sentence above will disturb most non-economists, but it's true. Even if you dislike WM, you know that elitist reporters don't connect well with the average joe. And frankly, neither do I, but at least I'm willing to admit it.The magnitude of Wal-Mart's patronage makes it sui generis in the history of human commerce. Even so, media attacks are based on the premise that Wal-Mart's success results from some perverse consumer irrationality. The implied message is that the hundreds of millions who shop at Wal-Mart each month are acting against their own best interests.
This apparently is why the stories are uniformly devoid of adequate perspectives from customers and employees. Instead they focus on those with an ax to grind, who validate the negative perceptions of the reporters. Thus the thrust of the �Frontline� analysis was typical: an abundance of people willing to claim the worst about Wal-Mart, but minimal attention paid to Wal-Mart's core constituency. It's as if the journalists fear they'll become tainted if they interact with the great unwashed who throng to Wal-Marts.
Just once it would be nice if an interviewer asked those blaming Wal-Mart for their woes whether they or their families patronized the company some seem to see as the devil incarnate.
Instead you get economic observations often as zany as they are pointless. When discussing the imports Wal-Mart generates, the interlocutor muses that such business practices transform us into a �Third World country.� Perhaps he forgot about those who flee the Third World and risk all � sometimes even death � to get to America, the land of plenty.
As for those imports, the examples usually are goods that U.S. producers have no business making anyway...
Posted by Kevin on November, 19 2004 at 10:31 AM
