Shaun Richman

There’s a pretty good article in today’s Washington Post about legal efforts to block Wal-Mart from invading the region. These include a measure that would restrict the location of stores larger than 120,000 feet (the typical size of a Wal-Mart Supercenter) and one which would require employers to spend eight percent of their payroll on health care if they have more than 10,000 employees in Maryland (only one company employs as many people while paying far less than eight percent on health care; guess which one?).

Efforts like these, and our own Wal-Mart Free NYC, are having their effect. Wal-Mart’s stock price has been stagnant for years. Sure, they’re a huge corporation making billions of dollars in business, but Wall Street always wants more. Wal-Mart’s failure to expand into America’s large urban areas is hurting them, slowly but surely.

But, oh, how can we consumers resist all that cheap underwear? From the Post:

The results can be seen at the cash register. At the Wal-Mart supercenter in Spotsylvania County, which opened in March, a basket of 23 popular household products, including such brands as Jif peanut butter, Maxwell House coffee and Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil, cost $60.37. At the nearby Giant, less than a mile away, the same 23 products cost $75.55, or about 25 percent more.

…

Grover and Linda Wilson, both self-employed, drive 25 miles to the Spotsylvania supercenter from their home in Rhoadsville, Va., passing both Giant and Safeway on the way. The Wilsons don’t mind that Wal-Mart workers have no union.

“You can’t pay people $20 an hour and sell bananas for 33 cents a pound,” Grover Wilson, 62, said.

What’s funny about old Grover’s “observation” (not sure where he got that $20 an hour figure; the local union contract calls for $13 an hour in wages – even with healthcare and pension factored in, the pay is still not that high) is that it echos the complaints of socialists in the former East Germany. In the months following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the political focus shifted from greater democracy and openness towards the West to welcoming international capitalism and dismantling the welfare state, German socialists would commonly complain, “We didn’t fight this revolution for bananas!”

But the Wal-Mart revolution is bananas. It’s about cheap underwear and $60 teevees. We’re not supposed to be worried about the social costs of all that crap – the sweatshops in China, the welfare payments that subsidize the company’s low pay, the discrimination against women and so on. We’re just supposed to be grateful that prices are falling almost as fast as our wages.