The Bosque Boys

I think there's a plausible counter-argument to be made; indeed, one can make a plausible conservative case against Wal-Mart.

In his article, Thwarting the Killing of the Corporation: Limited Liability, Democracy, and Economics, 87 Nw. U. L. Rev. 148 (1992), conservative law professor Stephen Presser writes eloquently about the role small business plays in our democracy. Presser explains that corporations were endowed with limited liability precisely so as to encourage the growth of small business:

The popular democratic justification for limited liability is rarely observed by modern scholars. Nevertheless, it appears that to the nineteenth-century legislators in states such as New York, who mandated limited liability for corporations' shareholders, the imposition of limited liability was perceived as a means of encouraging the small-scale entrepreneur, and of keeping entry into business markets competitive and democratic. Without limitations on individual shareholder liability, it was believed, only the very wealthiest men, industrial titans such as New York's John Jacob Astor, could possess the privilege of investing in corporations. Without the contributions of investors of moderate means, it was felt, the kind of economic progress states like New York needed would not be achieved.

The author of the most comprehensive study of New York legislative policy toward corporations in the nineteenth century concluded that New York's policy of limited liability, and its policy of encouraging incorporation by persons of modest means "facilitated the growth of a viable urban democracy by allowing a wide participation in businesses that could most advantageously be organized as corporations." "More importantly," he suggested, New York's general incorporation statutes "helped equalize the opportunities to get rich. The passage of general incorporation laws for business corporations was the economic aspect of the political and social forces that democratized the United States during the Age of Jackson, 1825-1855."

By trampling small businesses underfoot, through its mix of volume pricing and subsidies, Wal-Mart and its ilk undermine the possibility of "wide participation in businesses." Prospective entrepreneurs are thus pushed out of fields like retail.

Of course, maybe Wal-Mart makes up for that by buying products from small entrepreneurs in places like China. But do we really want to encourage our nation’s most likely future superpower rival to further build up its economy with massive trade deficits?

There also is an aesthetic/humanistic argument to be made. Consider Russell Kirk's description of his beloved Detroit:

All my life I have known the city of Detroit, called-during World War II "the arsenal of democracy." ... In the shocking decay of that great city nowadays, we behold the consequences of an inhumane economy-bent upon maximum productive efficiency, but heedless of personal order and public order. Henry Ford's assembly-line methods had much to do with the impersonality and monotony of Detroit's economic development; and so, in some degree, did Ford's concentration of his whole productive apparatus at the Rouge Plant; but of course Henry Ford had no notion, in the earlier years of his operation, of what might be the personal and social effects of his highly successful industrial establishment; nor did the other automobile manufacturers of Detroit. Indeed, they seem still to be ignorant of such unhappy consequences, or else indifferent to the consequences, so long as profits continue to be made. Consider the wiping out of Poletown through the unholy alliance of industrial, municipal, and ecclesiastical power structures, regardless of the rights and the wishes of Poletown's inhabitants-all to build on the site of Poletown a new industrial complex, which already, far from supplying the promised increase in tax revenues for Detroit, is involved in grave difficulties.

Outside the most heavily urbanized areas, Wal-Mart typically builds on the edge of town, putting up a huge (and butt-ugly) big box building surrounded by acres of bare concrete parking lots. There are few sights in the American scene less attractive or appealing to the eye.

Kirk observed that "Detroit, during my own lifetime, has produced tremendous wealth in goods and services. But it has been a social failure. And so have nearly all of America's other major cities." I put it to you that Wal-Mart contributed to moving those failures into small town America by shuttering local business and creating huge barriers to entrepreneurial entry into fields traditionally the province of local small business men and women.

Being a conservative is supposed to be about things like tradition, community, and, yes, aesthetics. If I'm right about that, it's hard to see why a conservative should regard Wal-Mart as a societal force for good. And remember, when you spend your dollars at Wal-Mart, they go straight to Little Rock, Arkansas--they don't stay in your community.

So what do we do? Well, we must strike a balance between respect for private property rights and our other values. How? On the one hand, government should not legislate against Wal-Mart and its ilk (although Japan has sucessfully done this). On the other hand, government should certainly not subsidize Wal-Mart through zoning or tax breaks. Wal-Mart’s a big boy, so to speak, who can take care of itself. We ought to let it compete in a truly free market. And those of us with a bully pulpit out to use it to encourage Wal-Mart to become a better neighbor and citizen.

As for me and my family, we'll worship the Lord (and we'll not shop at Wal-Mart!).

Tocqueville,

I can't argue with any of your points. In fact, I meant to stipulate as much in my first paragraph. I applaud your crusade. My sympathy for Wal-Mart, I suppose, is a guilty pleasure. As I say, it is a sanctuary for me. I like huddling with the teeming masses as I buy my ten-pound carton of dish soap.

The good news for you and society, and the rational part of my brain, is that Wal-Mart is dying the slow death of a big corporation. They have forgotten what made them successful, and now they are following a familiar pattern in American business history of hurdling down the highway on nothing but momentum. Wal-Mart will run out of steam eventually, and likely we won't have to wait too terribly long to see it.

Until that happens, however, I think I will continue to wander the aisles from time to time, wading into the tired and poor yearning to be free (and buy cheap underwear).

There are non-political reasons to avoid Wal-Mart, and primarily they are the same reasons I avoided K-Mart, until it closed. The customer service, beyond the vaguely creepy elderly "greeter" at the door, is non-existent. The stores often are dirty and disheveled. The product lines are uneven and inconsistent-- they sometimes don't have the same thing from one week to the next. Finally, they strangely have limited selection in some areas-- probably due to volume purchasing agreements. There aren't 48 types of motor oil there, there are only a handful.

It's kind of sad that your sanctuary is a faded, grumpy store rather than Cameron Park or a library or working on a Habitat House (where you probably would also get away from the "elitists"). A sanctuary should have a spiritual component, shouldn't it? I really don't think that consumerism is a conservative value, or a value at all-- it's just being the chump guessing at cards in three-card monte on 6th Avenue and 57th.

Thanks, Parent.

1. Consumerism is not a conservative value, which explains why thinking conservatives are voicing their righteous indignation at Wal-Mart more articulately with each passing day. Wal-Mart has no friends in either camp of the culture wars. Conservatives and Liberals can feel good about agreeing on something. "Wal-Mart bad." (Again, the irony: bad for everybody except those who cannot afford to buy at a less "faded, grumpy store.")

2. Customer service and inventory and store cleanliness miss the point. Of course, those things are awful at Wal-Mart. And those things are part of the reason why Wal-Mart is doomed. The Wal-Mart product is inferior and the concept will eventually fail. As I said, I suspect that there is no one left in the organization who remembers why Wal-Mart succeeded.

3. I think it is okay to have multiple sanctuaries. Cameron Park is a good one, especially for one with a nineteenth-century sensibility (worshiping in God's great cathedral). Habitat and other benevolent enterprises are great (although those opportunities have their own pitfalls). Who doesn't love libraries? But none of those places give you what I attempted to describe about Wal-Mart as a public space for hard-working and dispossessed Americans. As for mingling with a larger cross-section of America, of course, there are many alternatives: Hispanic Fest; any classroom on the MCC campus; and the Bellmead HEB can serve as a nice option, if you just cannot stomach Wal-Mart.

By targeting their marketing at shoddy impulse items for the working class and cutting off chances for them to start their own businesses, Wal-Mart makes sure there will be plenty of poor people for you to keep slumming with.

I shopped at Wal-Mart. It made me sick to my stomach because I WAS poor (not just chumming around with them, and I saw how they marketed the giant, crappy tvs and 124 oz. bags of Cheetoes on the end caps so those people who went there to get tube socks would overspend. I saw my friend who worked there without health insurance further impoverished because of an illness. Admittedly, I didn't see the shoe store a colleague might have opened, because that never happened-- Wal-Mart was there.

Wal-Mart keeps those poor and dispossessed people poor and dispossessed. Look in the carts as you wait in line. Do you still feel good about Wal-Mart?

FTR: Wal-Mart is not a place that makes me feel good. Wal-Mart makes me feel real.

As for your plan to reform society and make poor people's lives better, I am all ears. I will give you as much space as you need to outline that. In the meantime, what to do right now for those tube socks and crappy TVs? Is that redundant? How much would you have to pay to have a good TV?

I wonder whether there is some value that is higher than cheap toothpaste, underwear, and light blulbs? Is the the highest value, the summum bonum?

Again, I think this discussion of the supreme good is worth having, but it does not diminish the necesity of toothpaste, underwear and light bulbs. The summum bonum is a philosophical question. Cheap staples are a gritty reality. One of my points: Wal-Mart maybe "butt ugly," as Tocqueville said, but for folks for whom a few pennies per item add up to something at the end of the day, Wal-Mart provides a welcome service. We can rail against the disease of which Wal-Mart is a symptom, but we need to acknowledge that right now Wal-Mart is extremely important to a large segment of the population whom we do not consider often or understand very well.