Why I love Walmart despite never shopping there
<p>In a discussion thread  that wandered to the subject of Walmart and its enemies, I said &#8220;Scratch a Walmart-basher and you’ll find a snotty elitist, a person who hates capitalism and consumption and deep down thinks the Wrong People have Too Much Stuff.&#8221;</p>
<p>The commenter <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3968&#038;cpage=1#comment-345603">replied</a>: &#8220;You know, I don’t think you need to be an anti-capitalist in order to disdain over-consumption and its enablers.&#8221;</p>
<p>No, certainly not.  My own preference is to live simply, getting and spending little and putting my energy into creative work.  Much of what we think of as &#8220;normal&#8221; behavior in a consumer society strikes me as wasteful and vulgar. But it&#8217;s a disdain I tend to keep quiet about, for at least two reasons:</p>
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<p>I find that, as little as I like excess and overconsumption, voicing that dislike gives power to people and political tendencies that I consider far more dangerous than overconsumption.  I&#8217;d rather be surrounded by fat people who buy too much stuff than concede <em>any ground at all</em> to busybodies and would-be social engineers.</p>
<p>But there&#8217;s more than that going on here&#8230;</p>
<p>Rich people going on about the crassness of materialism, or spouting ecological pieties, often seem to me to me to be retailing a subtle form of competitive sabotage.  &#8220;There, there, little peasant&#8230;&#8221; runs the not-so-hidden message &#8220;&#8230;it is more virtuous to have little than much, so be content with the scraps you have.&#8221;  After which the speaker delivers a patronizing pat on the head and jets off to Aruba to hang with the other aristos at a conference on Sustainable Eco-Multiculturalism or something.</p>
<p>I do not &#8211; <em>ever</em> &#8211; want to be one of those people. And just by being a white, college-educated American from an upper-middle-class SES, I&#8217;m in a place where honking about overconsumption sounds even to <em>myself</em> altogether too much like crapping on the aspirations of poorer and browner people who have bupkis and quite reasonably want more than they have.</p>
<p>I was less reticent when I was younger, until I noticed what I sounded like.  I&#8217;ll still snark freely about vulgar ostentation and overconsumption in people who are richer than me, but I don&#8217;t do the other direction any more. It&#8217;s&#8230;unseemly.</p>
<p>Which is a reason I tend to mute any criticisms I have of Walmart.  I basically don&#8217;t ever shop there &#8211; I think I bought a specific $13 tacklebox once because I knew by seeing an example that it was right for a use I had in mind.  I do not love the ambience of Walmarts; by my standards they&#8217;re loud, cheerless, and tacky &#8211; and that describes a lot of their merchandise and their shoppers, too.</p>
<p>But my esthetic and aspirational standards are those of a comparatively wealthy person even in U.S. terms, let alone world terms. To the people who use Walmart and belong there, Walmart is a tremendous boon that stretches their purchasing power, enabling them to have things that don&#8217;t suck.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s why I love the idea of Walmart, and will defend it against its enemies.</p>
