The conversation went like this:
Me: "What crime do they get away with?"
New Yorker Reading Medical Student: "They put mom and pop shops out of business, force everyone to shop there, they sell inferior goods, and they pay their employees slave wages."
New Yorker Reading Medical Student: "They put mom and pop shops out of business, force everyone to shop there, they sell inferior goods, and they pay their employees slave wages."
Me: "Hmm. People prefer shopping at Walmart instead of higher priced mom and pop stores. Why are you angry that Walmart allows poor people to approach material lifestyles enjoyed by people born into privilege such as everyone in this room?"
She became angry, and was about to riposte, but a patient began to experience respiratory distress, or something, and we never finished that conversation.
Pretentious snobbery is always amusing to observe, but Walmart haters are the tops. Some key points:
- Walmart puts mom and pop shops out of business. This is a good thing. Walmart puts them out of business by selling items that people desire at a quality they desire that is cheaper than mom and pop can offer. For mom and pop to stay in business would mean for the poor to spend more of their disposable income so as to support mom and pop's middle class lifestyle.
- To say Walmart has poor quality or variety is farcical. The selection and quality of fruits and vegetables you can buy at any Walmart in the US is far superior to any high end grocer of the 80s. Walmart clearly rips off the poor by selling delicious strawberries year round for less than $3 a box. I wonder how much the upscale grocery stores frequented by New Yorker readers charged just 15 years ago?
-Despite a silly book by an activist who does not quite understand game theory or public choice, nobody forces anyone to shop at Walmart. There are very good reasons why the poor and middle class shop at Walmart. New Yorker readers reserve the right for themselves to govern their lives, why not grant it to the poor in their shopping decisions? It is delightfully misanthropic to argue that the poor are incapable of truly doing something so basic as to choose where to shop.
Why do people publicly hate Walmart? The haters mysteriously always seem to be upper-middle class, have spent at least $100k on their bachelor's degrees, and never really interact with the type of people who do shop at Walmart. Most humans love signalling their socioeconomic status, for whatever reason (pride? wicked vanity? mates? securing the reproductive success of one's already living offspring?). Letting others know you are rich enough to purchase items of the same utility for quadruple the price is one way to signal where you are on the socioeconomic totem pole, a process known as conspicuous consumption. The most likely explanation of these privileged haters of Walmart is that they observe that as rich and educated and powerful as they are, there are people who are richer, smarter, and even more powerful; this awareness induces envy in these insecure narcissists, which they allay by loudly pointing out their different shopping choices of those less privileged than themselves.
*Yes, Walmart is full of flaws. I am not a fanboy. They are a publicly traded for profit corporation, they've bribed Mexican Govt Officials, blah blah blah. But I do fervently believe in the Law of Complaining: if you complain, you must put forth a plausible solution superior to the status quo. If you cannot do this, then what is really signified by your complaining?
