The Walmart Effect

For those of you who live outside of the UK, it may surprise you to know that the UK is still in the early stages of the anonymising, globalising strip-mall effect that long ago decimated many of the USA's local businesses (especially independent food retailers) at the expense of the global supermarket chains. Walmart for example, only made it's first appearance here within the last decade (buying up Britain's 'Asda' chain of stores). Nevertheless, as a recent article in the Guardian makes obvious, their mission is to conquer the rest of the world in much the same fashion as they have in the States. (More on this in a moment).

This will have a particularly devastating effect on the character of British towns and cities, because many of them - at least those older than a hundred years or so - were originally built around their local markets. Where such markets still exist, they constitute a rare source of income for local people - and that means farmers and food producers, not just vendors. If the markets go then so does that source of revenue and incentive for local food production, as well as one of the last vestiges of actual community that many British cities have left. (If any of you are wondering why local food production is so important, then just think about how much climate-altering pollution it takes to fly a plane-load of fruit from New Zealand to your fruit basket). The British folks amongst you will all probably have noticed that British city centres all look much the same these days, since they all have the same dozen high street chains, which carefully design all of their stores to look, sound and smell exactly identical. Local markets are probably the only things left in our towns and cities that remain distinctive.

For a vivid demonstration of how this sort of trend strips a town of its character, we can already look to the Newtowns - pre-planned towns based on a US-style zoning model, with a large shopping mall at its centre. I grew up in such a Newtown, a place called Livingston. In Livingston there are no longer - I'm not sure there ever were - any choices other than the big chains, such as Asda, Tesco, and Morrisons. Of these there is only the slightest evidence that any of them give a shit about local business. I was happy to discover recently that my own local supermarket Waitrose has started stocking locally produced foods (I immediately went in and bought a basket full, hoping to encourage them in this unusually ethical and positive project). Perhaps they actually read the slip I put in their 'Suggestion Box' (thought I doubt it, it probably just looked like a good marketing ploy).

Of course, some among you might be wondering what all the fuss is about, why it's such a bad thing if food is cheaper and staff are nice to you for a change. Here are just a few thoughts about what's wrong with Walmart and the power it wields over government and its employees (and I'm certain it's just the tip of the iceberg). It's taken from aforementioned Guardian piece, which is about a forthcoming documentary by director Robert Greenwald. The full article is here.

Robert Greenwald's [documentary]... builds a picture of the devastating impact Wal-Mart culture has had on the landscape of small-town America, and is having on the wider world. Greenwald... shows how the homey store created by Sam Walton in the Fifties, now the world's wealthiest corporation with a revenue of nearly $300 billion, blights almost every aspect of American life.

It is hard to say which part of the film is most shocking. There are the interviews with the owners of father and son stores in middle America who watch their life's work destroyed overnight by the arrival of a Supercenter. There is the footage from squalid Chinese sweatshops, where workers live in slave conditions to fuel the aggressive discounting that Wal-Mart (slogan 'Every Day Low Prices') prides itself in; there are the testimonies of former store managers forced to cut overheads every month by understaffing and underpaying and denying health cover to 'associates' (which is what they call the workforce); there are the antiunion Swat teams that fly in on private jets from headquarters in Arkansas to target and harass any individuals who make a motion to join a union; and there is the unbelievable litany of murders and rapes and muggings that have occurred in Wal-Mart car parks because the company refuses to shell out on security.

[...]

At Becton the Asda 'colleagues' (as they are known in Britain) seem happy enough to help, but it is hard not to notice the difference between someone who has been incentivised into 'welcoming you' and someone who does so because they want to... I wander the aisles for a while, beset by a familiar kind of superstore despond, take notes of prices which compare unfavourably with those at the market, and hope in vain to see a couple of colleagues chatting to each other, which is considered 'time theft' by Wal-Mart HQ.

There is something in all vast supermarkets' relentless demonstration of choice that seems to suggest the opposite. Asda colleagues may have pockets of pride and so on but, in among the deals of the week, I find it's hard to get a few headlines out of my head. The one about the store being fined nearly a million pounds in the North East because it attempted to bribe employees to leave their union. The one about the store in Leicestershire where, in a panic about illegal immigrants, any colleague with an 'odd-sounding name', even those who had worked nearly 20 years at Asda, was told over the store tannoy to report to the manager's office with their papers. I collected a basket of shopping, but didn't fancy the queue, so I headed back to Queen's Market.

[...]

[Says a market stall vendor] "What people don't realise is that the women who come here shop to cook. Ninety per cent of them don't work, but they do know how to cook. They will buy 10 kilos of onions, 10 kilos of potatoes, just for the week. They don't want any convenience food. We are told repeatedly that is what the government wants: home cooks.

[...]

Neil Stockwell sees the same indications that it is the beginning of the end for him. 'We've been told we have to close now at six o'clock for example,' he says. 'We used to go on, on a summer evening, as long as we wanted. Me and my grandad used to drive out of here at midnight. Lovely summer's evening we'd be selling grapes, oranges, lemons. For some reason Asda will be allowed to stay open all night. Explain that to me?'

[...]

1,306 the number of convenience stores currently owned by the Big Four (Sainsbury's, Asda, Tesco, Morrisons).
54 the number of convenience stores owned by the Big Four in 2000.

22% the percentage by which independent stores in the UK declined between 2001 and 2005.
40% the percentage of Britain's small independent grocery stores predicted to be lost by 2015.

£850,000 the amount Asda were fined by a British court this February for offering illegal inducement to try and get workers to leave their unions.
1.6 million the number of women who have sued Wal-Mart in a US court for gender discrimination, the largest class action suit in history.

Since I hate to finish a post with only depressing news, I wanted to say a big 'Well done!' to The Gap, who are at least making an effort to stop their clothes being made by starving children in sweat shops.