Market Populism at
Wal Mart
I'm in the midst of working on a project about the relationship between "the people" in the American political imaginary and how they've come to be selfsame with the product of collective choice i.e. the judgments of the market. My last blog post here looked at the specter of consumerism in a famous Ronald Reagan campaign ad, “Morning
in America.” Some of the dynamics I identified there can actually be viewed today, albeit in a slightly different way in the practices of the Walmart corporation. Indeed, between their decision
to purchase the cheapest good available regardless or labor conditions and
their well-documented mistreatment of their own labor, Walmart is something of
an easy target for progressive activists and political pundits alike, Thomas
Frank repeatedly mentions Walmart repeatedly in his 2005 essay “What’s the
Matter With Liberals?” when he complains that centrist Democrats refuse to
challenge large corporations like the Arkansas-based retail giant, choosing
instead to benefit from the resulting corporate fundraising. More recently,
Walmart came under fire for a few different issues in the spring of 2013. A CNBC report from April detailed that
customers were frustrated with their shopping experience at Walmart, as cuts made
to staffing created extensive stocking and customer service issues.[i]
The report also noted that in order to avoid running afoul of labor laws
Walmart was forcing employees to work off the clock in order to increase
efficiency. Forbes’ Rick Ungar linked
these practice to decline’s in Walmart’s profits, suggesting that there was a
correlation between companies like CostCo that pay their employees a living
wage and a positive shopping and consumer experience.[ii]
The Washington Post’s Harold Myerson
picked up on these observations, noting this uptick in criticism came even as
Walmart opened more stores while cutting down on the overall number of people
employed in its businesses. It also uses this business model throughout its
supply chain, resulting in a situation where:
Problem is, the Wal-Mart model of
employment and service not only reflects but also reinforces the declining
economic prospects of the majority of Americans. The nation’s largest
private-sector employer has used its market power to impose its low-wage model
all along its supply chain, leaving millions of Americans with no shopping
option other than the kind of discount, and frustrating, experience that
Wal-Mart provides.[iii]
At the same time that people like Myerson were issuing high
profile critiques of the company, a disaster at a Bangladeshi factory tied to
the corporation made visible the high costs of its labor practices on the
population abroad, threatening to link American consumption practices to unacceptable violence elsewhere. Time magazine
reported that the cost of Walmart’s cheap products was at least 386 deaths in addition to another 122 at a separate facility just a
year before.[iv]
Critics
were taking aim at the negative consequence’s of Walmart’s policies that aimed
to cut costs and increase profits. Offshoring production, playing shell games
with employee hours, and imposing conditions throughout their supply
chain—remember, Walmart is the biggest corporate employer in America—create a
kind of self-fulfilling prophecy wherein Walmart’s low-cost, “no frills” model emerges as a necessary evil for
scores of American consumers. In response Walmart turned to market populism as
a strategy for managing the criticism.
Walmart
launched an ad campaign called “The Real Walmart.” The campaign featured three
videos corresponding to three different aspects of the company, including the
benefits it provides for consumers, its employees, and its hyper-efficient
supply chain. Each ad seeks to humanize a different element of the Walmart
business model. The first advertisement called “Real Walmart Shoppers” focuses
on the benefits for consumers. It emphasizes the size of Walmart’s customer
base—60% of the shopping American public—and figures these consumers as
particular representatives of the American whole. Not for nothing does the
advertisement open with a black man who calls himself an “American success
story” before a multiracial and dual-gender parade of bodies get a few seconds
each in front of the camera to run through their occupations: firefighters,
accountant, engineer, teacher. These occupations correspond neatly with those
on display in the old Reagan campaign video, which shows firefighters and
teachers, and of course various generic white-collar workers on their way to
the office. The advertisement emphasizes
the consumer savvy of those who shop at Walmart, locating in the gap between
the Walmart price and the (assumed) higher price from another vendor the
economic acumen of the average American citizen. The decision to shop at
Walmart becomes an expression of the market savvy of the American population,
wherein less spending on one thing creates opportunities for thoughtful
purchasing in others. What Myerson’s article suggests is the effect of
coercion—a reduction in the available options for purchasing—is instead figured as an expression of the popular will. Of course for many Americans they “choose” to
shop at Walmart inasmuch as it’s the only option available for them, and in
many cases this is because they work at some other company who is a subsidiary
of Walmart or works on a similar business model so to call it a choice stretches credulity.
While the
first ad establishes the democratic bonafides of the decision to shop at
Walmart, the second ad opens with a young black man who works at Walmart and
who proudly proclaims “I’m the next American success story.” The advertisement
then lays out a host of possible opportunities within the infrastructure of
Walmart: management, engineering, and several other related areas where Walmart
gives its employees college credits. Rather than appearing as exploited labor,
the protagonist says of those who observe him on the job that, “When they see
me, I hope they see someone working their way up.” The present is not a matter of actually
existing injustice but instead is figured as a temporary stopping point before
a future of possibility and professional growth, not to mention financial
enrichment. Not for nothing he notes that he receives a bonus when sales are
good, suggesting that critiquing Walmart and its labor practices is to actually take issue with and threaten the livelihood of "the next American success story."
The third
advertisement focuses on Walmart’s highly efficient supply chain, regulary
drawing on language of eliminating inefficiency. Again using the language of an “American success story” the ad features lots of images of trucks, tractors,
and their drivers, emphasizing the human and machinic elements at the heart of
Walmart. Employing imagery that belies an odd fetish for the mechanical, the
short ad closes with the following statement, that “When you see our low
prices, remember the wheels turning behind the scenes delivering for millions
of Americans everyday.” By encouraging consumers to be semioticians, this third ad completes the equation of market populism set up
by the first two: behind each price lay a in separate elements the fingers on
the invisible hand, where consumer choice, employee labor, and an efficient supply
chain meet in a coincident point. Because there is no temporal element to the
narrative, each of these factors plays into the production of the commodity
equally in terms of their form: at the same moment that the consumer makes the
right choice, they are providing a benefit for the young black employee in the
form of increased sales, at the same time that they themselves are
demonstrating their economic sophisticated by producing savings that they can
move to other areas even as the efficient supply chain in part makes it
possible. At each level the economy is humanized: truck and tractor drivers,
the cosmopolitan and multiracial makeup of the Walmart consumer base, and the
potential-laden black youth demonstrate that Walmart is "people" not some space of exploitation. Not for nothing are we reminded of Mitt Romney's easy proclamation that "corporations are people."
“The
people” are a rhetorical resource available not only for their use as a
spearhead in an attack of the regulatory structure of the welfare state.
Indeed, “the people” authorize attacks upon those who would seek to criticize
the existing arrangements of power as they exist within the economy itself. This market populism makes each part of a
commercial transaction—production, sales, and purchase—into human moments that
express the competence and value of the American public. To take issue with the
product of these judgments which in this case is the central position in the
market held by Walmart is thus to disagree with the marvelous product of the
American “people.” As a Forbes
article that reported on the campaign said in its headline, “Its About Time
Walmart Waged an Ad Campaign Like This One” people need “to understand
the tremendous net positive that Walmart remains for the American economy.”[v] In
a way this move seems unnecessary: shouldn’t the very public who “decides” to
shop at Walmart already know the facts that the advertisement wants to
disseminate? The need for the campaign itself demonstrates that the trappings of populism are cynical indeed.
Moreover, the Walmart
campaign suggests an update to Patton’s thesis discussed previously about the threat posed to the
silent majority by the racial and sexual Other and the State. It is not just
the figure of the queer person or the black male who threatens to “penetrate”
the silent majority, but in fact it is the generalized threat of the
possibility of there being some judgment external to “the people” and,
seemingly, external to the economy. In the same way that the state threatens to
distort the truth of the market, so too does external criticism of the market
threaten "the people's" integrity by indicting their choices as complicit in injustice. Where
we are generally led to believe that what the market is good because it is a
reflection of a complicated aggregation of choices that, on balance, tend towards the better, what does it means for this
tacit economic populism if its results are actually net negative? While the
advertising series does not engage in a proper rehearsal of objections and
their refutation, certainly its routine insistence on pointing to an abstracted
but positive existence enabled by Walmart—whether the future career of the
young black worker or the other savvy consumer choices of its customers—suggests that these complaints with
Walmart are temporary while the future of both customers and employees lies
elsewhere, with a future in engineering or the adjustment of resources into
more vital areas as told by a sovereign American vox populi.
The
individuated collective is made manifest in this campaign. Elsewhere I have attempted to show that the individuated collective is a modern rhetoric of conservative populism wherein the collective element of appeals to "the people" is maintained while in practice the only shared element common to the population is the fact of their individual differentiation from one another. While there are a
variety of human inputs into Walmart, each of them arrives at one shared point
which is the moment of consumer choice. Whether teacher, firefighter, trucker,
or Walmart employee, what holds “the people” together is that they can each
express themselves equally through their choice to either consume or work at
Walmart. Their right to do is established through defenses of efficiency,
choice, and ultimately competence: shopping or working at Walmart maximizes
utility and efficiency. In this way a typical paradox of political
populism—namely that “the people” by being multivariate and many do not possess
any kind of unity that would come along with a collective name—is displaced if
not resolved through the suggestion that the shared element is participation in
the choice that is reflected in where the market settles. Hence to attack
actually existing arrangements of economics is to attack “the people” in their
one moment of supposed appearance within the realm of the public, insofar as “the
people” can be found not as an entity in the world but instead in these moments
of judgment that reflect their will. Hence market populism’s hostility to
claims made on the basis of labor and social justice is a move to insulate the naturalized economy from criticism on the basis of that criticism's emergence from a site outside the place of populism. Given our tendency to emphasize the democratic rather than republican elements of our politics in our political discourse, this explains in part the staying power of these version of market populism despite the "contradictions" pointed out by Thomas Frank and other critics who wonder loudly why Americans continue to "vote against their interests." They are not, it seems voting against their interests: they and the economy are inseparable in the rhetoric of modern market populism.
[i] http://www.cnbc.com/id/100618849
[ii] http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/04/17/walmart-pays-workers-poorly-and-sinks-while-costco-pays-workers-well-and-sails-proof-that-you-get-what-you-pay-for/
[iii] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-taking-the-service-out-of-the-service-sector/2013/04/16/b0a47efe-a6b6-11e2-8302-3c7e0ea97057_story.html
[iv] http://business.time.com/2013/04/30/bangladesh-factory-collapse-will-force-companies-to-rethink-outsourced-manufacturing/
[v] http://www.forbes.com/sites/dalebuss/2013/05/14/its-about-time-walmart-waged-an-ad-campaign-like-this-one/
