Copyright 2004 Ben S. Pollock
Thursday, June 10, 2004. The small business community continues to make itself extinct. It’s so easy to hit Wal-Mart as it’s such a big target (pun intended) but it’s what we truly want.
Bargaining is a basic human need as food and sex, if you think about it. Bargaining is also uniquely human. I could mean, but I don’t, that bargaining is the from-day-one haggling. That is not a need, and modern humanity finds it so unpleasant that we’ve moved around it to fixed prices; there’s scholarly theory on that, even.
What I mean is the universal need to obtain something for less. This exists in barter and money situations alike. Everyone falls under its spell, not just the poor whose need for frugality is obvious, but also the rich. Sensible rich people, as in those who want to stay rich or become richer, hunt for bargains as that’s how they stay rich.
This is also a need like food and sex in that it can become obsessive. Also and more interestingly is that these three basic needs also take in more than the basics. Food and sex, hunger and procreation, often become so much more, mean so much more, than the basic impulse. Food replaces loneliness or food is a reward or a punishment far outside nutrition. Sex is love, sex is control, oh, you name it.
Likewise, bargain-hunting is a symbol made real.
Back to Wal-Mart. If you can buy a microwave at the typical appliance dealer or for a third less at Wal-Mart, if not the same model then very similar ones (model brands and line numbers often are dissimilar for inventory reasons, if not marketing), a human has to go with Wal-Mart. To do business with the appliance dealer is only an act of charity, and, because bargaining is a basic human drive, patronizing the unique cannot last long. It is short-term. It is doomed.
Maybe this is a specious argument. I am not a Wal-Mart shareholder or otherwise its apologist. But the Supercenter concept fills a need, not just for working people but for everybody with a wallet. Arkansas’ own Wal-Mart somehow got to be No. 1 employing a stable yet evolving cluster of buying and selling strategies; Kmart of Michigan and Target of Minnesota were, and are, on its heels.
The person who says Wal-Mart is taking away jobs in their town, pointing at the giant’s wages and benefits, really should compare it with the wages, benefits and workers’ rights of Joe’s Old-Time Office Supply and Mom’s Home Appliance Center, not with the pay scale and break room of, say, the Microsoft home office.
I’d rather not defend a Big Business like Wal-Mart, but its critics ought to find more worthwhile world problems to analyze. They look hypocritical on this one. -30-
