Giving them the business

National Review, August 8, 2005 by Alexander Rose

Why all this brouhaha over a chain store, anyway? The issue hinges on whether corporations owe a "debt to society," and not just to their shareholders. But what kind of "society" should corporate "values" represent? As always, it all depends on who is doing the defining. The anti-corporate types--the Dicker sorts who typically denounce large companies as "soulless" and "uncaring"--envisage a social-democratic paradise of powerful unions, lavish benefits, and 35-hour workweeks. Presumably, like love in the Ring cycle, unionization will redeem the spiritually vacuous corporations that dominate the United States. The Soderquist camp, on the other hand, is convinced that corporations possess distinctive personalities, with their own (in this case, Wal-Mart's) "way" of behaving that is nurtured and enforced by the senior staff. These "personality" companies, it seems to me, worship either their founder or their CEO--Sam Walton, of course, but not forgetting Jack Welch of General Electric and Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway--in a cult form of basileiolatry. Just as medieval kings were the "fathers of their people," whose interests and instincts naturally coincided with those of the masses, today's corporate chieftains boast of the great things they and their everyday low prices do for their customers, and for society. The debt, so to speak, has been paid, and we owe fealty with our dollars.

So, is Wal-Mart good or bad? Tough question--and most likely a pointless one, since there is no way of accurately tallying the financial, political, and social pros and cons. All in all, I'd lean towards the positive side, for Wal-Mart does employ a staggeringly huge number of people here and abroad, does provide cheap products and useful services, does squeeze out inefficiencies by its suppliers, does contribute to dampening inflation by keeping prices low, does create competition for lazy local and regional retailers, and does venture into no-go urban areas ignored by other chains. On the negative side, Wal-Mart's big, gray box architecture is shamefully ugly, the company does drive local wages down and bankrupts downtown businesses (not all of which are worth saving, by the way), and it fetishizes low prices, creating consumerist waste as a result. Wal- Mart's not perfect, but then nothing is, and it's not the worst by far.