{"id":3993,"date":"2011-12-03T22:39:37","date_gmt":"2011-12-04T03:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=3993"},"modified":"2014-03-11T19:46:01","modified_gmt":"2014-03-11T23:46:01","slug":"why-i-love-walmart-despite-never-shopping-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=3993","title":{"rendered":"Why I love Walmart despite never shopping there"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a discussion thread  that wandered to the subject of Walmart and its enemies, I said &#8220;Scratch a Walmart-basher and you\u2019ll find a snotty elitist, a person who hates capitalism and consumption and deep down thinks the Wrong People have Too Much Stuff.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The commenter <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=3968&#038;cpage=1#comment-345603\">replied<\/a>: &#8220;You know, I don\u2019t think you need to be an anti-capitalist in order to disdain over-consumption and its enablers.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>No, certainly not.  My own preference is to live simply, getting and spending little and putting my energy into creative work.  Much of what we think of as &#8220;normal&#8221; behavior in a consumer society strikes me as wasteful and vulgar. But it&#8217;s a disdain I tend to keep quiet about, for at least two reasons:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I find that, as little as I like excess and overconsumption, voicing that dislike gives power to people and political tendencies that I consider far more dangerous than overconsumption.  I&#8217;d rather be surrounded by fat people who buy too much stuff than concede <em>any ground at all<\/em> to busybodies and would-be social engineers.<\/p>\n<p>But there&#8217;s more than that going on here&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Rich people going on about the crassness of materialism, or spouting ecological pieties, often seem to me to me to be retailing a subtle form of competitive sabotage.  &#8220;There, there, little peasant&#8230;&#8221; runs the not-so-hidden message &#8220;&#8230;it is more virtuous to have little than much, so be content with the scraps you have.&#8221;  After which the speaker delivers a patronizing pat on the head and jets off to Aruba to hang with the other aristos at a conference on Sustainable Eco-Multiculturalism or something.<\/p>\n<p>I do not &#8211; <em>ever<\/em> &#8211; want to be one of those people. And just by being a white, college-educated American from an upper-middle-class SES, I&#8217;m in a place where honking about overconsumption sounds even to <em>myself<\/em> altogether too much like crapping on the aspirations of poorer and browner people who have bupkis and quite reasonably want more than they have.<\/p>\n<p>I was less reticent when I was younger, until I noticed what I sounded like.  I&#8217;ll still snark freely about vulgar ostentation and overconsumption in people who are richer than me, but I don&#8217;t do the other direction any more. It&#8217;s&#8230;unseemly.<\/p>\n<p>Which is a reason I tend to mute any criticisms I have of Walmart.  I basically don&#8217;t ever shop there &#8211; I think I bought a specific $13 tacklebox once because I knew by seeing an example that it was right for a use I had in mind.  I do not love the ambience of Walmarts; by my standards they&#8217;re loud, cheerless, and tacky &#8211; and that describes a lot of their merchandise and their shoppers, too.<\/p>\n<p>But my esthetic and aspirational standards are those of a comparatively wealthy person even in U.S. terms, let alone world terms. To the people who use Walmart and belong there, Walmart is a tremendous boon that stretches their purchasing power, enabling them to have things that don&#8217;t suck.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why I love the idea of Walmart, and will defend it against its enemies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a discussion thread that wandered to the subject of Walmart and its enemies, I said &#8220;Scratch a Walmart-basher and you\u2019ll find a snotty elitist, a person who hates capitalism and consumption and deep down thinks the Wrong People have Too Much Stuff.&#8221; The commenter replied: &#8220;You know, I don\u2019t think you need to be&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=3993\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Why I love Walmart despite never shopping there<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3993"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5435,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3993\/revisions\/5435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}