dollars and senselessness...

My granddaddy was a dentist; he worked in the Astin building in downtown Bryan, Texas, my home town. We used to watch the Christmas and July 4th parades from the windows of his upstairs office—I remember back in the 70s, when I was just a little kid, downtown Bryan was still ‘where you went’ when you needed something. You parked and walked, and within a few blocks you had the Woolworths, the Parker-Astin hardware store, a pizza parlour, shoe shops, men’s clothing shops, women’s clothing shops, hat shops, a barber shop, a library, restaurants...There was a community there, and tagging along with Dr. Enloe was a good way to meet and see every member of it. By the mid 80’s, it was a ghost town. Two out of three shops were empty, folks had moved out to bigger stores on bigger streets with bigger parking lots. Dr. Enloe had retired, the parades moved uptown and the barber looked bored. You see, that was right around the time that Wal-Mart came to town. I’m thinking about it because Wal-Mart has just announced that it is planning to begin construction, starting this spring, on its long rumoured Kemptville location.



Back in the 80s, Wal-Mart was still saturating the various media with prevarications about it’s ‘commitment’ to ‘Buy American’ a commitment which I notice it has not committed to anytime recently, especially as by about 2005, somewhere around 60% of the stuff they sold was imported, mostly from China...according to one study, in 2004 alone, Wal-Mart spent over 18 billion dollars on Chinese products. That means that if it were an individual economy; they would be China's eighth largest trading partner, bigger than Russia, Australia, and, you guessed it, Canada. According to the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations), "Wal-Mart is the single largest importer of foreign-produced goods in the United States", their biggest trading partner is China, and their trade with China alone constitutes approximately 10% of the total US trade deficit with China as of 2004.



Apparently, Wal-Mart has sent as many as 1.5 million jobs to China; you know, decent jobs, factory jobs, middle class jobs. Not the kind of ‘greeter’ or ‘cashier’ jobs they offer in their stores, jobs that pay minimum wage and lock a person into the lowest possible economic bracket for life (or at least for as long as the often brief term of employment...), especially given this company’s famous and well documented anti-union stance and what seems to be a complete and utter disdain for anything resembling a job benefit...Wal-Mart sells its stores to communities by promising jobs. Hmmm. Here are some interesting statistics: a 1994 study done by the Congressional Research Service concluded that "for every two jobs created by a Wal-Mart store, the community loses three. Jobs that are retained by a community are often merely shifted from local businesses to the giant retailer." In another study, a fella named Kenneth Stone, who is a Professor of Economics at Iowa State University, found that some small towns can lose as much as half of their retail trade within ten years of a Wal-Mart store opening. They don’t bring jobs, they just shift them around.



I used to live with a Wal-Mart employee, and her stories used to make me cringe...she said that every morning they would do cheers, even sing ‘Wal-Mart’ songs, like a cult, you know, morale building stuff...What a great place to work, right? At least until she was sent home mid shift every time she approached 28 hours in a week, the magic hour at which she would have become a full time employee, and thus been eligible (after a year!) for the modest health insurance package that such employment status required. She knew of no-one, outside of management, who was receiving any such benefit, and it’s probably just as well, with a $1000 deductible, the presence of the insurance would have been all but invisible to a person of her age, health and financial means. Wal-Mart is not a good steward of its people.



These days, I live in Kemptville, and we are not immune to the fallout of the carbon economy, the desire for bigger parking lots for our bigger trucks have already moved much of the major business from downtown to the highway, as seems to be the way of the world these days. But one of the things that attracted me to this town, one of the reasons I wanted to be a part of this community was that we still had (have...) a vibrant, beautiful, and even functional downtown area. It’s not at 100% occupancy, by any stretch, but it is still a vital, functioning core to our town. I can still shop, eat, go to the post office, the bank, I can buy books, clothes, gifts and hardware all within an easy walk from my home. The parades still loop down Clothier Street to Prescott, and we watch them from upstairs window of our Heritage building that hearkens back to a time when horses would have pulled the floats.



I realize that so far this article makes me sound like a xenophobe, like someone who doesn’t believe in the market or in competition. This is simply not the case. The fact is, I have always accepted that this concept, this thing, that we have collectively agreed to call ‘the market’, whatever it actually is, is one of, if not the most compelling forces on human behaviour that exists. I even believe that it might be something even deeper, something more intrinsic, like some kind of manifestation of our base needs in the world. People need to eat, to have shelter and clothing, and since prehistory we have hunted, we have gathered, and farmed, we have done what it has taken to survive, we have protected our own by providing for them, and even when we had enough, and when those we care for had enough, we hoarded, because eventually (we instinctively knew) that someday, we might no longer have enough. These base activities when practiced in the modern world become dollars traded for goods and services, the collection of dollars has replaced the collection of foods and firewood, the need to protect became the act of collecting and exchanging dollars through corporate and market based prophylactics that have absolved us of the direct responsibility for what we have done to collect more and to hoard. We are compelled by these base instincts and desires, and we act.



The question then becomes, is the market all that we are? Are we nothing more than slaves to our most basic motivations? I contend that we are not. There are, and have always been other factors that affect our behaviours, factors like love, compassion, empathy, free will and choice. A corporation is an excuse to behave badly, by its very definition it protects its participants from risk, and it absolves them of direct accountability, of blame. If these other instincts, these other factors exist and therefore do affect our behaviour, it stands to reason that other institutions must also exist (as the market exists to express our base desires) to embody them and that through them, we can act on those better angels in our hearts and minds. My feeling is that those institutions are exactly what we would expect them to be, things like the government and its mandate to regulate and pick up where the market leaves off, trade unions, churches, charities, service groups, even extended groups of family and friends. I don’t doubt the power of the market; I simply refuse to accept that it is the whole of who and what we are.



We don’t always do what is best for ourselves—given food we will sometimes indulge too much, given wine, we sometimes drink beyond our fill; we are humans and to be human is to accept that there is both base desire and a higher calling—when my pants get too tight, I know it is time to slow down. I hope that I will decide in time, but who knows? Wal-Mart is the grand expression of our most base desire, our need to collect, to conquer and to hoard, no matter the cost... it is the love handles of our culture, it is the desire to indulge taken to such bloated extremes that it no longer has a view of its own belt. I believe in the market, but I also believe in knowing when it is time to say no to a second serving, when it is time to temper our greed, and when to think about more than what is easiest and fastest and cheapest, and to start to think about what is best; best for me, best for my community and best for those who I love.



Kemptville has three grocery stores, a health food store, four hardware stores, and several other small retail stores and shops that will be dramatically, instantly and permanently affected by this new beast, this Godzilla that will not stop until Tokyo is burning. Many of these stores have been locally owned for generations; when you spend your dollar with these folks it stays here, in Kemptville, it doesn’t shoot off to Bentonville, Arkansas to make sure the Walton family will have even more billions of dollars to not give to charity (less than 1% in 2005!). Wal-Mart will come in with predatory pricing (a new Wal-Mart will charge as much as 17% less in a new area than in one where its act of economic devastation is complete,) it will bring unsecure and low paying jobs to replace the secure and better paying jobs that it will destroy and within a few years, our sweet little downtown will, sadly, probably look a lot like the one in my hometown did in the years after its arrival there, and it will probably look a lot like the downtowns in thousands of sweet little towns all across North America still do. That is, unless we decide not to let it.



The last time I visited Bryan, my old downtown was a sight to behold, new shops, new stores, new clubs and restaurants had sprung up to fill the empty storefronts from those years after the Wal-Mart came to town...folks in the government, folks in the neighborhood, the old businesses that didn’t want to move, lots of smart, forward thinking people had gotten together and decided to fix the place up. Incentives were used, not to bring in an instrument of destruction this time, but to rebuild and re-imagine what that downtown could be. Now it’s a beautiful, vibrant place, in many ways it reminds me of downtown I remember from tagging along with Dr. Enloe. It was a long road to recovery, but it worked, and I don’t think one person in Bryan would say it wasn’t worth it. The way it worked was through community—people getting together and deciding that it was something they wanted and then going out and doing it.



I don’t presume that I can stop Wal-Mart. No more than I can presume that I can stop myself from sometimes eating a second slice of pie. But I can, and we can, sometimes say that enough is enough. I don’t presume that I can stop Wal-Mart. Not alone. I can hope and help to curb its effects on my new home, I can warn and I can share what I have seen. We can take our energy, our ideals, our dollars and our votes and we can go downtown, pick up some trash, encourage a friend to open a shop, patronize it, send other folks there, patronize the other shops downtown even if it costs a buck or two more, we can join a community group, participate in the BIA, in a theatre group, in a church group, shop at the farmers’ market, we can build a strong community and together we can keep it alive. We can elect a mayor and a council who want to keep the heart of the community alive, who will fulfill the mandate that their institution has as a sacred duty, to think not just about the base and greedy desire to increase the tax and revenues, but rather to take the best care possible of the community that has elected them and which has given them the dollars which they already have. That means accepting that things like Wal-Mart will come, but not incentivizing it, not paying out of pocket to extend services, not giving any tax breaks or easy zoning changes...It means growing, but growing smart, not just growing for its own sake. And if you really want to be a part of real change, you can do what Nicole and I have done for the last several years, you can make the easy, quick and simple decision to shop somewhere else.