Sparki had a good post a couple of days ago on avoiding Chinese-made products. Davey's mommy picks up the discussion and links to this article on the fight to keep Wal-Mart out of the little town of Abingdon, Virginia.
I would like to add to the discussion, but my thoughts are all a-jumble and today's to-do list is very long. A few random thoughts:
1. I dislike Wal-Mart because it's a crowded, cluttered, ugly store. Yet there are a few products that I know I can reliably find at Wal-Mart. Last summer I underpacked and needed some plain white cotton underwear. We were traveling through Michigan's Upper Peninsula and I knew Wal-mart would have them, even in my size, and that I'd be able to get them on Saturday evening.
1.5 But then did I really need them? Couldn't I have just washed out a couple in the sink and dried them overnight?
2. It's true that Wal-Mart drives small retailers out of business. Just ask my uncle. He used to have a hardware store in a small town in South Dakota. Wal-Mart opened up outside of town. He scarcely lasted a year afterwards. I'm told that most of the other downtown merchants succumbed as well, and that now the downtown is a ghost town.
2.5 Wal-Mart brings products to small towns that small-town retailers might not otherwise have been able to stock. But is it worth it? Couldn't they have ordered those products in the mail? Did they even need those products? Was it worth destroying their downtowns?
3. I hate buying Chinese products (and it really frosts me when you see religous goods made in China.) But as Davey's mommy and Sparki point out, it's getting harder and harder to find things that aren't made in China. Are there any lights for the Christmas tree, for example, that aren't made in China?
4. It seems like our entire economy is based on retail these days, but very few retail employees are in unions.
5. I've been a member of a union (most bedside nurses in Washington, DC are union) and I was horrified by how thick-headed our leadership was. After I left my union position, the nurses went on strike -- this at a time when the hospital was struggling to stay afloat. I thought the timing of the strike was a poor idea to begin with, and then the strike dragged on for a couple of months. Striking nurses who were out of money started to sneak across their own picket lines and return to work. The union ended up accepting a proposal that the hospital had offered four weeks previously.
I also saw nurses with bad attitudes hiding behind union rules. My husband, who works for the federal government, sees the same thing all the time: lazy and incompetent people hiding behind union rules. I would have a lot more sympathy for unions if they weren't so stupid and did more to encourage excellence in their employees.
6. I ordered our Thanksgiving dinner (long story) from Safeway. Should I cross the picket line to pick it up?
7. Hambet wants cornflakes. Time to wrap up.
8. I am growing more and more uncomfortable with the way we're shaping our economy. I'm growing mistrustful of globalization -- the world is simply too large and complex to be considered as a single market. People's needs are better served by smaller, local institutions whereever possible.
Is our economy going to end up destroying itself and seriously damaging our country? What are we going to do when we run out of countries with cheap labor to produce our goods for us? What are we going to do if we go to war with China and can't import from them?
What good is it going to do to have all these U.S. companies making goods overseas and importing them back to the U.S., if people back in the US can't afford to buy them?
Through zoning and other projects, cities are aggressivly wooing singles and childless couples (including homosexual couples) because they pay in more money to the city treasury than they take out. Children are seen as an economic liability, as a civic burden. So families with children have fewer places to find housing.
It just doesn't seem healthy. The economic decisions our country is making seem to be based on short term gain and not on the long-term economic health and security of our country. But who cares if we have a major depression in the future? We've got to show a big profit this quarter so our stock doesn't tank!
And then what can we, as individual consumers, do about it? As Davey's mommy writes,
...I feel like without organized resistance on a large scale to Chinese-made products, avoiding them is like taking a penny out of the pocket of Bill Gates and a lot of dollars and hours from ourselves trying to find alternatives.....
The Washington Post (marketing questions) had two interesting book reviews yesterday on globalization and debt (and the abyss of our trade deficit.)
9. And then I haven't touched the Catholic social teaching on these topics.
10. I haven't touched distributism either.
