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.
Jeff Culbreath had a great excerpt a while back on this. I actually remember reading in “Mere Christianity” a comment about the immorality of an economy dependant upon ‘lending money at usury’. And yet we have the Gospel account of the parable of the talents.
The Catholic church is a paradox to the teachings of our culture. We believe that the worker is worth the wage, and that workers have the right to organize to have a safe workplace etc – but we also believe that the worker has an obligation to the employer to provide a fair day’s work. The current union management is too much one way, the current batch of MBAs are too much the other.
Distributism, I have so many thoughts on this but I so cannot pin point them down!
All that is accomplished by preventing a Walmart’s opening is that small proprietors have successfully used the government to compel people – and in practice this largely means poor people – to pay a premium for their purchases because they came from a small shop. Why it is less unfair for small retailers to freeze out the competition by preventing Walmart moving into the community than it was for U.S. Steel to create a steel monopoly is something that no one has yet explained to me. This country is prosperous BECAUSE the market is free to respond to supply and demand. The parts of the economy that are planned – the dairy industry, for instance – are the least flexible and the most overpriced. I adore Chesterton, but economics wasn’t his long suit, and he wasn’t positing a country that was either a republic, or nearly as large as ours.
I can’t believe I’m about to publicly disagree with Mrs. Dashwood, whom I typically agree wtih so often!
Bringing a giant retailer like Walmart into a community is NOT supporting a free market economy, because the small retailers can’t possibly compete. They don’t have the buying/bullying power that Walmart has over its suppliers. Walmart says they’ll beat any price because they can — the contracts they write with the mnfctrs are such that Walmart keeps its margin but the mnfctrs lose theirs in a price war. I’ve seen it happen with previous clients, including one that went completely out of business because Walmart wouldn’t let them make any profit at all and they were stuck in a contract (that was American Camper, a mnfctr of tents and other camping supplies). Mnfctrs who sign with Walmart are invariably left with two choices — keep staff wages painfully low or cut quality. Typically, they end up having to do BOTH. Consequently, there’s a lot of “disposable” stuff at Walmart and little of anything that will endure.
Small retailers are routinely forced out of business because Walmart bullies the market, not because they are interested in free trade. A small merchant who wants to sell quality goods and take care of customers with premium service HAS to charge more than a Walmart, and if their neighbors do not support their business, they will go under.
I had a choice this weekend. I could go buy a $39 twin mattress that was a piece of cr*p or the $79 “better” model with a 3-yr lifespan at a larger retailer OR I could go to a local mnfctr’s warehouse and pay $99 for something I know will last 8-10 years minimum. Even though I’m tight on money, I bought the $99 one. They are making it to order today and will deliver and set it up for me on Wednesday afternoon. So for $20 more, I not only got better quality and 5 or more extra years of usage out of it, I got better service.
Is the large retailer hurt by not getting an $80 sale from me this weekend? No way. Is the local retailer helped by selling one more mattress this week? Without a doubt.
I’m willing to pay more to support my local retailer. Even though I’m on a budget and it means eating pancakes every Wednesday night for a month instead of roast chicken. To me, it’s the morally correct thing to do. Not that I’ve read up on Catholic policy for this or anything.
–Sparki
Off the subject, but I chanced to read your blog right before I left for Thanksgiving. I noted with great interest your odd gray pumpkin. On my way I saw one at a farm market, bought it, and used it for pies.
Not only was thw flesh very sweet, but there was a lot more of it than in the typical roadside jack-o-lantern (or even in an official store-bought “pie pumpkin’).
The color of the pie was a bit lighter and duller than I’m used to, but it tasted terrific. Thanks for making my holiday more interesting!