It almost seems like an essential part of every Ball State University student's life - you have to buy books at C.B.X., show up to class and make a "Wal-Mart run" for everything else you need. I recently noticed that my food supply was at the "half-box of Ramen noodles and Gatorade bottles filled with water" stage, so I decided it was time to make a "Wal-Mart run" myself.
I was greeted by a friendly gray-haired man as I entered the massive 209,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter. I pushed my cart across the front of the store, admiring the cute winking smiley faces at the end of every aisle. I entered the grocery section and instantly had everything I was going to need for winter hibernation, and it was all in plain sight.
I thanked the gods of convenience for the temple of "Always Low Prices" that lay before me, and I went to work filling my cart with life's necessities.
Somewhere between the Gillette Mach 7 razor and the TAG Body Spray, I started thinking about my study abroad experience in Australia last semester. Those poor Aussies have to go to a different store for everything they need. They have to buy their meat from the deli, their bread from the bakery and their vegetables from the market. They even have to go to a special stand to buy fruit - I think they call it a "fruit stand."
Men's and women's clothes are often sold in completely different stores - even hardware has its own store. If you want to buy beer, you have to go to a liquor store, and if you want to buy a gun, you practically have to go to America!
Needless to say, I'm happy to be back in the good old United States, where I can get my food, clothes, tools, alcohol and firearms all under one roof.
Australians are pretty good at supporting small businesses and reinvesting profits locally, but they don't know a thing about convenience.
Wal-Mart, on the other hand, knows exactly what it's doing.
New supercenters are popping up in every little Podunkville town in the country. It's like the convenience fairy sprinkling her magic dust all over rural America.
Wal-Mart currently has more than 1,700 stores and is projected to have 3,131 supercenters in operation within five years.
So how is Wal-Mart able to provide everything we need at "Always Low Prices?" Well that's easy: It just pays its 1.6 million associates an average of less than $20,000 a year for full-time work, force local businesses to close by cutting retail prices way below cost when you enter new communities and buy $10 billion worth of merchandise each year from Chinese sweatshops that pay their workers 13 cents an hour.
Wal-Mart's got it all figured out. Once it devours the local grocery, hardware and clothing stores, it jacks the prices back up to bring home those consistent record profits that only a true monopoly can get you.
The superstores don't even have to create new jobs; in fact, for every two Wal-Mart jobs created, three local business jobs are lost.
All those small local Aussie businesses should take a step back and watch how the pros do it. Buy cheap goods from poor people, sell them at low prices to poor people and keep opening new stores where poor people live. That's the way the real money-makers do it; it also happens to be the most convenient way, for everyone.
Oh, and by the way ... This might have been my last "Wal-Mart run," unless I'm in a town where it's the only store.
Write to Tim at
tjsukits@bsu.edu
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