Wal-Mart Is Pure Evil?
by Jack Cashill
About 10 years ago, I received my one and only summons to serve on a jury in Jackson County. I got a sense of what the case was about when we prospective jurors were asked to disqualify ourselves if we had a grudge against Wal-Mart.
That struck me as an odd question. Being Irish by descent and something of an authority on grudges—“Heard about the Irish man with Alzheimer’s? He forgot everything but the grudges”—I had presumed them to be something one held against an unavoidable individual or institution: a dead beat brother-in-law, a derelict neighbor, the Jackson County tax assessor.
Two years ago, for instance, Jackson County hiked my taxes by 89 percent. I could do little but hold a grudge. Wal-Mart, by contrast, has never made me do anything: not shop there, not work there, not slip and fall there. At the time of the trial, in fact, I had never even been to a Wal-Mart. So I did not disqualify myself.
Nor did I expect to be picked for the jury. At the time, I was doing daily talk radio and was railing often and openly about bogus lawsuits. This was not long after old Stella from Albuquerque had transformed a 49-cent cup of McDonald’s coffee into a $2.86 million mother lode by spilling it on herself. Happily for Wal-Mart, the plaintiff’s attorneys did not listen to AM radio.
Our Stella was a 60-year-old grandma who got caught red-handed swiping a blue coat just before Christmas. There was no question about her guilt. Feeling a bit seasonal perhaps and sorry for the granny, Wal-Mart managers declined to prosecute. They should have. The unindicted coat-thief turned around and sued for $1.5 million, claiming “malicious” something or another, one of nearly 5,000 lawsuits filed against Wal-Mart that year alone.
After a few days of blather, we jurors repaired to the jury room. Before I had even finished my strategic daily doughnut sharing, half the jurors had expressed their undying hatred for this, this . . . store! I had my work cut out for me.
As I have since discovered, there are entire organizations dedicated to hating Wal-Mart. I Googled the words “Wal-Mart” and“evil,” for instance, and got 4.4 million hits. At the top of the list is WIPE, an acronym for the seriously unambiguous “Wal-Mart Is Pure Evil.”
WIPE bloggers, like most on the left, think of Sam and the Walton family the way the rest of us do Saddam and the Husseins. WIPE’s headline story as of this writing reads, “Wal-Mart Tries to Fix Elections as Well as Prices.” Election-rigging is just one of Wal-Mart’s many sins. Wal-Mart doesn’t pay enough. It doesn’t offer enough health benefits. It isn’t green enough or diverse enough or unsuccessful enough.
One charge above all others drives the funding for the resistance: Wal-Mart’s understandable lack of enthusiasm for unions. More troublesome than WIPE, if vaguely more rational, is an outfit called Wal-Mart Watch. Initial partners in the cabal included a who’s who of left-wing mischief-makers, including the Sojourners and the Sierra Club. The cabal’s deep pockets, however, belong to the SEIU, Service Employees International Union.
In 2005, Wal-Mart Watch’s first year of soft-core subversion, the SEIU funneled nearly $3 million into its coffers. In the capitalistic spirit, however, Wal-Mart Watch now helps support itself by selling fake Wal-Mart T-shirts with the unsubtle slogan, “Cut costs, Harm others.”
I am sure that when Missouri’s youngest Eagle Scout, Sam Walton, opened the first Wal-Mart in 1962, he had “harming others” right above “friendly, courteous and kind” on the store’s mission statement. How else to account for the fact that in 45 years this enterprise has grown from its humble Arkansas roots to become the world’s largest private employer.
There is something about growth, however, that troubles our inner proletarian. And so the charge that has most resonance, even if rarely examined, is that Wal-Mart destroys small town life and commerce.
In the years since my jury experience, I have been able to watch up close the impact that Wal-Mart has on a small town, in this case Dunkirk, N.Y., near which I spend a good chunk of each summer. I have even shopped there once or twice and was appropriately amazed at how much stuff you could buy for so little.
Wal-Mart arrived just about 10 years ago. Downtown Dunkirk had started to die about 40 years before that. Although locals blamed botched urban renewal, which surely contributed, the real culprit was the New York State Thruway, whose one entrance was three miles from downtown.
With the advent of good roads and reliable cars—and this was true all overAmerica—mall town consumers were no longer limited to the high prices and painfully limited choices that local merchants could offer. They could drive 40 minutes to the malls in Erie or 50 minutes to the malls in Buffalo and buy just about whatever they wanted. We did.
Not only did downtown Dunkirk die, but so did the strip mall built near theThruway exit. Wal-Mart changed all that. It created enough of a draw from the rural towns nearby that a Home Depot opened soon after. That in turn attracted a Bob Evans and an Applebees and a Blockbuster and at least a couple new bank braches. The nearby strip mall snapped back to life as well.
A friend of mine owns an enterprise called the “Paper Factory” that flourishes in the shadow of Wal-Mart’s. Wal-Mart managers often steer customers there to buy the kind of personalized party favors and the like that they don’t stock. His is not the only small, indigenous business that exploits the Wal-Mart traffic.
It seems to me beyond dispute that Wal-Mart keeps rural dollars in rural America. It also keeps rural cars and their planet-wrecking, Gore-defying, greenhouse gases off the highways and out of the big cities. You’d think the Sierra Club would be thrilled.
At the time I served on the jury I did not know any of this. I just knew that our granny stole the coat. For the first hour of jury deliberation I sat back silently, listened to the reasons why Wal-Mart should pay this lady her millions, and handed out doughnuts. “We have a jelly and a cream left.”
Finally, someone asked the kindly, professorial, doughnut guy his opinion. “Did the lady steal the coat?” I asked Socratically. Yes, they agreed, but as one woman interjected, “The manager is such a bitch.” Maybe so, I suggested, “but wouldn’t you be a tad upset if someone stole your coat?”
An Hispanic guy claimed that Wal-Mart tracked black and Hispanic customers around the store. “You’re making my case for me,” I responded. “Who would set up a white, 60-year old granny?”
When I asked, I learned that all my fellow jurors shopped at Wal-Mart, even the Wal-Mart bashers. I then patiently explained that Wal-Mart’s always low prices would not always be low if Wal-Mart had to keep buying off coat-stealers and their conniving attorneys. They hadn’t thought of it that way. Within 90 minutes we had voted to give the granny exactly zero.
“Do you have any of those jellies left?” 
Return to Ingram's September 2008
Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has been affiliated with the magazine for 28 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.