By Jason Levitt
TheSequitur.com Contributor
March 22, 2006
GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- I was going on my 14th straight hour at the friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart when my girlfriend visited me. It was dark, but a few bright stars punctured the light cloud cover. The parking lot was mostly empty.
I didn’t even get off the bench to greet her. My legs were tired. I had traveled the aisles of Wal-Mart so many times, I’m sure I left about a quarter-inch of rubber sole on the linoleum. I had to move leftover KFC – a pile of chicken bones, an untouched thigh and a half-eaten biscuit – so she could sit next to me.
“Jason,” she said, looking at me seriously. “Why are you doing this?”
So, the inevitable question: Why would anyone spend an entire day – 24 hours – at a Wal-Mart?
(Well, it is open 24 hours. I’m doing it because I can.)
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll get another Red Bull and try to explain.”
For weeks, I had read everything I could get my hands on about the corporate giant. I learned it operated more than 6,200 stores, employing more than 1.7 million people worldwide.
In other words, Wal-Mart is the 33rd-largest country on Earth.
But the more I learned about Wal-Mart the less, it seemed, I knew. What does Wal-Mart stand for? Is Wal-Mart the American dream in its most powerful form?
Is it killing America? Or creating it in its own image?
Reports from business journals, newspapers, pro-union Web sites and Wal-Mart’s own powerful public-relations department became an ivory tower on the corner of my desk. But from the top of this skyscraper I could see only blurry shapes below. What was it really like down there in Wal-Mart land?
I needed the perspective from the ground. I needed to go to Wal-Mart. And a quick trip would not do. Why, anyone could do that.
I needed to go for a full day, see the shift changes and hear what the employees talk about during their midnight smoke breaks.
As I walked into Wal-Mart at noon on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, I remembered why I hated shopping there.
The consumer chaos of the place makes me break out in a sweat. The soccer moms drive their shopping carts like they are SUVs. The codes and sales are barked over the intercom like I’m at a prison camp. Stalag Wal-Mart, where I’m ordered to shop ‘til I drop.
And worst of all, the babies and toddlers crying, screaming, begging, pleading and grabbing. Their small, sticky hands must be filled!
But the front of the store itself is a jumbled, chaotic place. Everywhere you look there are ceiling-high stacks of popcorn tins, two-liters of soda of every conceivable flavor (pineapple soda – what!) and bags of snacks wherever you look. I saw a display of Garth Brooks box sets piled next to huge bags of plastic straws.
I could not make out a method in this madness. There are no signs visible from the front of the store that read “Electronics” or “Men’s clothes.” It’s disorienting.
For the first few hours, I wandered around. I found myself in the electronics section. I had my backpack on and was taking notes.
“Can I help you with something?” a young Wal-Mart associate named Juan said. He was using what he later told me was “aggressive hospitality.” It was the Wal-Mart way of preventing “shrinkage.” This term has nothing to do with cold weather or swimming pools.
In the corporate world, it is the term for merchandise loss.
“We have good security,” he said. “There are cameras that catch everything, and a full staff of security that watches them. They can get to about anywhere in the store in about 15 seconds.”
Great, I thought. I’m wearing a backpack and rummaging through everything in the store. I’m walking around for hours and not buying anything. I’m going to get kicked out in no time.
We talked some more, and I found out he is a student majoring in computer graphics and technology. That’s why he works in the electronics section. Wal-Mart likes to utilize your knowledge and expertise, if you have any.
He told me that Wal-Mart has an “Open Door Policy.” That means that if he has a complaint, he can go right to the district manager with it. It could also mean that if he has a good idea that would improve the store, it could very well be implemented.
That sounds great, but I remembered how Wal-Mart uses the policy. According to the PBS documentary, “Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town,” employees were told they didn’t need unions because there was an Open Door Policy. But after two years, the average Wal-Mart employee is making 25 percent less than a unionized counterpart at a different retail store. That is, if the Wal-Mart employee hasn’t quit yet. A survey conducted by Wal-Mart found that 70 percent of the employees quit within the first year.
There was no reason to confront him with these unpleasant facts. I was not there to start an insurrection. However, after I asked Juan for his last name and wrote it down, I told him why I was really there.
He looked at me like I was a pervert.
“Are you publishing this,” he asked incredulously.
“Possibly,” I said.
“Then please erase my last name,” Juan said.
“O.K.,” I said.
“No, I mean now. Please erase it now.”
So I did, and I moved on. The hours ticked by. The Wal-Mart clientele changed from families, to older women, to college age couples, to bored high school kids.
Was there anything to be learned from the merchandise?
I made my way to the toys. There were remote control tanks that looked big enough to crush someone’s foot, missile carriers that I could ride around on and smaller models of every type of military machine.
There was something called a Stealth Unit Operation Vehicle, which was basically a model motor boat with two massive machine guns mounted on top. On the package it read, “Evil is here and it’s time for heroes. The Corps! Are the best of the best, bravest of the brave, and dedicated to honor and victory.”
“The Corps” toys were made in Hong Kong. At that early morning hour, it struck me as strange that there are factories a world away churning out military fantasies for the American youth.
But then again, it is hard to find anything that wasn’t made a world away. Even the Larry the Cable Guy mug set (one of them read, “The Right to Bare Arms”) was made in China. But I am happy and somewhat relieved to report that the American flags are “proudly made in America,” as the label proclaimed.
Apparently, the outsourcing of “Old Glory” is where, and only where, this company draws the line.
I went back to “electronics” and began browsing through the CDs. The biggest section was country music. In fact, there are really only two sections: country and everything else.
There’s not much rap, and what rap there is has been edited. It is Wal-Mart policy that any music that needs a parental advisory sticker doesn’t need to be on the shelves.
I was starting to put all of this together while I was sitting on the bench outside with my girlfriend. The Red Bull was cutting through the gravy and grease, and beginning to pump blood through my heavy head.
This Wal-Mart image is just a curtain which hides its true identity. Everything from the prices of Wal-Mart soda ($.35) to the coin-operated horse ride out front looks back to an earlier sensibility.
But Wal-Mart is also the world’s greatest harbinger, pushing us into a new and vastly different future. It is a future with a truly international market. It is a future where American workers will have to sell their labor as low as, say, a starving peasant in China.
Wal-Mart contends that it extols good old red-state values, while it really values only profit. It professes to care about the impressionable minds of America’s children, while it has used child labor in Third World countries. It shields the children’s ears from rap and their eyes from magazines like “Maxim,” while it lets them feast their imagination on machines made for war.
After she heard my rant, my girlfriend went home to bed. And as morning approached and daylight broke on the dreary parking lot, I thought about what I had learned “on the ground” at Wal-Mart. Did the blurry shapes really become clearer?
Yes, but it had as much to do with the employees who worked at this Wal-Mart than anything else. You see, the old wooden benches outside where I sat to give a break to my aching also served as a break room for the Wal-Mart workers. It was where they went to talk, relax and smoke cigarettes.
“We told our little boy that Santa Claus was going to our house while we was at Grandma and Grandpa’s,” a mother started a story about her son. “And when we got home, he would not go through that door. He was so scared. His daddy was behind him trying to nudge him through, you know. But he just kept backing up with terror in his eyes.”
I heard a woman in economic desperation: “Rent, lights, cable, phone - this paycheck to paycheck, it’s crazy. And I work at a nursing home, too.”
And, of course, I heard about sex: “When I get home, I’m going to wake up my husband and tell him I had a hard day at work and I’m ready for it.”
It was through the workers’ talk that the blurry shapes at the top of the paper skyscraper became clear.
The day, as a whole, was successful. I didn’t get beat up, kicked out or hassled in any way. But I also didn’t hear one complaint from them – the employees – about the Open Door Policy, lack of union representation, or anything else about Wal-Mart for that matter. I certainly didn’t hear any complaints or criticism from the customers.
As I trudged back to my car after a day of all Wal-Mart and no sleep, the noon day sun baking the oily black asphalt, I wasn’t sure that I could even say the word “ambivalent,” but that’s how I felt.
That and completely, utterly exhausted.
Jason Levitt, a TheSequitur.com contributor, is a journalism and political science senior at the University of Florida. He has written for the Mangrove Review, Gator Times, University of Florida International Review and the Independent Florida Alligator.
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