Up Against A Wal

A few months ago, I wrote about how McDonald's has become a victim of its own success, targetted by profiteering victims of evil caloric fast food hamburgers that magically climb into people's mouths and make them fat. The equivalent in the retail sector, of course, is Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is the proverbial 800-pound gorilla of retail stores, except that they're more like an 800-ton gorilla. Manufacturers base their production around creating cheap products to be sold through Wal-Mart. In a perverse rearrangement of the typical economic model, Wal-Mart has enough market share to go to its suppliers and demand cost cuts and/or efficiency, often through foreign outsourcing. If the suppliers refuse, Wal-Mart will play hardball by taking their orders elsewhere, which can essentially single-handedly kill a business. Just ask the good folks at Rubbermaid.

Wal-Mart has also become the bellwether for the retail sector in America. It was headline news over the weekend when Wal-Mart reported that their sales over essentially a two-day period dropped from last year. Competitors don't get the same treatment, and as such, their shareholders aren't constantly sent scurrying at the slightest drop of a pin.

But it seems that where Wal-Mart just can't win at all is in the political arena. From its early days, Wal-Mart has been under pressure with the left because of its abject hostility toward unions. Wal-Mart will shut down stores before being forced to accept unionization. Now, however, Wal-Mart is feeling pressure from the right, thanks to its downplaying of the word "Christmas" in favor of a more religiously neutral term and its membership in the national gay and lesbian chamber of commerce.

Frankly, I don't give a damn about Wal-Mart's politics. Maybe that makes me a heartless conservative or a heathen liberal. I still don't shop there, however. Even though their prices can't be beat, Wal-Mart makes for an absolutely miserable shopping experience. The aisles are too narrow, the shelves are disorganized, there are never enough cashiers, and the store is a magnet for the dregs of society. I will gladly pay a few pennies more for the bright lighting, wide aisles, and commitment to customer service that I find at Target.

Look, Wal-Mart must be doing something right. Maybe the constant media and political attention is a necessary cost of doing business for them. In my mind, though, it just goes to prove that being the biggest is always the best.