roachboy

is walmart good for america?
i have no idea what the question means.
so i was reading through posts to figure this out.

i guess you could argue that it is because they deliver commodities at lower prices through economies of scale combined with opposition to unionization, predatory pricing and so forth. but within this, consumers get to find commodities cheap. so if all that matters, really, is cheap consumer goods, and access to cheap consumer goods can somehow be tied into what is good or not for "america" then i guess---maybe---you could say yay walmart.

and i guess, following the same logic, that you could argue that to not see walmart thorugh this truncated frame of reference is to fall into a type of "classism"--if by that you understand class divisions as being nothing to worry about in themselves, and so as something to be addressed, if at all, by adjusting factors like the price. so poorer folk have less disposable income--this is simply a given, not the result of anything that might require thinking or change--and so cheaper prices is something like a public service. yay walmart.

and i guess from this same type of viewpoint, the destruction that walmart visits upon downtown areas everywhere a store turns up--is a type of schumpeter's "creative destruction" of capitalism. which itself can only be cheered. yay walmart.

of course, this all makes little sense if you do not also assume that the real measure of political freedom, and all other varieties, lay in your access to consumer goods. so your ability to optimize your shopping experience proves that you are free.

somewhere along the line, folk started confuseing the absolute stupidity of contemporary discourse on/about capitalism with a kind of optimism. i guess once you walk across that line, there is no turning back. so yay walmart.


edit: on economies of scale and walmart: if you think about walmart only as a series of concrete buildings, retail outlets, in isolation, you might come to understnd them as simply benefitting from the race to the bottom characteriztic of contemporary capitalism in terms of wages, costs, working conditions, the preference for repressive political regimes as site to locate production facilites because these regime internalize the costs of crushing union activity---but if you think about the size of walmart, its purchasing practices have to be seen as a driver of the race to the bottom.

what do walmart's cheap prices assume?
continued, wholesale intensification of the worst types of capitalist exploitation--but moved to another part of the world---so you cant see any of it---but if you, in a low prices=good for america kinda way, assume that the world extends no further than america, what is away in the world can be understood not to exist.

so it doesnt exist because i cant see it.
that helps.
yay walmart.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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