Tannishblog

Make sure you rest up today and eat plenty of protein tonight. Come midnight Black Friday begins. No, the stock market won’t crash. This year at midnight several shopping center management companies plan to beat Wal-Mart to the punch by opening malls at midnight.

It was inevitable that corporate greed succumb to such madness. Likewise some less introspective Americans will validate the move by shopping all night after stuffing themselves past the point of sleeping. Wal-Mart, being the epitome of American values, is fast becoming the first retail monopoly ever, and the hundreds of companies affected by the behemoth are going to spend a long sleepless month watching the numbers.

What is at stake here is not just lining of company bank vaults. In my eyes, after working for two decades in retail, I see Wal-Mart as a beast that will - if unchallenged - ultimately destroy the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the retail and manufacturing industries. The irony is many of these people are shopping at Wal-Mart, unable to see what’s coming. Being relatively low income workers themselves, they focus on the one thing that works for the company: under-cutting competitors pricing. Needing to save money, they help to ensure a cataclysmic implosion of retailing nation wide. No. I’m not exaggerating.

Wal-Mart is a predator. That’s how it does business. Sam Walton was very shrewd to envision a business model that, to date, hasn’t been beat. Like many businessmen, his concern was not to better the lives of Americans by offering them less expensive goods, but to make money. In that, he excelled. But is money the end-all of business? Do the means justify the ends? What will happen if all those displaced retail employees find themselves forced by the job market to apply and work for Wal-Mart? Everyone knows that the company pays little and workers enjoy almost no benefits, while being forced to work schedules that may conflict with their ability to raise families.

Business, as all human ventures, is about people. Money should be viewed as a perk, a reward for servicing people. But that Victorian concept has no place in our economics-is-everything philosophy of markets. Wal-Mart is not alone in this type of thinking, but it is the best at it, the most ruthless in it’s pursuit of money over humanity. That type of thinking may help our economy (which, even while ignored by our current political focus on warfare, running idle, still grows somewhat), but it does nothing for the people. Please keep this in mind as you partake in the Annual Retail Feeding Frenzy.