The Blessings of the Big Box: In Praise of Wal-Mart

In a previous essay, I lamented how few businesses welcome their customers in the way that restaurateurs do. I regretted the impersonality of most business transactions, as opposed to the familial greeting that so many restaurant owners pride themselves on giving their patrons. My question was - why can't my accountant rush forward with an avuncular embrace when I come into his office, and assure me that "When you're here, you're family!" Why should such a motto be limited to the likes of the Olive Garden?

But there's another side to that issue. I could argue just as cogently, perhaps even more cogently, in favor of the sheer facelessness of the big box approach to business. There is advantage in having a big anonymous entity selling mass produced commodities to a stream of anonymous buyers. I might even argue that the ability to transact business in this way, without any personal contact, is at the foundation of many kinder, gentler, more democratic societies. It might be at the core of why modern America is an unlikely place to give rise to any extensive programs of genocide, terrorism, or dictatorship. It's possible that America would be an unlikely breeding ground for such widespread atrocity, not because Americans are intrinsically better people, but because they can shop at Wal-Mart.

Let me explain. Some years ago, I took a fire extinguisher I'd had sitting around the house into a little business I'd seen near me for years, advertising itself as the place to get fire extinguishers re-charged. I was warmly greeted by an elderly man who came out from the back of the shop, addressing me in a thick German accent. He chatted with me, taking an interest in my need to have an old fire extinguisher, almost an antique, chemically restored to full force. At first this seemed as if it was going to be a pleasant, convivial transaction, a nice change of pace from the usual brusque processing I got in most business establishments. The elderly gentleman took the extinguisher into his back room, and in a short time, brought it back out again with its dial now nicely registering "Full Charge." All was going well. How delightful, how refreshing to be waited on with such old-fashioned, individual attention. I drifted into a Norman Rockwell romanticization of Ma-and-Pa shops.

But - as I was turning to leave, the old gentleman checked me by remarking how blonde and fair-skinned I was. He asked if I was married and if I was German. This in and of itself unnerved me a little. Was he making a pass at me? That would be awkward. A little distantly, I replied that no, I wasn't married, and that yes, I had some German ancestry. However, I soon saw that the reason for his questions was more disturbing than any dating intentions. He chirped, "I knew it. I knew it. I could tell - you're from good German stock, just like the mädchen on the posters." He proceeded to caution me about my future choice of a marriage partner. He wagged his finger at me and said, "Now you be sure to marry a man like in the posters, blonde and blue-eyed and strong, and 100% German! You want to keep the bloodline pure. Don't put mud in the blood by getting mixed up with any of those dark ones! Don't forget! Keep the bloodline pure!" he wagged an admonitory finger at me again.

What year was this? What place was this! I was so shocked by this throwback to the Nazi propaganda of the 30's and 40's, I left the shop in stunned silence. The store proprietor probably took my silence as a sign that I was in accord with him and as a tacit promise that I would comply with the need to keep the bloodlines pure.

As I mulled over this bizarre encounter in the days that followed, it occurred to me that some such version of that conversation probably in fact DID take place time and again in Germany in the first half of the 20th century. Oh, the exchanges were likely rarely so pointed and explicit. But the enlistment to prejudice was there, and probably grew with each new visit to local shops.

I envisioned an endless number of such casual, everyday affirmations taking place in bakeries, in butcher shops all over the small, relatively homogeneous towns of Germany. The shopkeeper would make some grumbling remark against Jews as he was wrapping his customer's purchase. Then the customer would have two choices. The customer could express, what was for her, legitimate agreement with the shopkeeper's bigoted views. In that case, their cause would be strengthened by their realization of support. Now both shopkeeper and customer knew they weren't alone. Each had the comfort of an ally in his or her prejudice.

On the other hand, the customer might not agree with the shopkeeper. However, the customer would be unlikely to find it worthwhile to say so. She would, probably correctly, calculate that any disagreement wouldn't change the shopkeeper's mind. It would only antagonize and alienate him. Let's say he's the local butcher. Then that would be the end of the extra little weight of sausage that he'd usually slip into her order, even though her ration card didn't allow for it. She'd never again get the advantages of being a preferred customer whom he liked.

So in this case when the shopkeeper vented some slur against Jews or any other minority group, the customer would just nod passively. Then an alliance would be assumed - an alliance that the customer couldn't later go back on or cancel by suddenly bursting out with an objection. Such opposition, coming belatedly out of the blue, would only make the customer seem erratic, crazy. Her opposition would carry no weight. So faced with what seems like tacit acceptance of his opinions in this case, the shopkeeper would feel encouraged to confide his negative feelings more and more on subsequent visits. His hatred would gain momentum with the retelling, and the customer would be locked into a stance that simulated support of this escalating froth of poison.

Oddly enough, the building of a tacit consensus doesn't usually work the other way around, in the direction of positive feelings and tolerance. That might be because, in the same way that newspapers are only likely to report bad news, shopkeepers and others would only be likely to voice negative opinions. There never seems to be enough interest in or weight to benign reports. It's primarily the bad, the shocking, the negative, that gets retailed. That's how a blanketing of prejudice often gets spread.

Of course, that kind of dynamic didn't only pertain to Germany during the Nazi regime. So many other Holocausts of hatred have occurred that probably had their roots in the same kind of neighborly dependencies and inter-dependencies. The campaign of extermination of all "intellectuals" carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia might in part have gained strength by the echoing of hatred taking place between people thrown into daily proximity to and dependency on each other. Similarly, the hatred behind the Rwanda genocide of 1994, in which it was principally Hutu extremists killing Tutsis, could have initially been forged through tribal connectivity. And so the Bosnian/Serbian atrocities, and on and on across geography and time. Seeds of hatred get propagated into kudzu growths that take over the landscape because people are rooted together, their lives entangled with each other through networks of buying and selling and necessary provisioning.

I can't help but think that if the people who participated in committing these cited instances of genocide, and the thousands of others that have occurred throughout history, had had early access to a Wal-Mart way of shopping - there would have been a lot less killing. The big box stores help a person to disengage from his neighbors, to think his own thoughts, to be his own person. They allow a person to free himself from the constraints of family feud and tribal tradition. And as much as local cohesiveness and cooperation is often extolled, the ability to step outside that boundary is often a good thing.

I had a parallel awakening on this score in a somewhat different context. I have always been an admirer of the writings of Ivan Illich. I discovered him through his most famous book, Deschooling Society. I'm very much in tune with the insights he presented there. He argues that mandatory schooling, and indeed all our insistence on the importance of schooling, is based on a false premise. Such an insistence assumes that children must be taught in order to learn. It completely discounts a child's willingness and ability to learn on her own, in the course of performing worthwhile activities in her household and her community. It insists that "education" become a product delivered in an impersonal, institutional setting - namely, the school.

Illich advocated a return to family and community empowerment. He gave suggestions for creating environments in which a child can learn, rather than having to be strapped down, so to speak, and taught - environments in which a child can spontaneously pick up basic knowledge in the course of helping her father build a shelter, or set up a well, or, in industrialized countries, repair a car. He didn't want children to have to be abstracted from their communities and isolated in age-segregated ghettoes where they are exposed to the same kind of carrot-and-stick incentives given to a donkey. Get away from the gold stars and the scoldings and let a child's natural curiosity lead the way in natural, multi-generational communities rich in opportunities for learning through interpersonal exchanges.

I was all for that, and essentially still am. But then as Illich elaborated on his philosophy, he more and more put the concept of community empowerment first. As he went on to write about health care and the provision of resources such as fuel and water, he emphasized ways in which these goods could be provided by grassroots action. Having been so in tune with him on the subject of schooling, I automatically went along with him through all these other explorations. His ideas about community empowerment sounded so right, so irrefutable. Who could be against tapping into the wisdom of elders, of extended family, of community leaders, in order to accomplish goals? Rather than opting to have services provided by vast impersonal institutions that homogenize needs in order to profitably deliver standardized products - let the living, breathing people around one all participate in custom-creating the goods of life.

But then I attended a seminar on community organization and was jolted into re-thinking some of that philosophy. There was a woman there who had wandered into the seminar as a sort of last-minute way to fill some spare time. She came without any of the imbedded vocabulary or assumed ideology the rest of us had after having steeped ourselves in Illich, Foucault, and similar philosophers. After we had bandied ideas largely borrowed from these writers about how neighborhoods could police themselves, foster learning, and promote health and healing by tapping into native wisdom rather than by relying on commercial institutional deliverances - this woman spoke up with a contrary view.

She protested that she wouldn't want to rely on her grandmother for any of these ministrations. Her grandmother's answer to every earthly ill had been "castor oil."  If people with medical problems ranging from a broken arm to cancer had limited themselves to her grandmother's neighborly advice, they would have been in a bad way, without any hope of a cure. What's more, this woman wouldn't have wanted to entrust her grandmother with any of the other functions the rest of us had been so sanguinely about to unload on the elderly lady. If the grandmother had been encouraged to police the neighborhood for example, it would have been a riot of racial profiling, since the woman, like many members of her generation, held very negative views of minorities. This elder, truth to tell, had been a bigoted, ignorant woman, and our seminar participant felt that it was a better world that delegated tasks to impersonal institutions rather than to the likes of her grandmother.

It hit me then! How unthinking and hypocritical so many of my mouthings about the superiority of self-help community activism had been. I certainly didn't practice such preaching in my own life. In reality, I was just as reluctant to trust to the advice of family and neighbors as that seminar maverick had been.

Almost all the neighborhood block meetings and community rallies I'd ever attended had quickly turned into hyperventilations of  "Not In My Neighborhood!" Existing residents voiced unappeasable concerns about immigrants coming into the area, running down property values, taking jobs away from "good Americans." They had exaggerated worries about their toddlers being sexually molested by perverts jumping out of the bushes. They would therefore petition any Alderman who'd come to speak that evening to jack up required registration for and surveillance of anyone in the area with a police record. They predictably clamored for more and more street lighting, for tree and shrubbery removal, for enforcement of grass-cutting laws. They demanded prompter graffiti removal and stricter policing measures. Every neighborhood meeting was pretty much a re-play of the last meeting on all these points.

I sort of understood some of the concerns. I had read how eliminating gang graffiti turned out to be one of the surest ways of tamping down gang activity in a neighborhood. If you demonstrate that you won't tolerate the symbol, you show you won't tolerate the gang itself. Oh, but I did rather like that big, beautiful eagle that had been painted on my garage one night. It was a rendering worthy of Audubon. I understood, but I felt somewhat aggrieved when the neighborhood block club had the eagle sand-blasted away without my permission.

However practical that particular action was, I still saw it as reflective of the more general intolerance that characterized most of these community meetings. They were repetitions of petty complaints stemming from exaggerated worries. The most vocal people at them were usually the ones most intent on making the neighborhood more enforced, more sterile, more humorless. One could feel a pressure toward prejudice building at these meetings, not exactly to the degree that doubtless happened at meetings and rallies across Germany, but still dreary enough to reflect badly on the nature of humans in groups. People at these "let's work together" events didn't behave with the quirky individuality one would see among Wal-Mart shoppers.

It was the same with family gatherings. They usually were not the occasions for the kind of exchange of ancient wisdoms that Illich had projected. More typically, they were a gallimaufry of just the kind of prejudice and misinformation that the seminar woman had cited.

Holidays meant having to deal with that phalanx of big, beefy male cousins who thought delivering punishing tackles on the football field was what every proper young American male should be up and about doing. There was Aunt Ida's friend who disowned her daughter when she learned she was a lesbian. There was Uncle Joe who proudly told how he'd refused to let a black nurse touch him when he went into the hospital for his gall bladder operation.

A person couldn't generally retaliate against such opinions then and there. As with the German butcher, countering Uncle Joe wouldn't have changed him. It would only have pointlessly spoiled the Thanksgiving meal. The best I could do was to try to change the subject, to get Uncle Joe talking about something he did know something about, such as wood joinery, for the short time I had to be engaged with him. But if I had been forced to engage more globally with him, in a close-knit tribal or community setting - I'd have been faced with a much more difficult situation. My only choice might have been to get out, to estrange myself from family - or else to stay and take the bad with the good, the prejudice with the wood joinery. With either choice, going or staying, my actions could have provided a toehold for old hatreds to reach greater heights.

I'd seen and felt all this. So in reality, I didn't practice the Illichian philosophy of community self-help that I'd been preaching. In real life, I usually avoided community meetings and family gatherings as much as possible. I didn't want to get drawn into the lives of most other people more deeply than an exchange of chit-chat in passing.

Jane Jacobs, a noted urbanologist, came to the point from another direction. She observed how crime flourished in most concrete high-rise housing projects, in part because residents there were faced with an all or nothing situation. In their stacked apartment units, there was no place for neighbor to meet neighbor on a limited basis. There were no congenial, spacious common rooms where people could briefly chat with other building residents, and then disengage. For those law-abiding residents who really didn't want to get drawn into the often violent gang culture that pervaded some of these buildings, there were only two options. They could completely withdraw from their surroundings - either by moving away from the housing project altogether, leaving it to the gang-bangers - or by staying strictly to themselves, bolting their apartment doors securely against any infringements from the outside world. Their second choice, their only other choice, was to entertain the violence. This meant opening their doors, allowing others completely into the privacy of their living quarters, with all the good, the bad, and the ugly, that these others might bring with them as baggage.

Jacobs made astute suggestions about how buildings and neighborhoods should be architecturally and spatially designed to allow the limited engagement that makes it possible for more wholesome relationships to be sustained between neighbors. Her ideas were a form of "good fences make good neighbors." The location and the degree of opacity of such figurative fences can make all the difference.

In their way, the Wal-Marts of the world operate in the same way that Jacobs' proposed design features could have. Wal-Marts and the Internet enable limited engagement with others. You don't have to accommodate and appease a butcher's prejudices in order to get meat. You don't have to tacitly lend approval to a baker's bigotry when you buy your daily bread. The big impersonal retail outlets allow you to anonymously buy anything you want without being enlisted into others' projects. You can come and go from them a free and independent individual.

So as unfriendly as it sounds, I don't necessarily lament the passing of some of the Ma-and-Pa stores when a Wal-Mart hits town. I find myself rejoicing in the personal freedom that Wal-Marts afford. It's not only that I can buy anti-fungal creams there without embarrassment. It's also that I don't have to seem to accede to disliking gays or blacks or Moravians or anyone as part and parcel of my transactions there. I can be myself. I don't get enlisted into anyone else's warped worldview. I can return to the store again and again, without getting cut into conformity with whatever smoldering hatreds other townsfolk might harbor.

The better angels of all of us can emerge at Wal-Mart. Yes, in tight leopard leotards and ludicrous brassiere tops - we can shop there in all our diverse, uncensored unloveliness, and be the better for it. Let's celebrate Wal-Mart - a bastion of liberty, a pillar of human rights!