The Walmart Strain

Watching this animation of the spread of Walmart across America, I was reminded of The Andromeda Strain. :-)

But Walmart is serious business.

There are the usual complaints about Walmart's business practices and its impact on communities.

My first hand experience: when I was a kid in the 70's, my small hometown in rural Kansas had every kind of store you could imagine. Downtown is boarded up now. People shop at Walmart and similar big box stores. And that story has been repeated thousands of times across America.

Wake Up Walmart and Walmart Watch address those concerns.

Politically, Walmart is working to prevent an Obama presidency based on the concern that his election would increase the likelihood of the unionization of their nearly 1.5 million U.S. employees.

Perhaps most worrisome of all is the risk that James Kunstler raised in The Long Emergency: namely, that the very efficiency that Walmart has brought to the "supply chain" makes us our society more vulnerable to disruption.

In other words, American communities once depended on a collection of local businesses and other sources for the essentials of life. Some of our food and other necessities were produced locally. What wasn't we got from various small stores who each had a variety of suppliers. This sort of system is more resilient because no single link in the chain is going to devastate the community.

But with the Walmartization of our economy, more and more of our necessities come from far away, and we depend increasingly on businesses (like Walmart) who have long, relatively simple supply chains. A huge percentage of Walmart's products, for example, come from China. A break in that supply chain--due to war, escalating fuel costs, epidemic, or other crisis--has a disproportionately huge impact to American citizens.

In other words, there's no where else to turn.

More from Kunstler:

Wal-Mart and its imitators will not survive the oil-market disruptions to come. Not even for a little while. Wal-Mart will not survive when its merchandise supply chains to Asia are interrupted by military contests over oil or internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" will not be able to operate in a post-cheap-oil economy.

It will only take mild-to-moderate disruptions in the supply and price of gas to put Wal-Mart and all operations like it out of business. And it will happen. As that occurs, America will have to make other arrangements for the distribution and sale of ordinary products. It will have to be reorganized at the regional and the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances at multiple increments and probably by multiple modes of transport. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy, and fewer choices of things. We are not going to rebuild the cheap-oil manufacturing facilities of the 20th century.

We will have to recreate the lost infrastructures of local and regional commerce, and it will have to be multilayered. These were the people who Wal-Mart systematically put out of business over the past thirty years. The wholesalers, the jobbers, the small-retailers. They were economic participants in their communities; they made decisions that had to take the needs of their communities into account. They were employers who employed their neighbors. They were a substantial part of the middle class of every community in America and all of them together played civic roles in our communities as the caretakers of institutions—the people who sat on the library boards, and the hospital boards, and bought the balls and bats and uniforms for the little-league teams. We got rid of them in order to save nine bucks on a hair dryer. We threw away uncountable millions of dollars worth of civic amenity in order to shop at the Big Box. That was some bargain.

Walmart... just say NO.