Beginning Feb. 1, 240 to 250 new Wal-Mart Supercenters will be built in the fiscal year. About 80-90 of these will be new facilities. This is old hat to Alice, Helen, Jim, John and Rob -the Walton family -who occupied five spots of the top ten richest Americans in 2004.On the opposite end of the monetary spectrum is the student budget. They dine on caviar -we buy imitation lunchmeat (and mustard if we have enough pocket change.) Unfortunately, before we climb our way to the top of the corporate ladder, someone who already did has left his legacy to help us out.Wal-Mart is the biggest employer in 21 states, with more people in uniform than the U.S. Army, according to a Nov. 2004 special edition of Fortune magazine (http://www.fortune.com/fortune/specials/2004/walmart/walmart.html). While Fortune named Wal-Mart the most admired company in America for the past two years, I have to wonder what about Wal-Mart is to be admired.In the beginning, Sam Walton only bought from American suppliers. But now, with 1,500 stores in 9 countries, including Mexico and China, Wal-Mart has infiltrated the world's economy. I felt right at home when I studied abroad in M+
quoted Al Norman, the leading anti-Wal-Mart consultant from Sprawl-busters.com (http://www.sprawl-busters.com/). Wal-Mart is not a form of economic development. It's a form of economic displacement Norman said. New jobs in old aprons.I don't wanna see these new jobs entering American communities. Homogenous the customer's always first policies seem fake when they come from super retail chains. And standing in a doorway droning Welcome to Wal-Mart isn't my idea of quality job replacement.(I must mention that good people work at Wal-Mart -they're just stuck in bad situations. A white-haired elderly gentleman with stern wrinkles greeted me in the Wal-Mart at Fields Ertel, Ohio for many years. I can only hope he has since abandoned the uniform that wiped the smile off his face.)When I speak out against shopping at Wal-Mart, I often hear, But what's my alternative? That's just it -there aren't many. And that's just the problem. So we park at the farthest edges of the lot and wait in endless lines; we give them our cash and we think we get good bargains. My New Year's resolution was never to shop at Wal-Mart again. You won't see me in line.-Caren Baginski is a junior journalism major. Send her an e-mail at caren.baginski@ohiou.edu.
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Caren Baginski
