Salon is almost reasonable on Wal-Mart

This recent bit on Wal-Mart in Salon, which emanates from my old stomping grounds of North Florida, is both surprising and welcome. My feelings on the store and its critics aren’t exactly a secret, but it’s always nice to see someone from the other side acknowledging that, far from hurting lower-end workers, Wal-Mart gives them a way to stretch their dollars even further. Speaking of my former state’s residents, Andrew Leonard writes:

Don't the throngs of North Florida residents flocking to Wal-Mart bear at least as much responsibility for killing their downtowns as Wal-Mart does? And shouldn't the cash that they are saving be part of the discussion as to how much money is being "sucked" out of the local economy? If, as Fishman points out, Wal-Mart's prices are 10 to 15 percent lower than those of other stores, then consumers may well have saved as much as $7 billion or $8 billion in November and December by shopping there. That's a fair piece of change.

Indeed it is. And by many counts, the savings are far bigger than that. In a recent Washington Post essay, Sebastian Mallaby argued that Wal-Mart was nothing short of a progressive success story that saved Americans more than $50 billion on food alone – more than $10 billion more than government food stamps.

I grew up just a few miles South of the first Super Wal-Mart (built in Crestview, Florida), and later, near another location which would, for a little while, carry the honor of being the U.S’s largest Wal-Mart (second in the world only to one in Mexico). The new stores are, of course, much larger, and there are persistent rumors of even larger, double-decker Wal-Marts, which will no doubt include amusement parks, farming and apartments, these being the only general consumer markets left for Wal-Mart to take over. I’m waiting for a Wal-Mart search engine, and when they get bored with retail, I expect to see Wal-Mart missiles and bombers. Really.

It’ll be a cookie-cutter Mall of America for every town in the U.S. And being pro-capitalist, I’m basically fine with this.

Being used to (and generally supportive of) the permanent, massive expansion of the retail giant, I’m clearly aware of the store’s positive economic impacts. But many of the store’s critics also complain that when the store comes in and wipes out an old, economically stagnant, inefficient downtown, it also wipes out that downtown’s character. And sure, Wal-Mart will never replace the cozy little coffee and bagel joints that it crushes with its megasized homogeneous boot, but then again, it’s not as if those lovely little cafes were much more than boho-marriage-destroying money pits* anyway.

And, contrary to what anyone seems to think, Wal-Mart actually builds its own community. Yes, you read that right. Now, this is purely anecdotal, and I’m sure it’s different in the major metropolises, but in small town Florida, small town Kentucky, and even in Jacksonville (usually ranked in the top 15 U.S. cities, population wise), Wal-Mart becomes one of the default places for youngsters, especially those too young to drink, to hang out.

Now, I know this seems totally bizarre to most mid-Atlantic city dwellers, but in small Southern towns where the only places open to a 17 year old at 11pm are Wal-Mart and Waffle House, maybe a Denny’s, traipsing the aisles of Wal-Mart till all hours of the night has become the modern equivalent of cruising the strip. I know that at the small liberal arts college I went to for a few years, one professor actually expressed mock-disapproval at arriving at Wal-Mart on the weekends only to find bands of freshmen roving around, milling the cheap DVD racks and maybe picking up some chips and soda.

While there’s nothing wrong with a thriving downtown, and Why Wal-Mart Works actually makes a case that Wal-Mart encourages “funky” shops by taking care of the basics, Wal-Mart proves that you don’t need a quirky collection of economically unstable stores in order to build community. All you really need is a place – any place, as long as it’s open -- and preferably one that gives you a host of strange things to heckle with your friends while spending a little bit (if not a lot) of money.

*If you doubt this article’s class-A hipster cred, it appears to have been written by a Lower East Side dwelling Pitchfork writer.