Wal-Mart and the Kingdom

If stores that sell things to the public get better to the extent that they get bigger, then Wal-Mart has not only been going on to perfection --- it has almost arrived. The number of its employees roughly approximates the number of uniformed personnel in the U.S. military. The chain's economic clout has been characterized as greater than that of the Federal Reserve. We are talking big here, really and not just symbolically big.

In the long run, though, it is Wal-Mart's symbolic rather than economic power that will be the better remembered, just as the symbolism is also receiving huge attention in the here and now. From the standpoint of current political debate, Wal-Mart has become a symbol both of consumer sovereignty at its best and of corporate greed at its worst. It is a prodigious creator of jobs and a profligate exploiter of those who struggle to stay in them, a sterling paradigm for free enterprise and an insatiable devourer of local government subsidies, a cure for the woes of declining neighborhoods and a destroyer of the small businesses that helped make them neighborly in the first place.

Across the country, there is a large cadre of business and political leaders who have shared, sometimes eagerly and other times reluctantly and painfully, the experience of setting up the auctions that play towns, cities, parts of both, and unincorporated areas as well, off against one another to compete for a new Wal-Mart store of which their constituencies can then strive to make themselves worthy. Most of these leaders discover quickly that they are up against a powerful new kingdom in its own right, with a distinctive message of hope, a call to obedience and service, a system of rewards and punishments, a royal hierarchy, and the power to alter drastically the landscapes of whole communities geographically, demographically, emotionally, and economically.

From the standpoint of Christian social ethics, the kingdom of Wal-Mart poses a number of questions that even a greater number of its citizens seem loathe to pursue or even to ask. Here, just like in sermons, are three of them: First, does a community's need for an economic jump start justify --- morally and not only pragmatically, that is --- its political leaders' bartering away in the form of subsidies future tax revenues that should be going to meet other community needs? This same question can be asked in contexts far beyond that of building a new road to get customers from the highway to a new or an old Wal-Mart's front door. For instance, it's a good one to ask of sports club owners and investors in their negotiations to put up new arenas. (Isn't it galling to contemplate that these places may not be generating any net income for their host cities after all?)

A second question: how can we determine --- again, on the basis of moral considerations --- the extent to which workers who help generate an enterprise's profits should subsidize their companies' owners and investors by accepting lower wages, salaries, and benefits? The best way to avoid dealing with this particular question is the way business has chosen during most of the decades of all of our lives: by appealing to what it takes for profit-making organizations to survive in rapidly changing economic processes and systems. This economic version of Darwinianism rarely fails to scare off efforts at raising the minimum wage. Its most recent scare word is "globalization," now being hurled in the faces of their too expensive, left behind employees by executives charged with getting their companies out of town, country, and the continent at first light. One would think that a question with global ramifications, addressed at a global level, should in fact open up new possibilities of achieving global answers rather than keep us stuck with proclaiming parochially that the question is unanswerable.

Finally --- and here the preacher gets down to some really big meddling --- how, as professed citizens of the Kingdom of God, can we justify our never-abating, craven demands for anything and everything we want under one roof, whenever we want it, for whatever we want to pay for it, at whatever cost to our fellow citizens who make it, ship it, stock it, rack and shelve it, and check it out for us? As well as to those who deliver it, along with the cars and trucks with which we can choose haul it away ourselves. No wonder we have allowed Wal-Mart to become such a powerful symbol of corporate greed. It takes the pressure off of dealing with an even more malignant kind, the greed that is in our own hearts.