MOVIE REVIEW: “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices”

Not counting a funeral or two, I hadn’t “been to church” in over a decade.

Occasionally during my early teens, my parents would—on Sunday mornings when they were feeling particularly cruel—force me into this or that local church. These brief forays into the land of organized religion never panned out. Some nosey lady sitting nearby would spot me pecking away at my Gameboy during the sermon and kindly harass my parents about it for the next several Sundays. Or some obviously unstable Sunday school teacher would blow up at my casual dismissal of the possibility of God’s existence. As far as I was concerned, the pot luck dinners were the only spiritually uplifting part of it. But, and I'll just put it out there - dude, those rural white Protestants could cook.

Finally, though, it all became too unbearable, and, pulling a Jimi Hendrix, I strongly and in few uncertain terms hinted to my mother that I was gay and that the preacher’s “hateful tirades” about “certain minority groups” made me quite upset. My mother, mordified about what she’d done to me, flirted with eternal damnation and insisted on no more church for our family.

Thank goodness there were none of those gay-friendly "mainstream Protestant" churches in rural Arkansas, else we'd have wound up there.

But my nearly-forgotten church experiences suddenly resurfaced Tuesday evening as I and my roommate crept timorously into the Lucy Parson Bookshop (which, as noted previously on this page, calls itself a “radical and independent” bookstore and doubles as a dumping ground for aging hippies, environmentalists, and drug addicts) to view a premier screening of "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices," the new anti-Wal-Mart documentary directed by far left filmmaker and Michael Moore wannabe Robert Greenwald.

All the old fears returned: What if we’re not dressed right? What if there’s a group discussion afterwards and I say something wrong? What if during the preaching I accidentally snicker or role my eyes and someone notices?

And when we got to Lucy Parsons we found that, yes, everyone was dressed to kill—or, more accurately, to beg. In that way of appearing peculiar to young left-wing fanatics, it was a race to the bottom to see who could appear most like a homeless person. Tattered jeans, puke-green 1970’s sweaters, filthy brush skirts, purposely disheveled hair, faded t-shirts in need of several ironings, and other fashions from the fall Vow of Poverty line abounded.

In hopes of blending in—and maybe even impressing—I wore a nasty old pair of rubber sandals with my signature jeans and button-down, sandals that I happily purchased at Wal-Mart a couple of years ago for 99 cents. My roommate, though, didn’t need to dress up much; her nose is pierced.

There was, of course, the expected inspirational sayings and “informational materials” plastered everywhere—the “fight globalization” signs, the giant picture of President George Bush captioned with “The real terrorist!” (in German, no less), the rack of t-shirts depicting the great revolutionary and internationally acclaimed mass murderer Che Guevara, a counter of brochures for every conceivable cause under the sun, the felt wall of patches, pins, and other “revolutionary” keepsakes, three for $1.

As with most religious gatherings, the sermon—or, pardon me, “film”—was a great bore. Rather, it was the horror show of left-wing fundamentalists that made the event mildly interesting.

Just as every fundamentalist Protestant church worth its salt has some senile old woman who lingers in the lobby before the sermon, enthusiastically proclaiming things like “Jesus saves!” and “We’re about to make Satan tremble in fear!” so the Lucy Parson Bookshop sported some old guy—in all likelihood a genuine homeless person—who had parked himself in a lime orange recliner off to the side and insisted on subjecting everyone within earshot, i.e. everyone in the room, to his personal reaction to certain images appearing on the screen.

During the pre-film montage of scenes from the film, for instance, at a point when the screen was suddenly filled with the oversized American flag that flies unapologetically outside Wal-Mart’s Arkansas headquarters, the crotchety old fart—without so much as missing a beat—huffed, “Someone needs to burn that rag.”

I 'bout came up out of my chair at that.

No, in actuality, someone needed to burn whatever that was he was wearing and buy him a clean set of clothes.

Then there are the posers, the ones who are there just because their friends are or because it’s the trendy, urban hipster thing to do. This was the woman sitting up front who, decked out in brown corduroy and thick rimmed glasses, initially appeared quite enthusiastic about making Wal-Mart tremble in fear. During the latter moments of the sermon (I mean, film) it became obvious, though, that she was suffering from an intolerable boredom—a point she demonstrated repeatedly with prolonged excursions to the bookstore’s proudly unisex restroom and leisurely browsing of the bookstore’s inventory as she made her way to and from the proudly unisex restroom.

At most non-Catholic services, particularly poignant points in the sermon are likely to induce an “amen!” from at least someone in the audience. At Lucy Parson’s, though, it was a visceral “bastards!” or “pigs!” whenever the film’s mindless spouting off about the evils of Wal-Mart reached any type of crescendo. When a clip of Jon Stewart making some formulaic joke about Wal-Mart came on the screen, a young man in the back of the room actually shouted “F*** yeah! F*** yeah! F*** yeah!” for a solid fifteen seconds. (In all fairness, though, they might have been still fired up over the Democratic Party’s breathtaking victory in the 2005 “midterms,” where, as we keep hearing, they totally cleaned house in the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board elections.)

Oh, and also there was the film itself. First off, Greenwald is no Moore. In addition to having no structure, no point, and no treasonous display of the charred, disfigured bodies of American soldiers being strung up in a public square in Iraq, the "High Cost of Low Prices" has no narrator. So, for me, there was no one person to focus my anger on—an arrangement I found most frustrating.

The so-called documentary is just a piebald montage of meandering, vindictive rants from disgruntled former employees, environmental activists, and small town merchants standing outside their million-dollar homes and complaining about Wal-Mart wrecking their 45 percent profit margins. Some of them refer to Wal-Mart as a “million dollar company,” suggesting either that they don’t know anything about Wal-Mart, the very topic under discussion, or that they cannot grasp the not-so-subtle distinction between a million and a billion.

One of the expert laymen offhandedly asserts that if the Walton family were to sell off even $10 billion dollars of their Wal-Mart stock it would generate enough cash to purchase health insurance, retirement plans, and “livable wages” for the company’s 1.4 million employees. Now, doing a few rudimentary calculations in your head unmasks this assertion as pure nonsense. $10 billion dollars divided among Wal-Mart’s 1.4 million employees works out to $7,200 per worker, which means that $10 billion would be enough to provide health insurance, retirement plans, and a $4 an hour raise for Wal-Mart’s employees for, oh, maybe four months.

Most of the commentators (if you could call them that) don’t even bother trying to put a price tag on their irrational demands. They just flat out assert that “surely a company as big as Wal-Mart can afford health insurance and high wages for every employee.” "Really?" one is pressed to ask. Are you quite sure about that?

As with most religious fanatics, these people aren’t going to let facts, numbers, or commonsense disrupt their delusions. Wal-Mart's profits are less than 10 billion a year. If tomorrow the company gave in to even half of the left's bizarre demands, it would be in bankruptcy proceedings by early March. Yet, to hear them tell it, Wal-Mart can "somehow" afford to buy health insurance for all its employees, lavish them with union-style retirement benefits, and give them a 4 dollar an hour raise - that, and Jesus literally walked on water.

They never get around to discussing precisely how Wal-Mart is supposed to accomplish this; it's always a vague "somehow."

Johnny Faenza, some employee at a hardware store in Ohio and noted economist, elucidated, “They busted up Standard Oil, and they busted up Ma Bell,” but “nobody seems to be paying attention” to Wal-Mart. Well, and as any semi-informed person could tell you, Standard Oil controlled upwards of 90 percent of the nation’s oil market when it fell prey to antitrust regulators, but Wal-Mart controls at most 12 percent of the nation’s retail market. So, you know, that’s the major difference.

The documentary consists solely of angry, rambling, unthinking, uninformed assertions from angry people off the street, all of whom have obvious axes to grind with Wal-Mart. They wail endlessly—like desperate prayers to some dark unknown—about how awful their own lives are, how Wal-Mart is somehow to blame for all the injustices of the universe, and mindlessly regurgitate the silly, propagandistic slogans they’ve seen every day for the last two years in the pages of the New York Times and its sundry puppet papers across the nation. It is 95 minutes utterly devoid of any thoughtful commentary, intelligent analysis, or, for that matter, even one original thought.

Also, it's hard not to notice that the expert laymen and laywomen griping that they "had" to choose between health insurance for they and their eight children clearly went with the food. Yes, and tell me if you notice otherwise, but all of them clearly went with the food.

And this is a genuine problem with on camera depiction of those who claim to be at the point of starvation because of Wal-Mart - not one of the expert witnesses appears to be in any way starving. In fact, they appear to be, shall we say, taking full advantage of Wal-Mart's low grocery prices.

I know I do. If you like to eat, Wal-Mart's grocery stores are a dream come true. Whenever I go on a diet, my first vow is to stay away from Wal-Mart. Not in any civilization in all of history has it been so easy for poor people to buy all the high quality food they want at extremely low prices.

In fact, I'd like to see some organ of the University of California (since once of them comes out with some anti-Wal-Mart study every week or so) investigate the link between Wal-Mart's grocery departments and obesity. Obersity, of course, isn't a good thing, but it's at least a sign of prosperity.

In place of a narrator, each segment of "The High Cost of Low Prices" is introduced with some word or phrase flashing onto the screen, usually accompanied with foreboding music. The various fonts were poorly chosen, and sometimes the words fly onto the screen from odd angles, giving the film an overall cheesy, PowerPoint-created feel.

Several times, the words start rolling across the screen displaying all sorts of anecdotal evidence:

In addition to these complaints, there also seems to be a problem with security in Wal-Mart parking lots. After interviews with victims and their families, a seemingly endless list of crimes committed in store lots rolls like film credits. Then a message appears onscreen: those were only the ones from the first seven months of 2005.

The same thing happens near the end when the sermon—I mean, film—delves into what’s meant to be an empowering and inspirational discussion of the various cities and localities where special interest groups have managed to block a Wal-Mart from going up. Except, though, towards the beginning of this rolling list you notice “Manhattan, Kansas.” It just sorta sticks out, you know, because it’s odd to see the word “Manhattan” paired with the word “Kansas.” Then about ten seconds later, you notice “Manhattan, Kansas” again, and then a third time, and a forth—and then you realize that they’re running the same damn list of twenty or thirty towns over and over. And then several flags go up in your mind. If they were trying to deceive me by rolling this list over and over—what about the other lists earlier in the film? Were they also the same twenty or thirty store locations rolled over and over? Did I just not notice it before?

To persuade someone, you have to establish a certain amount of credibility in their mind, to gain their intellectual trust. Mostly, this consists of showing that you are being genuine and that you are, at the very least, not knowingly or intentionally trying to mislead them. Well, the “Manhattan, Kansas” bit pretty much sealed it for me. Why even bother to give a fair hearing to someone who’s so blatantly trying to mislead you?

Much of the documentary’s effect relies on the average viewer’s inability to wrap his head around Wal-Mart’s immense size. If Wal-Mart were a country, its total gross domestic product (“GDP”) would be the thirty first largest in the world, greater than that of Saudi Arabia or Sweden. Sometimes in human enterprise of that size, things go wrong. You know, shit happens. Wal-Mart has almost one and a half million employees, so even if a small percentage of them are bad apples, you’re talking about thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of bad apples.

So, yes, sometimes somewhere an unthinking or over-zealous Wal-Mart manager might tell an employee who has already clocked out to straighten up the underwear aisle on his way out (headline: “Wal-Mart Racks Up Labor Violations!”). Yes, sometimes somebody will accidentally let a 17-year-old operate a forklift (headline: “Wal-Mart Violates Child Labor Laws”). Yes, sometimes an employee will direct a racist comment at another employee, and store management will fail to follow up with a thorough and proper investigation into the racial incident (headline: “Wal-Mart Accused of Racism!”).

A million is a thousand times a thousand, so if in a given year, there are, say, one thousand sexual harassment lawsuits against Wal-Mart, and even assuming every single suit has merit, it still only means that less than one out of a thousand of Wal-Mart’s employees are guilty of saying something sexually inappropriate—and illegal—to one of their coworkers. That’s a pretty low number. But, of course, the misleading, out-of-context headline is “One Thousand Sexual Harassment Suits Against Wal-Mart!”

Where an individual manager or employee violates the law, Wal-Mart should be held legally liable for any damages done to the victim. But to act like the entire company is at fault, to insinuate that, based on nothing more than a few hundred or even a few thousand instances, that it says something about the whole company—which has almost a million and a half employees—is not only slandering the good names of many innocent people who make up Wal-Mart but also an incredible example of intellectual sloppiness.

But that’s precisely what Greenwald does throughout his film. It's a disgraceful effort (disgraceful on many counts, not the least of which is his disregard for the IQ level of his audience). He shows one or two examples of sex discrimination or one or two instances of race discrimination or one or two third-world factories with bad working conditions—and then proceeds to suggest unwarranted generalizations about the company as a whole, a company, mind you, that is bigger than many countries.

Greenwald also ignores Wal-Mart’s sheer size when he discusses the number of crimes that occur in Wal-Mart parking lots (which, by some inexplicable line of reasoning, are supposed to be Wal-Mart’s fault). He gives a fairly long list of cities where there have been such crimes, but, you know, Wal-Mart does have thousands of stores. So is it 1 out of 100 stores that have had a violent crime in the parking lot or 1 out of 5? The film doesn’t say. How does the crime rate in Wal-Mart parking lots compare to the crime rate in the parking lots of other stores? Again, the film doesn’t say. The film then reveals that some Wal-Mart parking lots have around-the-clock security guards who drive around in golf carts, but "not all" Wal-Mart's have these. Well, Mr. Greenwald, tell us how many do and how many don't!!!

These are very basic questions any rational mind asks when confronted with the claim that Wal-Mart allows crime to occur in its parking lots—and a failure to give so much as a bare response to such obvious questions suggests that Greenwald is interested only in producing pure propaganda, and nothing of intellectual value.

Utilizing a technique originally developed by the New York Times, Greenwald also asserts that Wal-Mart has, say, 3000 employees in this or that state who are on Medicaid, which is almost always “more than any other employer in the state.” What he conveniently omits is that in many states Wal-Mart is far and away the largest employer. I mean, if 20 percent of a state’s workforce is employed at Wal-Mart and the next largest employer only has 5 percent, then NO DUH Wal-Mart is going to have more workers on Medicaid than any other employer.

The fact remains that less than 5 percent of Wal-Mart’s workers are on Medicaid, which is about average for the retail sector—on par with Target, K-Mart, Best Buy, Home Depot, Whole Foods, etc. Further, a 2004 study concluded that, while on average less than 5 percent of Wal-Mart’s employees are on state Medicaid programs, 6 or 7 percent were on Medicaid before they came to work at Wal-Mart, which means that Wal-Mart actually reduces the number of people on Medicaid. Chew on that one for a while. (This is common sense, of course; it's not like Wal-Mart employees would somehow be lawyers or investment bankers if not for the fact that they're stuck working at Wal-Mart.)

Of course, Business Week is the only media outlet anywhere to ever report on that study.

Sometimes, Greenwald stoops so low as to merely describe some completely innocuous Wal-Mart practice in a tone suggesting that we should all be shocked and scandalized by it—yet another technique borrowed from the New York Times. For instance, one commentator, babbling incoherently about how much he hates Wal-Mart, suddenly stops and breathlessly whispers “and they lock their janitors inside the building over night.”

Well, yeah. Wal-Mart doesn’t want its cleaning staff to roll a U-Haul up to the side of the building at 3am, fill it with jewelry and stereo systems, and drive off. Wal-Mart doesn’t want members of its cleaning staff inviting non-employee friends into the store—to party or vandalize or rape female members of the cleaning crew. (Can you imagine the lawsuits that would stem from that?)

So, you know, LIKE EVERY COMPANY IN THE WHOLE COUNTRY, Wal-Mart locks up its facilities at night, with the cleaning crew inside. And they’re not trapped inside the building. There are emergency exits every fifty feet or so around the building’s periphery, and if there’s any kind of emergency situation, workers can easily leave through the emergency exits.

I mean, am I missing something here?

But just as the New York Times has been doing at least once every two months for the last two years, Greenwald’s film reports that Wal-Mart has an extremely commonsense policy of locking the doors of its facilities at night—but states this in a tone suggesting that the practice is in some way dangerous or outrageous or illegal.

And it certainly had the desired effect on the brave gathering at Lucy Parson’s Tuesday night. When the bit about locked doors came up, there were gasps across the room. And Saaaay-tahn walks among us!!!

"The High Cost of Low Prices" is, like most sermons, unconvincing, based on emotions such as rage and fear rather than facts and reason, and a reiteration of the same inane things the audience/congregation already believes to be true. It’s excruciatingly boring for everyone involved.

When the New York Times glowingly compared Greenwald’s film to "Fahrenheit 911," it made a statement that was far more revealing than anyone at the Times probably realized:

But it's impossible not to remember what happened with Michael Moore's “Fahrenheit 9/11”: it outraged many Americans, made White House decisions look ridiculously dishonest and/or inept, and President Bush was re-elected anyway.

Well, actually, what happened was that Fahrenheit 911 “outraged” only those people who were already “outraged” over President Bush, and “made White House decisions look ridiculously dishonest and/or inept” only to those people who already believed that everything the White House does is ridiculously dishonest and/or inept, which is why "Fahrenheit 911" had little or no effect on the 2004 elections. And, by the same token, "The High Cost of Low Prices" will only raise the ire of people who already hate Wal-Mart—and, realistically speaking, that’s a very narrow and secluded segment of the population.

When are the New York Times and other papers of its ilk going to realize that not everyone thinks like the rich, white left-wing professionals in Boston, San Francisco, and Manhattan? When are they going wake up to the fact that there’s a whole continent out there—and that everyone out in the hinterlands shops at Wal-Mart and that most know at least one person who works—or has worked—at Wal-Mart?

For most of us, Wal-Mart isn’t some alien, abstract entity. We know the people who work at—who constitute—Wal-Mart; they are our relatives, friends, and neighbors. And we know they are not evil or sexist or racist. We also know that almost all of them have health insurance, that none of them are starving, and that they benefit from Wal-Mart’s low prices just as much as the rest of us.

Wal-Mart is the best thing ever to happen to low-income America. Wal-Mart has no hidden clauses, no one calling us up in the middle of the night and telling us to pay some hidden fee; Wal-Mart refuses to engage in usury, cashing our paychecks for $3, not 15 percent. We know that Wal-Mart is the exact opposite of the fat and lazy local retailer who’s boo-hoo’ing on the national stage that, because of Wal-Mart, he’s no longer the richest man in his town. We know that Wal-Mart is not some criminal organization, or some sleazy used car dealer or rent-to-own company taking advantage of the poor and ignorant. We know that Wal-Mart is one of the finest enterprises Americans have ever created—and we are rapidly losing patience with the powerful special interest groups and their brain dead followers who are bent on destroying this country's greatest company.

Even in New York City, a left-wing bastion, when trade magazine Retail Merchandiser asked New York City residents whether they would welcome a Wal-Mart store in the city, nearly two-thirds said that they would welcome Wal-Mart. The extremist anti-Wal-Mart left is completely outside the mainstream, even in New York City.

Listening to the New York Times wondering aloud about how and why left-wing propaganda films like "Fahrenheit 911" and "The High Cost of Low Prices" don’t have a bigger effect, one finds it impossible not to recall Pauline Kael, a writer for the New Yorker, who, in 1972 after Nixon was reelected by 49 out 50 states, famously and quite hilariously commented, “I don’t understand how Nixon won; I don’t know a soul who voted for him.”

Exactly.