The High Cost of Bargains

mrG — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 13:01:18 -0500

Sure, the price is right, but is the price really right? Or are we bargain-hunting our society into permanent poverty? A whole-systems look at WalMart from FastCompany suggests that the dime you save on socks may mean stealing a working wage from your neighbour ...

But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.

FastCo is short on solutions in this piece, and I can't blame them because it is a unifying thread in a lot of our economic woes: The loss of community cohesion thinking is the why of a lot of our societal ills, from poor education (why pay for your neighbours' kids schooling?) to environment (why pay more to save some Kentucky farmer's skies?) to military action (why not just force our pipelines to Kazikstan?) to even the ICT collapse (who needs good software when we can have Win/XP today?) and the RIAA (who needs local music when I can have a virtual Celine Dion sing at my wedding?)

A contrast to this is the largely successful anomalies that exist on our fringes; whether it's a confederate camaraderie or a den of thieves, we don't have to look far to find real-world communities who behave like communities, who look out for each other. Everyone knows ethnic neighbourhoods where every cousin gets at least some job, religious sects and cults where all purchasing and provision is kept inside the community. We may have labelled protectionism as a defacto bad thing, but is it really? Or are we succumbing to media rhetoric propping globalization stewarts like WalMart who stand to make oodles of cash at the expense of our social fabric?

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The High Cost of Bargains