Boycotting the Happy Face. Or Why Wal-Mart won't get my dollar

I am a girl who boycotts. I didn’t start out that way, in that I was never working to make a statement, really. It was just a natural response to not liking something.

Take Wal-Mart. Please, take Wal-Mart. And get it the hell out of Riverhead. They’re here now, in my own town where their big blue building isn’t quite big enough for them anymore. So they’re working at bulldozing the townspeople and the town board and the wide open, empty acres so they can build a Super Wal-Mart that I won’t shop at either. They’re spending a lot of money on lawyers to argue against our arguments against their plan for retail domination.

I used to look on ol’ Sam’s big idea as a stellar example of good ol’ American ingenuity. Yup, Sam saw a need and built up quite a business for himself. But at some point, after ol’ Sam passed on to his great reward, something changed. It was, I’m thinking, the point where the business went from being about people to being about profit. Not like I’m against making money but I think you have to have a little heart in the drive to succeed.

So, Wal-Mart lost its heart and started moving, uninvited and often unwelcome, into towns and cities, putting up their gianormous blue store fronts and running local businesses into the ground. And often then leaving themselves, if it turned out that target community couldn’t buy enough discounted clothing, kitchen tools and seasonal supplies to beef up the bottom line.

There was a story years back on ’60 Minutes’. That’s what kicked off my big boycott of Wal-Mart. A focus on a tiny town with a bustling, neighborly Main Street that turned to a dusty road lined with boarded up shops when they couldn’t compete with the initially super-low discounts that Wal-Mart brought to town. But when it turned out that this particular slice of Small Town, USA didn’t generate as big a bottom line as Wal-Mart had hoped for, they pulled up stakes and hightailed off in search of the next town to pillage.

Were they sorry? Not according to the smug exec who sold his soul on camera admitting that the heart of the town, the people of the town, nothing about the town really mattered at all to them. It was about profit.

After that, how could I possibly give them a nickel?

Interestingly enough, it turns out they’re even worse than that. Documented stories of sweat shops, abuse of the social assistance programs and a refusal to pay people what they’re worth or give them the promotions and opportunities that they’ve worked hard enough to earn. You can see it all in a fascinating documentary peeking in the back door of Wal-Mart. It’s called “The High Cost of Low Prices”. And even if you take it with a grain of salt, there’s so much there you can’t help but see a different side of Wal-Mart. Different than the warm, fuzzy commercials are trying to show, different than the happy face logo and different enough that maybe you’ll get why I’m a girl who boycotts.