The Tribune 12.08.05

As a teenager, I worked evenings and weekends during Christmas as a "runner" at Houston Wholesale Jewelers, a discount store that took Houston by storm when it opened its doors in the mid-50’s. Shoppers would jam the aisles and wait in queues 10-12 deep at the glass display cases where they would select their merchandise. My job was to literally run to the delivery desk with the customer’s sales ticket and wait for the merchandise to be brought out, then run back with the merchandise to the customer. It was a cumbersome system, but this store and others like it launched a new era of discount merchandising that was a harbinger of much larger things to come.

This Christmas season, shoppers will flock to discount chain stores like K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Target and Costco, modern behemoths that have taken the art of supply-chaining to a global scale. They bring us goods from around the world by buying direct from manufacturers, using efficient distribution networks, and keeping real-time tabs on what customers are buying with state-of-the art computer systems. The result is that they can offer goods at cut-throat prices and suffocate local mom-and-pop competition. Each new Wal-Mart SuperCenter draws 84% of its sales from existing businesses.

Sam Walton began with determination to "Buy it low, stack it high, sell it cheap," a philosophy he parlayed into 3800 Wal-Mart stores in the United States and 1600 in countries from Mexico to China – the world’s largest, most profitable corporation and largest employer, with 1.7 million "associates" worldwide.

When he began his enterprise, Sam Walton sounded like Santa, committed to the welfare of his workers and rewarding them for their service. In Made in America, he said, "Share your profits with all your associates. Treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations."

But somewhere along the gold-paved way, Wal-Mart turned into Ebineezer Scrooge. Wal-Mart pays its sales clerks about $14,000 per year. With $10 billion in profits, Wal-Mart insures fewer than half its employees and encourages those remaining to apply for taxpayer subsidized Medicaid. While CEO Lee Scott spends his $17,543,739 income on Christmas luxuries, more Wal-Mart employees will fall behind on their bills and join the hundreds of thousands of them already on public assistance.

This story is more "The Nightmare Before Christmas" than "It’s a Wonderful Life." Seventy percent of the goods Wal-Mart stocks are made in China, and more American workers will face Christmas without jobs because the Wal-Mart monopoly pressured their employers to lower costs so mercilessly that they were forced to relocate overseas.

So I will not purchase at Wal-Mart this Christmas. I’ll deck the halls and fa-la-la without them. My own sense of Goodwill towards Men won’t let me continue to be a part of this global system of worker exploitation. The cost of Wal-Mart’s low prices is just too high. I’ll pay a little more, but I’ll sleep a lot better.