Walmart and Clusterfuck Nation

These are two re-posts from the archives of James Howard Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation blog. They give an idea of the timbre of his blog, as well as giving a good argument why the discounts one enjoys at a place like Walmart are not worth the social cost they entail.

October 24, 2002
Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's vaunted "productivity feast" purportedly tells us everything we need to know about the US economy. In fact, it tells us quite the opposite: that statistical analysis conceals the truth at least as often as it informs us.
"Productivity" is another way of describing efficiency, and efficiency is understood to be an unequivocal social benefit. But the triumph of economic "efficiency" has done more to destroy American communities than anything. WalMart is the best example. Americans love WalMart. Everything you need in life can be found there under one roof at bargain prices. WalMart's ability to move vast quantities of merchandise over huge distances and distribute it around the nation in a "warehouse on wheels" is considered the last word in retail trade efficiency. Their ability to destroy rich and complex networks of social and economic relations has also been remarkably efficient. Everywhere WalMart landed in America small business districts died, and with them died millions of occupational niches and local interdependencies that added up to communities.
American communities at their best were not efficient. Retail trade was a multi-layered system carried out by retailers, wholesalers, warehousers, jobbers, and independent distributors, as well as manufacterers, who were participants in their communities, who employed their neighbors, who owned property locally, and took care of it, and in short composed an important strata of every community's middle class. The quixotic quest for efficiency put them out of business.
This process of corporate colonialism, which has been implaccable and insidious, left America socially and civically impoverished and ought to be viewed as a fantastic swindle. Americans were conned into surrendering all the social, civic, and economic infrastucture of daily life just so they could save ninety cents on a giant bag of Cheez Curls. What kind of people would allow this to happen to them?
If one follows the Greenspan view of ever-increasing efficiency, what further bargains await down the line for America? Are we going to surrender due process of law because our failing suburban environments can't support norms of decent behavior? Will we elect maniacs who promise to keep the Happy Motoring experience in operation by conducting military adventures for oil?
The law of diminishing returns casts a dark shadow over our foolish quest for efficiency and Americans sleepwalk in its darkness.

November 3, 2002,
The New York Times reported Saturday that car sales fell 30 percent in October, commenting that "strong auto sales this year have been a key contributor in propping up consumer spending, which in turn has been the main impetus of economic growth."
This ought to raise several troubling issues, the most obvious one being: is that all our economy is about? Buying and selling cars? In a way, the anwer is yes. The US economy is now based on the creation and maintenance of suburban sprawl and all its furnishings and accessories. Cars happen to be major accessories. So are suburban houses (Realtors call them "homes" to try to instantly invoke an emotional connection to what is, after all, just another consumer product).
What keeps the cycle of car-buying and house-buying going? Easy credit. Loans. Often with little-to-no collateral involved. Often to people with poor records of repaying loans.
What happens when the pool of all potential borrowers (even the most marginal) shrinks to near zero and even deceptive gimmicks, like "zero-percent financing," fail to bring in new ones? Then there is no more economic activity in the United States because we don't do anything else here (except make movies, TV shows, and pop music and only a tiny percent of Americans can be in show biz, though practically everyone wants to be). We've outsourced the actual making of most mundane products to distant nations where people work for peanuts. Everyday retail trade is conducted through "efficient" national chain stores, not through local networks of complex, fine-grained economic relations. We subsist on Caesar salads the components of which travel an average of 3000 miles from field to table (unless you belong to that segment of the population who get by solely on chicken McNuggets, Hostess Ho-Hos, and Pepsi Cola, which travel the same truck routes as the Caesar salads).
These elements point in the direction of a system unwinding. More tragically, as it unwinds, we will be stuck with all the unsustainable furnishings -- the farflung commodity housing, the redundant chain stores, the countless miles of blacktop in need of continual repair, the gazillion cars that we can no longer afford to replace (not to mention the unsold inventories of no-longer affordable new cars). We'll be stuck living in places that are not worth living in, and not worth caring about, with no networks of local economic interdependency, far from any food supplies.
These are our prospects even without probablity of international military mischief, Jihad, de-stabilized oil markets, and terrorism.
There's really only one reasonable way out of this predicament: the re-scaling of America and the reconstruction of local economies.
We are not prepared.
On the same page in the business section as that Times story on car sales, was another stpry about the fantastic success of the Humvee, the military super-car that has become a status symbol among the hyper-suburban rich. A marketing consultant named Dr. Clotaire Rapaille was quoted as saying: "People told me, 'I can protect my family [in a Humvee]. If someone bumps into me, they're dead.' People love this feeling."
Now that's marketing savvy!