By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Columbia County, Ark. — There’s no sign of it here in
Magnolia, Ark., but the boycott season is upon us, and graduates of Princeton
and Bryn Mawr are demanding “justice” from Wal-Mart, which is not in the
justice business but in the groceries, clothes, and car-batteries business. It
is easy to scoff, but I am ready to start taking the social-justice warriors’
insipid rhetoric seriously — as soon as two things happen: First, I want to
hear from the Wal-Mart-protesting riffraff a definition of “justice” that is
something that does not boil down to “I Get What I Want, Irrespective of Other
Concerns.”
Second, I want to turn on the radio and hear Jay-Z
boasting about his new Timex.
It is remarkable that Wal-Mart, a company that makes a
modest profit margin (typically between 3 percent and 3.5 percent) selling
ordinary people ordinary goods at low prices, is the great hate totem for the
well-heeled Left, whose best-known celebrity spokesclowns would not be caught
so much as downwind from a Supercenter, while at the same time, nobody is out
with placards and illiterate slogans and generally risible moral posturing in
front of boutiques dealing in Rolex, Prada, Hermès, et al. It’s almost as if
there is a motive at work here other than that which is stated by our big-box-bashing
friends on the left and their A-list human bullhorns.
What might that be?
If you want an illuminating example of the fact that
there is more to the way that prices work in a free market than can be captured
by the pragmatic calculations of cold-eyed util-traders, consider the
luxury-goods market and its enthusiastic following among people who do not
themselves consume many or any of those goods. One of the oddball aspects of
rich societies such as ours is the fact that when people pile up a little bit
more disposable income than they might have expected to, they develop a taste
for measurably inferior goods and outdated technologies: If you have money that
is a little bit obscene, you might get into classic cars, i.e., an outmoded
form of transportation; if your money is super-dirty obscene, you get into
horses, an even more outmoded form of transportation.
Or consider the case of fine watches: Though he — and
it’s a “he” in the overwhelming majority of cases — may not be eager to admit
it, a serious watch enthusiast knows that even the finest mechanical timepiece
put together by magical elves on the shores of Lake Geneva is, as a timekeeping
instrument, dramatically inferior to the cheapest quartz-movement watch coming
out of a Chinese sweatshop and available for a few bucks at, among other
outlets, Wal-Mart. (To say nothing of the cheap digital watches sold under
blister-pack at downscale retailers everywhere, or the clock on your
cellphone.) But even as our celebrity social-justice warriors covet those
high-margin items — and get paid vast sums of money to help sell them, too —
they denounce the people who deal in less rarefied goods sold at much lower
profit margins.
If economic “exploitation” means making “obscene profits”
— an empty cliché if ever there were one — then Wal-Mart and the oil companies
ought to be the good guys; not only do they have relatively low profit margins,
but they also support millions of union workers and retirees through stock
profits and the payment of dividends into pension funds. By way of comparison,
consider that Hermès, the luxury-goods label that is a favorite of well-heeled
social-justice warriors of all sorts, makes a profit margin that is typically
seven or eight times what Wal-Mart makes, even though, as rapper Lloyd Banks
discovered, its $1,300 sneakers may not always be up to the task. If Wal-Mart
is the epitome of evil for selling you a Timex at a 3 percent markup, then
shouldn’t Rolex be extra-super evil?
Strangely enough, Jay-Z remains “a celebrity quite
serious about social justice,” according to the Huffington Post, even as he
offers paeans to high-end horologist Hublot; though he does, as advertised,
seem to favor the platinum Rolex Day-Date II. Celebrity dope Ashton Kutcher
angrily demanded: “Wal-Mart, is your profit margin so important you can’t pay
your employees enough to be above the poverty line?” It is safe to bet that
Rolex earned a much higher margin on the Milgauss watch that Kutcher wears, as
surely as does the maker of the fairly spendy Baume & Mercier watches for
which he served as a celebrity pitchman.
A few weeks ago, I was very much amused by the sight of
anti-Wal-Mart protests in Manhattan — where there is no Wal-Mart, and where, if
Bill de Blasio et al. have their way, there never will be. Why? Because we’re
too enlightened to let our poor neighbors pay lower prices. The
head-clutchingly expensive shops up on Fifth and Madison avenues? No protests.
Rather, they were bustling with the same class of people behind the protests,
people busily accumulating — or at least making like Holly Golightly in the
window at Tiffany’s.
Here in Columbia County, Ark., a
not-especially-prosperous locale behind the Pine Curtain where the median
household income is about half the national average and where a few twists and
turns down county roads find you in a world of shacks and chained-up dogs out
of a Snuffy Smith cartoon, nobody is boycotting the local Wal-Mart. In fact,
the locals seem rather fond of this purported outpost of economic exploitation and
wicked capitalist blah-blah-blah. And it is not difficult to understand why: It
is an important part of local commerce in a community that is hungry for
enterprise.
People buy Rolex watches for reasons other than their
timekeeping excellence, just as people buy Ferraris and horses for reasons
other than going to the store to pick up a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread.
Economists talk about “Veblen goods,” which are more valued because of their
high prices rather than in spite of them, coveted not for their conventional
utility but for their exclusivity. Owning a Rolls-Royce isn’t about the car —
it’s about you. Which is why you see magazines such as The Robb Report — one of
those glossies full of “bland advertisements for being wealthy,” as the novelist
William Gibson put it — for sale in places such as Wal-Mart, where the typical
customer is not actually in the market for a yacht or Kiton overcoat. If you’ve
ever seen the heartbreaking sight of a young woman stopping a Wal-Mart checker
three-fourths of the way through ringing up her purchases — because she does
not have enough money to pay for what’s left in her cart — then you can be
pretty sure that what’s going in her sack is more or less the opposite of
Veblen goods.
Ironically, the anti-Wal-Mart crusaders want to make life
worse for people who are literally counting pennies as they shop for
necessities. Study after study has shown that Wal-Mart has meaningfully reduced
prices: 3.1 percent overall, by one estimate — with a whopping 9.1 percent cut to
the price of groceries. That comes to about $2,300 a year per household,
savings that accrue overwhelmingly to people of modest incomes, not to
celebrity activists and Ivy League social-justice crusaders.
Ultimately, these campaigns are exercises in tribal
affiliation. The Rolex tribe, and those who aspire to be aligned with it,
signal their status by sneering at the Timex tribe — or by condescending to it
as they purport to act on its behalf, as though poor people were too stupid to
know where to find the best deal on a can of beans. Or call it the Trader Joe’s
tribe vs. the Wal-Mart tribe, the Prius tribe vs. the F-150 tribe.
We see this everywhere: In Ferguson, self-righteous and
self-appointed spokesmen for the marginalized point to the fact that the criminal-justice
system generally produces far worse outcomes to the poor and the non-white than
it does to the well-off and white. This is, generally speaking, true. And
though the dynamics are equally complicated, the same thing is true of the
government schools, which do a pretty good job for rich white kids in the
suburbs while functioning as day prisons and incubators of dysfunction for poor
minority kids, especially in big cities. But the social-justice warriors in
Ferguson will fight on bloody stumps to prevent reform of the government-school
cartels, the endless failures of which do far more to harm the lives of the
economically and socially vulnerable than any police department does. Why? The
teachers are part of the tribe, and the cops are part of a rival tribe, which
is why nobody ever bought a Rolex out of the royalties of a song titled “F**k
the Milwaukee Public Schools.”
On the one hand, we have Wal-Mart, which makes a modest
profit margin by helping to feed and clothe people who typically do not have a
lot of spare money. On the other hand, we have a grotesque exercise in snobbery
— snobbery frequently compounded by stupidity. The view from Fifth Avenue is
rather different from the view from Columbia County.
