by Kristina Jones
In small towns, Wal-Mart is the modern day equivalent of the Greek agora - the commercial, political, and social center of a community. In the parking lot, rappers, hillbillies, and cheerleaders smoke home-grown together on the beds of pick-up trucks. Inside, the aisles teem with crowds of shoppers - not anonymous consumers, but family and friends - browsing shelves filled with all of life's necessities: rifles, pork rinds, rims (fancy automobile wheels), snuff (chewing tobacco), Kathie Lee clothing, and George Foreman grills. With little else to do, and nowhere else to shop, Wal-Mart is the only place to go.
Much of Wal-Mart's success can be attributed to placing its first stores in these isolated towns, located far away from other discount outlets. This strategy has helped Wal-Mart gain a solid base of customers, grateful to finally have a shop within driving distance offering a wide selection and low prices. Of course these days, there are Wal-Marts coast-to-coast, from the tiniest burghs to the outskirts of big cities. They all look the same - the big box exterior and store layout with ladies' fashions in the front and plastic animal decoys in the back. Beyond appearances, something else rings familiar in all of them. It's that pregnant girl with the ragged ponytail at the check-out counter who blithely dishes the tabloid "news," though you know her feet have to hurt. Or perhaps that toothless guy in Sporting Goods who finds your tackle and tells you the best fishing holes in the area. No matter where you are, Wal-Mart maintains its folksy personality because of its distinct corporate philosophy - take raw capitalism and serve it up with a side of hospitality. As Fortune Magazine noted when naming Wal-Mart the world's most-admired company earlier this year, "Wal-Mart in 2003 is, in short, a lot like America in 2003: a sole superpower with a down-home twang."1
Wal-Mart boasts a veritable canon of corporate literature in the carefully preserved writings of the company's founder, Sam Walton. His revelations, which include texts such as "Sam's Rules for Building a Business" and "The 3 Basic Beliefs," appear everywhere in stores - from employee training manuals to promotional videos.2 Besides folksy wit and wisdom, the collected works also reveal the tension between prioritizing the customer and respecting the employee. With Wal-Mart's ultimate belief in "Always Low Prices" as preeminent, there's no way that both can be served.
One of the more thrilling pieces of the Wal-Mart canon, a little ditty called the Wal-Mart Cheer, serves as a fitting introduction to this underlying tension. Penned by Walton after visiting a tennis ball factory in Asia where the employees did calisthenics and cheers during breaks, it exemplifies the advice given in Rule Number Six of "Sam's Rules for Building a Business." "Show enthusiasm - always," he writes. "When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. Then make everybody else sing with you." To this day, Wal-Mart employees perform the cheer often, at employee meetings, store openings, and even corporate shareholders' meetings. In short, no one at any level of the company is safe from screaming at the top of their lungs in high school cheerleader style . . .
"Give me a W!The last two lines of the cheer clearly illustrate the contradictions in Wal-Mart's philosophy. For employees, it's "My Wal-Mart," yet the cheer gives the customer the final and highest priority.
Give me an A!
Give me an L!
Give me a Squiggly!
Give me an M!
Give me an A!
Give me an R!
Give me a T!
What's that spell?
Wal-Mart!
Whose Wal-Mart is it?
My Wal-Mart!
Who's number one?
The Customer! Always!"
It's clear that the customers are satisfied. They flock to Wal-Mart first and foremost for the low discount prices, to the tune of 218 billion dollars in sales a year. That's 800 dollars spent for every man, woman, and child in the United States. But as Wal-Mart would tell it, it's the "aggressive hospitality" of the Associates that keeps bringing customers back. Tenets such as the Sundown Rule ("It's our standard to get things done today - before the sun goes down") and the 10-Foot Rule ("Whenever you come within 10 feet of a customer, you will look him in the eye, greet him and ask him if you can help him") scarcely differ from basic concepts of customer service. However, the company takes the idea of service a step further. In a section of the company's website entitled "Exceeding Customer Expectations," Wal-Mart prides itself upon sacrifices made daily by employees. There are the heroic Associates, like Sheila, "who risked her own safety when she jumped in front of a car to prevent a little boy from being struck"; the ingenious, like Joyce, "who threw a plate on the floor to assure a young mother that a set of dishes was truly unbreakable"; or even the selfless, such as Annette, "who gave up the Power Ranger she had on layaway for her own son so that a customer's son could have his birthday wish." These acts of derring-do performed by anonymous Wal-Martyrs more than prove that Wal-Mart means it when they say "Satisfaction Guaranteed."
What drives Wal-Mart employees to this high standard of service? As the cheer suggests, it's because it's their Wal-Mart. Walton, in Rules Two and Seven, lays out two principles on working with employees: first, that by sharing profits and treating Associates as partners, they will "perform beyond your wildest expectations"; and second, that listening to employees is the way to "to push responsibility down in your organization, and to force good ideas to bubble up within it."
When Sam says profit-sharing, he means it. Wal-Mart's stock options and 401(k) program is legendary among employees. Training manuals detail the success of Associates who earned hundreds and thousands of dollars during the company's boom in the '80s. The idea of sharing fits well with Wal-Mart's hard-working Heartland attitude; however, as stock growth has declined sharply, this dedication just doesn't seem to be enough. Especially without an affordable company insurance plan or other pension options, investing in some scratch-off lottery tickets at the corner store may reap higher returns for employees.
As the aforementioned Sam's Rule Seven would indicate, Wal-Mart lore is chock full of stories that illustrate managers' and executives' willingness to listen to the ideas of everyday Associates. On the "Statements" section of the Wal-Mart website (next to explanations of why Wal-Mart sells guns and how it deals with truck campers in its parking lots), the company tells the story of how an Associate enacted a revolutionary change in store policy: "On a store trip to Crowley, La., in 1980, Sam Walton noticed an Associate who was welcoming customers into the store. He thought this was a great opportunity for all of our stores and the program was implemented companywide the next year." After that momentous day, every Wal-Mart store had a greeter. This elderly or disabled individual says hello and hands out smiley face stickers and shopping carts to customers as they enter the store. Trivial as it appears, the greeter stands as a testament to the open communication at all levels of Wal-Mart store policy - when the customer benefits from it.
Wal-Mart has such a strong, reciprocal relationship with its employees that it wants to work directly with them - as individuals. In their words, "Because we believe in maintaining an environment of open communications, we do not believe there is a need for third-party representation." Despite wages rarely rising above $7.50 an hour, allegations of unpaid breaks and overtime, lawsuits charging gender discrimination, and huge organizing drives like the "National Day of Action Against Wal-Mart" last year, Wal-Mart also sees no need for workers who want unions. In 2000, a group of meat-cutters passed a union vote in a Canadian Wal-Mart Supercenter (the standard Wal-Mart discount center plus a grocery store). Immediately afterward, Wal-Mart made a company-wide switch to pre-packaged meat, eliminating the division in all 1,300 Supercenter stores.
The case of the meat-cutters is a rare one. As Wal-Mart would spin it, there's a veritable anti-union resistance movement occurring in its stores. United under the belief that unions are a decadent relic of the past, a predator seeking to gorge itself on fresh blood (and membership dues), Wal-Mart employees stand up to union organizers. As Associate Mary Chapman puts it, "The UFCW organizers are afraid to let us vote because they know they would lose. . . They are like vultures. They just keep circling and circling even though we 140 Associates send them letters asking them to bow out and leave us alone." This statement comes from a company press release, yet there is something to it. Employees may believe what Wal-Mart tells them about their place in the company, despite low wages and questionable treatment. Says Betty Dukes, the plaintiff in a pending California class-action lawsuit charging Wal-Mart with gender discrimination: "I learned . . .that Sam Walton had a profound vision and started Wal-Mart on a faith venture. I have always deeply appreciated his visionary spirit and his efforts to reach for the stars."3
With enemies like these, Wal-Mart wins every time. The losers? The same customers and employees that it so skillfully pits against one another. The same poor people who work at Wal-Mart are the ones who desperately want the low prices that Wal-Mart promises. This phenomenon spurs a cycle of dependence that destroys the economic vitality of any community Wal-Mart inhabits. Kenneth Stone, an Iowa State University economist, has charted the decline of 11 small towns where Wal-Mart has located after being offered tax breaks and other incentives by eager residents. In his opinion, they shouldn't be so excited about Wal-Mart: "Quite often, [local officials] look at the short-term benefits of more employment, and at an increased tax base. But in the long term, the situation often results in the loss of local-business - which reduces employment and the tax base."4
Certainly Wal-Mart is to blame, but so are the countless consumers and employees who support it with their dollars and hours. By enjoying low prices customers destroy their community's culture and economy, whether they intend it or not. What they get in return, besides some flimsy bookshelf or a pack of smokes, is a down-home fantasyland created in Wal-Mart headquarters - a poor substitute for the real thing.
Customers and employees may be slowly awakening. A recent online bulletin board discussion among Wal-Mart employees suggests that resistance is stronger than the company admits. The subject of the message was the Cheer - and variations upon it. One Associate shared how she and fellow employees tweaked those critical final lines:
"'WHOSE WAL-MART IS IT?!' (at this point you scream, 'MY WAL-MART')....'WHO'S NUMBER ONE?!?!' (this is where you are supposed say 'the customer, always'....but my fellow employees always manage to say 'we are' [although I always yell 'Target' - hehe])".5
This anecdote illuminates the solution to the Wal-Mart problem - and it's not shopping at Target. It's that customers and employees as a community must realize that they're all "number one."
1 Useem, Jerry.. "One Nation Under Wal-Mart." Fortune Magazine, March 3rd 2003
2 "The Wal-Mart Culture", Wal-Mart Corporation Online, www.walmartstores.com.
© 2001 walmartstores.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Note: This reference pertains to all subsuquent excerpts from Wal-Mart printed matter, unless otherwise noted.
3 Rosen, Ruth, "Women and Wal-Mart," The San-Francisco Chronicle, June 30, 2003.
4 Stone, Kenneth E. "Impact of the Wal-Mart Phenomenon on Rural Communities"
5 "TheWal-Mart Cheer - Fact or Fiction?" Post on www.ezboard.com