Someone emailed me this and I *shuddered*
This 'aspirational' quote incited a rather lengthy musing on billionaires, brands and our beautiful planet.
A salesperson sent this quote to me recently. It was supposed to inspire me, I guess. Spoiler alert: It didn’t.
“When Walmart's founder Sam Walton was asked about recessions, he said, "I’ve thought about it, but I have chosen not to participate.”
Samuel Walton didn’t make this remark at the start of his career, he made this remark in 1991, a year before he passed away. It is often used to inspire people not to focus on the doom and gloom of recessions… as if merely imagining that it isn’t there means it isn’t. I’m all for positive thinking, but let’s be real. Billionaires do not need to worry about putting food on the table.
Walton’s net worth today would be about $68 billion dollars, a figure so huge it’s hard to fathom.
To me, the quote smacks of wealth idolatry.
The kind of wealth lust that makes reality TV stars household names and chants ‘Make America Great Again’ at political events while turning a blind eye to everyday racism, poverty, inequity and misogyny. The kind that incites Kanye West fans to launch a GoFundMe to restore his billionaire status after he was dropped by Adidas for his repeated antisemitic remarks. What?!?
Is it just me that feels we live in a world that is completely disassociated from reality?
Sure, Walton’s achievements have been astounding in a business sense. The man was known for his unshakeable confidence, self-belief, and strong work ethic. Those are good traits to have. Although ‘the harder we work, the better outcome we shall have in life’ plays right into a capitalist fallacy of the American Dream. Today? Well, tell that to the store employees or third-world staff producing the stock.
Walton was known for frugality and refused to wear anything but cheap shoes and encouraged employees to bring pens from hotel rooms back to the office. I read that Elon Musk has a similarly frugal trait and refused to buy a new mattress when his ex-wife Grimes was unhappy and uncomfortable with their ‘broken’ one. But there’s a difference between a multi-billionaire whose personality quirk is being a tight-wad and someone who genuinely struggles to meet basic (high) living costs.
Walmart recently raised wages to over $15 per hour in a labour competition with Amazon, which raised its wages to $15 per hour. But the company is notoriously unsupporting of workers’ struggles, as is evident in its battle against unions, which you can read more about in this article. This matters because the company is the USA’s LARGEST retailer, grocer, and employer.
One former Walmart store manager tells the story that after discovering a pro-union flyer in his store’s men’s room, he informed company headquarters and within 24 hours, an anti-union SWAT team flew to his store in a corporate jet. And when the meat department of a Walmart store in Texas became the retailer’s only operation in the United States to unionize, back in 2000, Walmart announced plans two weeks later to use prepackaged meat and eliminate butchers at that store and 179 others.
As I see it, if you control the people, you control the economy.
Example: Walmart manufactures an enormous amount of clothing, housewares, and electronics, and its retail strength has shifted the global economic dynamic. One could hypothesise that Walton’s relentless drive to cut costs (at all costs) was an obsession that started a ‘race to the bottom’ in the Western world.
Another perplexing example of wealth influence is that Elon Musk recently tweeted to over 100 million followers to vote Republican. I do wonder what compelled him to buy Twitter in the first place. Why did he feel the need to control a social media platform? Frankly, I find it chilling.
Back to Walton, whose business theory was: the cheaper the products, the more people would buy them. His mission to drive production costs down as low as possible worked. Walmart’s sales on a single day recently topped the GDPs of thirty-six sovereign nations.
This also reveals one of humankind’s biggest issues and what will surely bring about our species’ eventual demise as we consistently overshoot the earth’s biocapacity: rampant, unchecked consumerism. For example, see the footage of people losing their minds, crushing crowds, flailing fists and gunshots ringing out across the mall at Black Friday sales. As a YouTube commenter remarked, ‘Only in America do we fight for things the day after we celebrate giving thanks.’ But this is the outcome when three multi-billionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society (160 million Americans). Why wouldn’t ordinary people have a punch-up over a discounted flat-screen TV when they can’t afford to leave the house anymore?
Yes, cheap production aids the buying power of low-income people. But there’s no choice. Low-wage workers can ONLY afford the lowest price products and in essence, ‘low cost’ is a key factor in driving down wages and benefits in both retail and manufacturing sectors worldwide. Although Sam Walton’s book was called ‘Made in America’, the business has played a pivotal role in mass outsourcing manufacturing to China, where women and children work relentless hours in dangerous conditions for unlivable wages and without healthcare or employee protection. IMO it’s the equivalent of the modern-day slave trade.
Today, Walmart’s monstrous size allows it to dictate what is produced, how things are made, how much they will be sold for and how much the company will pay for them.
The more we want and the less we are willing to pay, the more the environment and the people that produce these goods suffer. Cheap comes at a high cost.
The fashion industry accounts for 10% of global carbon emissions and 20% of global wastewater. What’s more, an estimated 92 million tonnes of textile waste is generated each year, which is expected to reach 134 million tonnes annually by 2030. Again, an unfathomable figure, but nothing short of terrifying.
There’s a saying that with great power comes great responsibility. But sadly, we see little in the way of those in power making responsible choices for humankind or the environment. We now have more income and wealth inequality than in the last hundred years.
Owners of behemoth companies accumulate unprecedented levels of wealth while the little people that produce and sell for them can barely survive, let alone hold the hope of escaping the cycle because there is never enough money for other options.
In an op ed piece in The New York Times, Robert Reich and Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor from 1993 to 1997 says, “The fact is, today's economy offers us a Faustian bargain: it can give consumers deals largely because it hammers workers and communities.”
He’s on the money. Pun intended.
With great power should come great responsibility.
And we hold that power too. IF we are blessed with the ability to make a financial choice, we vote with the dollars we spend.
Curiously, Walton and I share a personality trait - I’m also pretty frugal. I buy food in bulk bin stores and shop for secondhand clothes where possible. I try to support ethical Australasian brands. At the risk of sounding like a hoarder, I still wear a bikini I bought from an op shop when I was 15, because ‘it’s fine’. When I realised I was getting suckered into spending unnecessarily, I unsubscribed from all sale emails. But I am a flawed human too and far from immune to the lure of ‘cheap’ bargains. I buy affordable children’s clothing as they grow out of it quickly. But cheap isn’t the biggest problem us humans face, greed is. Many heavily marked-up designer brands are also known for appalling labour practices and cheap production. This irony reminds me of a stroll down Queen Street where the luxury storefronts were littered with cardboard boxes and mattresses of the homeless who sleep in doorways by night.
It’s enough to make you weep for the future of this beautiful planet and the home that our children will inherit. Meanwhile, Musk and his billionaire buddies are jumping onto rockets to outer space and fantasising about how we can live on another planet - as if the one we had wasn’t completely perfect without us trashing it. As I noted before: completely disassociated from reality.
I want a solution.
I know I am also part of the problem.
And I don’t know what the answer is.
I guess the key is to make our spending decisions as conscious as possible, think twice when we vote with our dollars, and think thrice before we buy anything.
But to return to the original quote that inspired this writing, I choose not to participate in the idolatry of billionaires. At the tipping point of an eco-crisis with 500 species of land animal close to extinction and predicted to be lost within the next 20 years and as we face the sixth extinction, IMHO their particular form of entrepreneurship is everything the world does not need now.