Walmart and the other America

There is the United States of America and then there is the idea of USA that exists in the minds of significant portions of the middle classes across the globe. This idea varies slightly according to the region, reflecting specific aspirations and anxieties. In the Indian continent, it is increasingly not the one made in Hollywood, given the “IT-coolie”-fired traffic to the US. One important element of the newer idea of the US that is beamed to us daily by TV, Skype, photographs, phone conversation and e-mails is the ease of the consumer experience in multi-brand retail stores as big as football stadia, with the variety of wares on offer seemingly endless—from bananas to bikinis and beyond. Walmart is unquestionably the most prominent of these chain stores, a superbrand. Viewed in another way, it is a shop the name of which is more famous than the brand names of the goods it sells.

I have been living in the US for the past few years, mostly in the cities of the east coast. The past six years have been in Boston. A map of the area (figure 2) shows the many municipal towns that constitute much of the Boston area. My location, however, deprives me of the “quintessential American” experience of shopping at Walmart. In the map, B and C represent the two Walmarts in the vicinity. I live in Cambridge, hence I am at least 16 km from each of them. Given that I use public transport and my bicycle to move around, both these locations are quite inaccessible. Walmarts and other similar stores cannot exist in the US in the absence of the stupendous subsidy to the highway systems that make the stores viable, not to mention the ultimate unsustainable mass-culture of individual car-ownership that makes such stores reachable. However, the map may be misleading as it gives an impression that Walmart stores are relatively sparse in the US. That is far from true, as is evident from the 2006 map (figure 1) of Walmart locations in the US. This corresponds well with the population density map of the nation, in case anyone was inquisitive about the large patches of virgin territory in the western half. The absence of Walmart in my area and the preponderance of such stores all over the nation is a phenomenon that needs to be explained.

It is not that Walmart did not want to set up a store in my vicinity. In fact, it tried hard. When I was a student, as a part of my on-campus job as a server and bartender for the Harvard University Dining Services, I would be deputed to various addresses around the area to serve at parties, clean dishes and do similar other chores. One such assignment was in the neighbouring municipal area of Watertown. When I was going into a house, I saw a sign on the lawn: “No Walmart—No more big boxes”. Big box is the nickname for Walmart and other such stores, for that is what they look like. Since I knew there were not any such stores in the area, I wondered what this was about. After my working hours were over, I talked to the house owner, and he told me he was part of the burgeoning local citizens’ movement called Sustainable Watertown, which was opposing a proposed Walmart “big-box” store near the central square of Watertown. In the US, citizens have a say in what happens to their areas, and elected officials can veto proposals—be they of setting up stores, building highways or railways. He informed me that they had been getting a lot of support, which had pressured some elected city councilors to not court Walmart.