Tag Archives: Walmart

Occupy Wall Street to occupy Black Friday?

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There is a report that some Occupy Wall Street protesters want to take the movement to national retailers on Black Friday:

Some demonstrators are planning to occupy retailers on Black Friday to protest “the business that are in the pockets of Wall Street.”

Organizers are encouraging consumers to either occupy or boycott retailers that are publicly traded, according to the Stop Black Friday website…

“The idea is simple, hit the corporations that corrupt and control American politics where it hurts, their profits, ” states the Occupy Black Friday Facebook page.

A few of the retailers the protesters plan on targeting include Neiman Marcus, Amazon and Wal-Mart.

Besides wondering how many people will do this, it raises other questions:

1. Would most or even a sizable minority of shoppers welcome the protesters? I would guess not. People might think that the income and power situation in the United States is unequal but that shouldn’t get in the way of good sales.

2. Why are certain corporations singled out in this list (though they do suggest going after the top 100 retailers)? Why not Target? Walgreens? Kroger’s? Costco? If it is all big corporations that are the targets, will the protesters be evenly distributed or will they go for the typical targets like Walmart and McDonald’s that are often tied to sprawl and excessive consumption?

3. How exactly does one have a visible protest at Amazon.com? I guess the group could take over the comment boards. If Deadspin can prompt so many responses that ESPN can’t keep up, maybe Occupy Wall Street can do the same.

4. If protesters show up en masse, what will the response of stores be? Is the parking lot of Walmart a public space? (I assume not.)

Claim: 2012 election will be decided by “Walmart Moms”

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Each new election cycle seems to bring about claims about a previously underappreciated demographic group that candidates need to pay attention to. Several pollsters argue that “Walmart Moms” will help decide the 2012 elections:

From the Hill: “Republican pollster Neil Newhouse and Democratic pollster Margie Omero are going shopping at Walmart. For voters. The pair told attendees at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast this morning that a key demographic in 2012 will be a group of voters they call Walmart Moms. The successors to Soccer Moms and Hockey Moms, Walmart Moms are female voters with children 18 or younger who shop at the discount retailer at least once a month. According to Newhouse and Omero, these women make up 14% of the electorate.”

Laugh at their clothes. Laugh at their fashion faux pas. They’ll see you on Election Day.

I wonder how much these “Walmart Moms” line up with the suburban independent demographic that Joel Kotkin argued has determined the outcome of the last few national elections.

More on what “Walmart Moms” care about when voting:

Walmart Moms are more interested in microeconomic issues such as college affordability than macroeconomic concerns such as the debt ceiling. The literature the pollsters distributed at the breakfast said, “It will be important for candidates to clearly communicate how their policies or ideas will personally impact these women and their households for the better.”

So it is about household economics and basic middle-class consumer items (groceries + college educations). Is there a politician that could effectively link these micro and macroeconomic concerns so that the American public understands the relationship between the two?

h/t Instapundit

The real America can be found at Wal-Mart

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I vividly remember what one professor told us one day in a sociology of religion class in graduate school: “If you want to find real Americans, just go to Walmart.” Several members of the class gasped – could the real America really be at Walmart, that exemplar of crass consumerism, low wages, and the loss of community life in America? This story from NPR makes a similar point:

The Wall Street Journal spotted the phenomenon recently. The headline: “Today’s Special at Wal-Mart: Something Weird.” “Almost any imaginable aspect of American life can and does take place inside Wal-Mart stores, from births to marriages to deaths,” observed the Journal‘s Miguel Bustillo. “Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin once officiated a wedding at the Wal-Mart in her hometown of Wasilla.”…

What is it about Walmart? As a species, we are fascinated by the place. The Web is awash with sites that scrutinize the Arkansas-based retailer’s every move. Walmart Watch, funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, says its mission is to challenge the multibillion-dollar retail chain “to more fully embrace its corporate responsibilities.” The now-infamous and snarky People of Walmart posts photos of shoppers. Hel-Mart offers anti-Walmart merchandise, such as T-shirts that say, “Resistance Is Futile.” Videos of people praising, mocking, pranking, walking around, dancing in Walmart are continuously posted on YouTube…

Officially, Walmart explains the apparent zaniness this way: “Over the years, Walmart has become a microcosm of American life,” says company spokesman Lorenzo Lopez. “With stores serving millions of customers in communities nationwide, it’s not uncommon for us to see our share of what happens every day in cities and towns all across the country.”…

* Of the 3,822 Walmart stores, 2,939 are Supercenters, which means they are open 24 hours a day. So in virtually every county, 500 people work at Walmart, and there is a Walmart open every hour of every day, and every one of those Walmarts is being visited by 37,000 people a week — that’s 220 people an hour, in every Walmart, in virtually every county in the whole country, every hour of the day.

So how come there are not more sociologists doing studies at or about Walmart? I suspect many do not like the place – even though some may even shop at Target and other big box stores. But just because sociologists might disagree with the practices of Walmart does not mean that it shouldn’t be the focus of much research.

This story also illustrates something Joel Best likes to talk about: the scale of numbers. Some of the statistics about Walmart from the article include half of American adults visit Walmart each week covering 70 million hours and the company has 1.5 million employees. This is hard to visualize because these are big numbers. We know what a couple of hundred people looks like but to understand 1.5 million, we might need to make some comparisons such as this is about the population of the City of Philadelphia or is around the same size as the metro area of Nashville or Milwaukee. Another way to understand these big numbers is to break it down into how often something happens per hour or minute or second. In this article, this translates to “that’s 220 people an hour, in every Walmart, in virtually every county in the whole country, every hour of the day.” We know what roughly 220 people looks like so we can then grasp a little better the enormity of the figures.

A disconnect: having electric car chargers at Costco

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The story that Costco is getting rid of electric car chargers in their parking lots because of a lack of use could be taken in several directions. One could ask: doesn’t there need to be an infrastructure in place before electric car owners would go to Costco? But I think there is a more interesting question: are electric car users really the sort of people who would shop at Costco?

Costco is a big box store, plain and simple. They offer bulk goods at cheap prices. Their buildings are bland and surrounded by parking lots. Is this the sort of place that electric car users would go? Are there people who would shop at Costco but wouldn’t shop at Wal-Mart (and I assume there are quite a few)? From a broader perspective, the picking and choosing between the “righteousness” of certain big box stores (Wal-Mart versus Target versus Costco versus Sam’s Club versus Home Depot…) is odd: they all operate on similar principles though their particular implementation varies some. To shop at any of them is to encourage standardization and sprawl. This doesn’t really go with the electric car culture/vibe.

So where should electric car chargers be installed? A few retail options: Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. I suspect these would get a lot more use.

The sociological origin of the term “McJob”

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With McDonald’s hiring 62,000 employees on April 19, a journalist looks at the sociological origins of the term “McJobs“:

The term McJob first appeared in the summer of 1986, when George Washington University sociology professor Amitai Etzioni wrote a column for the Washington Post decrying the “highly routinized” jobs at fast-food restaurants and their effect on American teens.

“By nature, these jobs undermine school attendance and involvement, impart few skills that will be useful in later life, and simultaneously skew the values of teenagers -especially their ideas about the worth of a dollar,” Etzioni wrote.

He went on to criticize the culture and routine of working at McDonald’s and other fast-food companies, noting that the jobs do not provide opportunity for entrepreneurship like the traditional lemonade stand, or the lessons of self-organization, self-discipline and self-reliance like the traditional paper route.

“True, you still have to have the gumption to get yourself over to the hamburger stand, but once you don the prescribed uniform, your task is spelled out in minute detail,” he argued. “There is no room for initiative creativity or even elementary rearrangements. These are breeding grounds for robots working for yesterday’s assembly lines, not tomorrow’s high-tech posts.”

The article then goes on to describe how McDonald’s has tried to fit back against the term, including a 2007 from “the British arm of the company…to get the Oxford English Dictionary definition changed.”

On one hand, such jobs may not be great and this is what Etzioni was getting at: they generally are low-paying and in many places don’t pay enough to be considered a “living wage.” A work like Nickel and Dimed (a review of the theater version here) portrayed such employees as having difficult lifestyles and little hope for the future. More broadly, we could think of these jobs as emblematic of a larger process of McDonaldization, coined by sociologist George Ritzer, that describes the rationalization of the modern world.

On the other hand, we live in a country that really pays attention to job reports with less interest in what kinds of jobs were actually created. The April jobs figures showed good jobs growth but we could inquire about the quality of these jobs: are they well-paying, sustainable jobs that will pay American workers for decades to come? Or, were the majority of jobs middling to lower-skilled jobs that serve American consumers in the service industry?

In the end, we have a society that is quite dependent on such “McJobs.” The term is unlikely to go away though it clearly applies to a lot more corporations and areas than simply McDonald’s. Just as Walmart tends to get singled out as emblematic of big box stores and suburban sprawl because of its revenue (still at the top of the Fortune 500), McDonald’s size and influence draws attention (Super Size Me, anyone?). But as a society, we could have larger and ongoing discussions about what kind of jobs we wish to hold and to promote. In these discussions, we need corporations like McDonald’s, Walmart, Starbucks, Apple, and others involved to think about the American future.

Continued issues for Walmart in Chicago

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Even with discussions last year suggesting more amity between Walmart and the city of Chicago (and an earlier post here), there are still some issues for the retailer in the city.

1. Over the weekend, activists in Little Village, a neighborhood on Chicago’s west side, said they think Walmart should locate one of their stores in their neighborhood rather than just building on the south side:

At a news conference Sunday afternoon at 26th Street and Kolin, Raul Montes Jr. said people could benefit from having a Wal-Mart more centrally located in the city, vs. the locations on the South Side, which are currently planned.

Montes says Wal-Mart would do well at 26th and Kostner, which has been vacant for years. Montes says he and others in Little Village have sent letters to their alderman over the past few months and have so far, gotten no response.

He says they feel ignored.

2. Last night, Walmart representatives presented plans to residents of Lakeview, a neighborhood on the north side, regarding a proposed smaller version of their store called “Walmart Market.” There was some opposition from the crowd:

About 200 people — many wearing anti-Wal-Mart buttons and stickers — filed into the Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ to hear the proposal.

John Bisio, a Wal-Mart Stores Inc. public affairs senior manager, said that although he recognized the citizens’ concerns, the smaller facility at Broadway and Surf Street would not interfere with the neighborhood’s character…

But many in the audience could be heard snickering at company representatives’ arguments for why the 32,000-square-foot Walmart Market would be good for the North Side neighborhood.

After the presentation, several residents overwhelmingly shouted down the proposal and urged Alderman Tunney to push forth the zoning limitation in City Council.

It is interesting to contrast these two responses to Walmart: one neighborhood wants a store while another is very skeptical and thinks the store is unnecessary and could harm the neighborhood.

But with big box stores wanting to move into cities (Target recently talking about plans to open on State Street as well as recently opening their first store in Manhattan), these discussions will continue to take place.

Sociological involvement in Walmart Supreme Court case

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The Supreme Court is about to hear arguments in a large class-action lawsuit against Walmart regarding female employees receiving lower pay. Interestingly, a sociologist is in the middle of the case:

Plaintiffs in the class-action suit, who claim that Wal-Mart owes billions of dollars to as many as 1.5 million women who they say were unfairly treated on pay and promotions, enlisted the support of William T. Bielby, an academic specializing in “social framework analysis.”

A central question in the case is whether he should have been allowed, in preliminary proceedings, to go beyond describing general research about gender stereotypes in the workplace to draw specific conclusions about what he called flaws in Wal-Mart’s personnel policies.

“Bielby made a conclusion that he had no basis to make,” said Laurens Walker, one of two University of Virginia professors who coined the term for the analysis almost 25 years ago. “He hasn’t done the research.”

But a brief supporting the plaintiffs from the American Sociological Association said that Professor Bielby’s work explaining how Wal-Mart’s policies may have led to discrimination “is well within our discipline’s accepted methods.”

Read the full article to find out more about the academic debate over social framework analysis. It sounds like what is it at stake is whether Bielby can make claims about organizational culture and how it might relate to this case without specific data from Walmart.

You can read the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) amicus brief here. It looks like this is the first such brief filed by the ASA since a 2006 case regarding a challenge to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Digging a bit into the ASA amicus brief, the “summary of argument” provides some insights into what “social framework analysis” is:

“Social framework analysis” is not a sociological method, but rather a legal term for some kinds of research. What constitutes high quality “social framework analysis” continues to be vigorously de-bated among scholars. As such, the Court should assess the underlying social science methods, as practiced by social science researchers and vetted in the peer-reviewed journals of those fields, instead of the “social framework analysis” construct when deciding whether social scientific work is valid.

Systematic social science research has shown that corporate culture may affect individual-level decision-making in common ways. Corporate culture is a set of norms and values that convey messages to em-ployees about appropriate behavior. Corporations may actively try to engineer corporate cultures by implementing policies and practices that convey norms and values. Informal cultures also emerge in the workplace when employees interact, and may either reinforce or resist formal culture as well as promote other non-sanctioned norms. The extent to which corporate cultures, both formal and informal, influence individuals’ behavior depends on the strength of the cultures and also on the degree of discretion that company personnel policies give to individual decision-makers…

Namely, corporations have been shown to reduce gender disparities by instituting formal personnel policies, creating accountability processes for managers, and self-monitoring their employment patterns in order to highlight and address disparities. Extensive research in sociology and other social sciences has shown that these practices equalize gender dis-parities in the workplace by placing central checks on individual discretion that leads to biased decision-making, but do not eliminate all discretion from managerial practice. (pages 3-5)

It will be interesting to see what the Supreme Court decides, even if they are just ruling on whether the large class-action suit can go forward.

Cabrini-Green site: from housing project to possible Target store

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Since the mid 1990s, the area around the Cabrini-Green housing project on the north side of Chicago has been changing (see an overview of this change here). As the high-rises have come down (with the last residents leaving just recently), new mixed-income neighborhoods as well as new commercial buildings have gone up in the area. News comes today that Target may be building a store on this site in the near future:

Target Corp., the cheap-chic discount chain, is in talks with the Chicago Housing Authority to build a store at the site of the former Cabrini-Green Housing Project.

The retailer’s proposal was brought up for consideration at a CHA board of commissioners meeting earlier this month, said Matt Aguilar, CHA spokesman. “We are in discussions and hope to help bring additional investment to the neighborhood,” Aguilar said.

Demolition of the last high rise at Cabrini-Green is scheduled to begin on Wednesday. The seven-acre complex, once among the most notorious housing projects in the nation, is just blocks away from Chicago’s glitziest shopping districts on North Michigan Avenue and close to the wealthy enclaves of the Gold Coast and Lincoln Park.

Target declined to comment on the proposal.

If Target does move forward with this, it would be the second high-profile space they have recently obtained in Chicago. (Read here about their plans for moving to State Street.)

As redevelopment of this space continues to take place, how long might it be until residents and shoppers of the area forget altogether that the Cabrini-Green complex was once there?

Another question: is a big box store in the city such as Target okay or the best move? Does it depend on which store moves in (see the long-running battle between Wal-Mart and the City of Chicago) or are big box stores okay in the city but not good in the suburbs because of their contribution to sprawl?

How to respond to the demise of Borders

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With negative business news about the bookstore Borders, a number of commentators have weighed in with opinions about how to respond. On one hand, Borders is a big box bookstore that helped push independent and smaller bookstores out of business. On the other hand, the demise of Borders suggests that bookstores in general are on the way out in favor of online retailers.

Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich writes about how the closing of the Borders store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago affects the shopping district:

By Saturday, Borders’ marquee Chicago store, at 830 N. Michigan Ave., will be closed for good. And — here’s what I think is the real news — the city’s premier shopping street will be without any bookstore for the first time in decades…

Borders was hardly a landmark on par with the old limestone Water Tower that stands just outside the store’s windowed walls. It had occupied its prime corner for only 16 years, barely a blip in Chicago history.

But 16 years is half an eternity in retail time, and Borders had come to seem as basic to the street as traffic.

Back in 1995, when it opened, spinning through its revolving doors was like stepping into a literary Oz, a unique place that, even though part of a chain, pulsed with ideas, people, cappuccino.

Even people who sniffled that it was killing smaller bookstores — most memorably the cozy shop just up the street run by the legendary Stuart Brent — came for the books and the buzz.

I myself have spent a good amount of time in this store, browsing books and music. This location was a nice change of pace from the typical retail store (clothing, in particular), a place to get out of the heat or the cold, watch people go by on Michigan Avenue, and enjoy browsing.

Instapundit provides a different perspective. After some comments about how Borders leftist leanings might have driven some customers away, Instapundit quotes an email from a reader who cites the irony of people lamenting the end of Borders:

Is this — like much of the newspaper industry — a case of the leftist 20% of the populace chasing a way a lot of potential customers over politics? Or is it mostly just technology and convenience?

STILL MORE: Reader Gary Rice has thoughts on the sudden onslaught of Borders-nostalgia:

Re; Borders…. Wasn’t it just a few years ago that Borders and Barnes & Noble were the bad guys? Corporate behemoths destroying the local independent bookstore with their Wal Mart like pricing models ? Wasn’t there even a Tom Hanks romance movie about this exact subject?

So Amazon comes along with a better pricing model and now we are all supposed to mourn liberal Borders’ demise? It is a wonder these people remember how to read, because they sure can’t remember anything else….

Heh.

A good point: can we lament the end of Borders today after criticizing it for over a decade? Perhaps we can: bookstores could be considered “third places,” a middle location between home and work where citizens could gather to read the news, talk to each other, and shop. I suspect there will always be people who like going to bookstores (I will still enjoy it though I’m not sure I would go out of my way to go there) but perhaps they simply can’t survive on the scale and size of a Borders or Barnes & Noble.

These sorts of strange juxtapositions may one major marker of our globalized and fast-paced economy. Do we want any bookstore or a big box bookstore or an online bookstore or an independent bookstore? People vote with their dollars and visits and within twenty years, the entire landscape can change.

But I doubt we would see the same kind of mourning if Walmart suddenly went out of business in favor of online retailers. There is something unique here about bookstores.

Measuring the economy by looking at midnight Walmart shoppers

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There are all sorts of figures and statistics that are used to measure how the economy is doing. This NPR story introduces a new metric: looking at midnight sales at Walmart on the first day of the month.

Wal-Mart noticed that sales were spiking on the first of every month. In a recent conference call with investment analysts, Wal-Mart executive Bill Simon said these midnight shoppers provide a snapshot of the American economy today.

“And if you really think about it,” Simon said, “the only reason somebody gets out and buys baby formula is they need it and they’ve been waiting for it. Otherwise, we’re open 24 hours, come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m. But if you’re there at midnight you’re there for a reason.”

And so Wal-Mart has changed its stocking pattern. It brings out larger packs of items in the beginning of the month, and smaller sizes toward the end. It makes sure shelves have plenty of diapers and formula.

This is a creative data source – but we would need more information before making broad conclusions about the American economy. Do other stores experience similar spikes? How big of a spike is this? What Walmart locations have seen the biggest jumps?

It strikes me that Walmart probably possesses a treasure trove of data that would be very interesting to look at.