Why

I Walmart: Delights, Delusions and Consumer Anthropology

Ken C. Erickson (Pacific Ethnography) Revised Version of a Paper Presented at the Invited Session The Legacies and Future Directions of Business Anthropology 110th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Montral, QC, Canada 19 November 2011

For a very long time, the intellectual consensus has been that we can no longer ask Great Questions. Increasingly, it's looking like we have no other choice. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years There is a kind of symmetry in following a spiral down as far as it will go. Chris Kraus, Aliens and Anorexia Here is Bill Simon, current CEO of Walmart USA, speaking at a Goldman Sach's Global Retailer's conference in 2010: You need not go further than one of our stores on midnight at the end of the month. And its real interesting to watch, about 11 p.m., customers start to come in and shop, fill their grocery basket with basic items, baby formula, milk, bread, eggs, and continue to shop and mill about the store until midnight, when electronic government electronic benefits cards get activated. And then the checkout starts . . . our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are substantially and significantly higher. And if you really think about it, the only reason somebody gets out in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and theyve been waiting for it. Otherwise, we are open 24 hours come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m. But if you are there at midnight, you are there for a reason (Simon 2010).

We may ask Bill, "Gosh, why do you think they need that formula and those diapers and eggs and milk and bread at midnight? He doesn't say. Is it love of LPED (Low Prices

Every Day)? Or is it a marriage of convenience between Walmart and her shoppers? I will use feminine pronouns and honorifics for Doa Walmart here, thus recalling a

Brazilian analogue to Walmart called Casas Bahia low prices, a big selection, and easy credit. Casas Bahia, in an ironic twist, is often called Me Bahia, Mother Bahia, by Brazilian working-class people (Cardozo 2011). She's a mother all right, and many Brazilian folks know precisely what kind of mother she is: the kind that offers easy initial credit on less than optimal products and then charges very high interest on the purchase. And why not personify Walmart? Five out of nine American senior jurists presently agree: corporations are people, and their money equals their voice. How challenging. Corporations may whisper sweet nothings, with their cash. Here is one of Walmart's customers, Arturo, a Spanish-speaking Colombian

immigrant from Houston. Puede que sea la tienda que yo mas utilizo porque me parece que tiene muy buenos precios. Siempre esta. Su ubicacion es muy conveniente, hay muchas Walmarts por todas partes. . .yo la visito practicamente en diario . . yo que soy un poco mas decente en mi compra de ropas, entonces, necesito otras tiendas. It may be the store I visit the most because it seems to have really good prices. It's always there. Its location is very convenient, they are everywhere; I visit just about every day. Me, I'm a little more particular in buying clothes, though, so I need other stores for that (Erickson 2010).

A minor lover's quarrel about the clothing selection?

Then, there's Adela, a Houston Spanish-speaking Guatemalan immigrant; janitor in a parochial school and part-time hotel maid who is likewise particular about clothing she

buys for herself (she prefers Kohl's). But every couple of months, she fills very large carton of gifts (two cartons at Christmas): clothing, housewares, you name it, nearly all bought at Walmart, for her adult children and grandchildren back in Guatemala. Adela is enchanted: Como de Walmart, durante Christmas tienen los especiales que pueden ordenar y ship to casa, todo eso me encanta. Like, at Walmart at Christmas they have specials you can order and have shipped to your house, and I'm enchanted by all that (Erickson 2010).

Or in Palm Springs, (and again, it starts to sound something like love, here) local

painter and printer Adrian has this to say about Doa Walmart . It gets cruisy at Walmart at night. For real. [Gay] guys are cruising at Walmart. (Erickson 2011) Who knew? So what's not to love about Walmart? Plenty. The lines are too long. The parking lot contributes to storm water runoff

pollution. They drive local stores out and retail wages down. We know this, and so does the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW 2009). But my question is this: Am I deluded in my affection for conducting ethnography

within her walls, or in the walls of Casas Baha or the big-box retailers in China where I've done shopping research over the years with my colleagues? Maybe I should long for other retail dance partners, partners who move differently, who whisper fewer white lies, who may be less prone to the engao, the trick, (like leading us to buy our greeting cards from her, instead of from the mom and pop Hallmark franchise down the street, where the cards may

be cheaper and in better supply)? Such longings do indeed matter to the clients of the company that I manage. Many of our clients make and sell things at Walmart. Our clients come to us to answer questions about how to sell more of their wares. Tough questions, especially if one attends even obliquely to the assumptions of (and desire for) eternal growth in consumption as the key indicator of organizational (or household or national) wellbeing. Difficult questions, indeed, when seen through the seductive fog of retail romance.

Doa Walmart
Doa Walmart is 9000 stores around the world. She represents, at this writing,

eleven percent of all U.S. retail sales. She is the largest non-government employer in the US, the largest in Mexico, and by most measures, she is the world's largest corporation. She is known to applied anthropologists for appropriating the values of a mythical by-gone America in her annual corporate meetings (Schneider 1998). To anthropologists working in China, she is a singer, intoning the revolutionary songs of the danwei (the post-revolutionary Chinese workgroup) as she re-works them into contemporary organizational operas of Taylorized workplaces with Chinese characteristics (Davies 2007). We all know who she is. If we claim not to, we deny our own amorous encounters. Some folks we interview and with whom we shop, some people who claim a certain

kind of cultural capital, will say they have had no truck with her. Thats what they say. Then we find the twelve pack of Coke under the kitchen tablelike lipstick stains on the collarand we learn how the carton was bought you-know-where, late last evening, when the neighborhood gossips could not catch the culprit in flagrante delicto.

For some shoppers, such prevarication happens often. And Doa Walmart seems to

know it. I think that's why she went through a recentand failednational makeover: to attract shoppers whose cultural capital includes an awareness of Doa Walmarts social position, an awareness of how spending time perusing her low-price selection of goodies reflects on their own social standing, their own descent into something other than a proper, middle-class position of taste and distinction.

The Delights
So, in Doa Walmarts recent efforts to make herself more attractive to shoppers

who might otherwise turn away from her, we find a small delight. We discover Doa Walmart has had trouble remembering what corner she is working on. In doing so, Doa Walmart thinks (as institutions may, indeed, be said to think [Douglas 1986]) she can overcome the shame that some shoppers feel when they pass through her doors. Here's what I mean. In November of 2011, La Doa finally pulled the plug on her apparel divisions move

to the garment district of New York, where she had hoped to leverage some fashion cach and elevate her level of distinction (Moin 2011). Maybe this was to figure out how to walk in discounted Jimmy Chews instead of her store-brand Faded Glory flats. I don't know. We had done some research illustrating how cultural capital plays a part in any

households choices of retail dance partners. During that work, our client told us that our fallen heroin's move to Broadway between 37th and 38th was part of an overall plan in which she sought a make-over, sought to cast her old low-price self aside. In so doing, we were

told, she "left millions of dollars on the table" (Briody 2011) when the move failed to produce sales results. That move to New York was just one more piece of the flotsam created by Walmart''s

nearly two billion dollar shipwreck called the "Impact Program." Beginning in 2009, Walmart trimmed back her SKUs (that is, she reduced the number of stock-keeping-units, the items on her shelves). She stopped focusing on LPED and started doing rollbacks special offersinstead. She cleaned up her stores, tried to make them more tidy, tried to become more appealing to people who only shopped with her late at night, when no one was looking. After all (the bloggers say) she had been listening to her customers, who told her (in, one might suppose, scientifically designed surveys and focus groups): 'We like tidy stores. We like Target.' But she had not been watching her customers. After all, what people say about Walmart rarely matches up with what they do. Doa Walmart had missed the evidence of night-time trysts by middle class customers seduced not by the cleanliness of her aisles but by her every day low prices. She had missed the store visits by people whose primary interest was having something to wear, something to eat, and interested in still enough money at the end of the month to afford the gas to get home after shopping. So, I love that Walmart is flawed, that she tried to become something she cannot be.

And her missteps continue to mount. I find this both interesting and attractive. After all, flaws are always more interestingand seductivethan perfection. For nine consecutive quarters, up to the end of 2011, her sales have been down. Only

in the last quarter was there a very slight up-tick, which her financial reports attribute to

reduced shrinkage (a business euphemism for losses due to employee and customer theft) (Walmart 2011). Yet even those gains may be another engao: One former employee in North Carolina is suing Walmart for wrongful firing, after, he says, she encouraged him to manipulate inventory numbers to make her sales-outlook brighter. The case has, at this writing, not yet been decided (Portillo 2010). And another misstep: a few weeks ago, Chinese authorities in Chonqing blew the

whistle on sales of regular pork falsely labeled (and priced) as "organic." Perhaps 700,000 US dollars worth of pork were implicated. Chinese police jailed a few employees; Walmart closed twelve stores; a round of top-management resignations destabilized Walmart's China efforts (Bloomberg News 2011). There are other examples, but thats enough for now More than a quarter of one of our client's substantial income comes to them through

Doa Walmart's cash registers; they are aware of her problems. Our client's executive sales team says that no one at a high level at Walmart, with whom they interact, has more than two years of experience polishing her star. (That star between the Wal and the Mart, still found on many storefronts, is said to represent Sam Waltons star in heaven after his passing; most stores have replaced it with a sort of sunburst-modern symbol). So our client's management tells us they are in the curious position of helping Walmart re-learn her retail steps. There are other dances on Walmart's shiny and contract-labor-cleaned floors, dances

our ethnographic research, over the years, has documented. There is the dance of the floor

manager who won't re-set the display the way our clients want them to, because the manager claims to know better than anyone else possibly could how people really shop within local the space she controls. (In fact, these floor managers generally know very well whats happening in their departments). And there are the Bentonville, Arkansas-based Walmart corporate managers who try to call the tunes, but change the rhythm half way through the waltz, making our clients miss their steps, pushing them to re-design packages and displays at the very last minute. It is delightful to watch the powerful slip up, or the relatively weak assert their power

over a not-quite omnipotent empress. But along with all this delight, not surprisingly, come delusions. And anthropologists who work at retail should know what they are.

The Delusions
The first delusion is simple. We are deluded (and campy) if we say, "uh huh, that

girl is just way too fierce to get her big self in serious trouble." Her performance in the United States (and even in China by some measures) may be

evidence that this retail queen, fierce though she may be, is hardly fierce enough. Walmart is capable of screwing up, even by the singular calculus of economic value, and all the makeup in her cosmetic section can't hide it. But another misguided notion comes from spending anthropological time in and around Walmart and offers, I think, another delusional example. This is our deluded notion of consumption itself. We run the risk of falling into the trap that Doa Walmart has set for herself, her

managers, her store associates, her contractors, and her ethnographers, by accepting the

notion that shoppers are in the store, and not some other store, only because they have made a kind of rational economic choice based on weighing the costs and benefits associated with shopping with her. We know this cannot be the case, in part because the full costs of low prices are externalized, are born by all of us, but are unknown and immeasurable. They cannot be part of anyones economic calculus, so the choices people make to shop with her do not and cannot reflect an accurate understanding of cost. When hidden, the reality of externalized costs makes the savings claim nonsense, because the savings cannot really be calculated. And if we understand shoppers in Walmart as consumers, are also deluded because

in doing so we limit our view of what shoppers are doing in the store. By using the word consumers for the people who buy from Doa Walmart, we are buying into an especially pernicious delusion, one that signals the power of the monetized, maximizing, and only mythically rational marketplace, the one that Doa Walmart would have us believe makes our lives better simply by saving us money, every day.

Lover's Quarrel, Lovers Question

Some of us have a lover's quarrel with Doa Walmart, and with anthropologists who

use the words consumer and consumption to describe what happens, and to whom it happens, when we spend time in Walmart, or when we follow people home from Walmart to understand what people buy there, and why. I do not think my colleagues and I are studying consumers and consumption. We try not to use those two terms with clients, when our team speaks or when we write, because I think those terms steer us away from

what's really going on inside the world of Walmart. It is hard to do the anthropology of buying and selling without using the words consumers or consumption. But it is not impossible and I think we must keep trying, in our quarrelsome way. This is not to say that anthropological musings about how people shop, and buy,

and share, and use, and dispose of goods has been irrelevant or unhelpful. Indeed, the work often called the anthropology of consumption has helped expand our understanding of what people do in a contemporary monetized economy. We no longer see what mothers do in a retail store as unworthy of serious scholarly attention nor do we discount the practices that surround use of the goodies that come home in a mother's shopping bag as merely the stuff of household re-production. We do not and should not see shopping and buying and sharing as less interesting nor less valuable than the hefty, macho "business" of production. Likewise, ethnographic workour own and that of many other anthropologistscan't avoid seeing much of shopping as a kind of caring for others, as something much different than simply getting and spending. That's a good perspective, a useful one, and an under- theorized one. But if we have learned anything by being enchanted by this retail coquette, if we

have learned anything about what happens to the goodies we buy from herand what happens to uswe've learned that there is plenty more going on than buying things at low prices, and then consuming them. The things we buy from Doa Walmart are only rarely just consumed. They are

gifted. Enjoyed. Displayed. Talked about. Messed up. Broken. Shared. Fought over.

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Recycled after use and sent to Santiago, Chile by the container-load for resale in Recoleta, a neighborhood in Barrio Patronato. (Or by the carton-load in their unopened plastic packaging, to Guatemala, by our friend, Adela). We do not know (because we have only just begun to ask) how much of what is

bought in Walmart is implicated in household and neighborhood and global systems of gifting. But I do know those cartons of discounted Coke that we find hiding in the kitchen are not just for individual use because, as anthropologist Daniel Miller so often reminds us, no one ever really shops alone (Miller 1998 and passim). And, I know that Adela's purchases at Walmart are gift purchases, nearly all of them. Beyond gifts, what about those local sport-team jerseys that Walmart trumpets as

evidence of local managers acting like "merchants" instead of acting like managers? Those are meant to be visible to others, to be worn with delight over and over while watching a football games with your neighbors. And when folks are done with them, they don't toss them out. Those jerseys go to the Goodwill (and, possibly, on to Recoleta in Barrio Patronato in Santiago). Think of it. The Goodwill. Not fed into the destructive fires of consumption. I'm taking some of this thinking from an article by David Graeber who exhorts us to

be careful about how we talk and write about these phenomena (Graeber, n.d.; Graeber 2011). Our anthropological job (one of them, at least) is to bring out the native points of view, to find the language of shoppers and shopping. Corporations, whose institutional values, recreated in recurrent missteps, and celebrated in slogans like Low Prices Every Day, mask the complex realities of shopping with words like "consumption" and "consumer" and,

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for that matter, "low prices." So do too many academics, even when calling out the inherent contradictions of an entire economic system. Words like consumer and consumption do, indeed, come from a point of view but by itself it is a deluded, engaoso point of view. It does not represent the shoppers' points of view; it is Doa Walmart's own point of view. And it isn't as though David Graeber is the only person who refuses to call what

happens when a video comes home "consumption." Real non-corporate persons don't use that word when they talk about that kind of shopping, or that kind of product use, either. I know because people like my former partner Adrian and I fooled Doa Walmart

before she pulled one of her engaos on us. We bought the individual Harry Potter re-issue DVDs at $3.89 from a "bin program," a stand-alone cardboard bin sent in by the video manufacturer or merchandise (and without the LPED logo found on Walmart's own displays). We bought from the bin instead of buying the higher-priced boxed set in the Walmart electronics department under the LPED sign. Adrian most certainly does not call watching a video "consuming" a video. He calls it "watching a video." That's the local language, the so-called emic perspective we are after and a better place to start understanding how people buy and use things than to begin by calling it "consumption." (The boxed set offer was more than we wanted to spend and, frankly, pricier on a per-disc basis anyhow. Note that I'm not arguing that economic calculus isn't part of what happens when we are caressed by temptation's scented handand I know that my colleagues who use terms like consumers and consumption don't argue that, either). But if I take that video home and burn it up (consume it) I'll deserve at least a funny

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look. Let us remember, as Graeber has reminded us, where this word comes from: a disease, a burning up, a kind of tubercular illness; using this word to designate personhood or buying and selling things is a recent, and odd, invention (Graeber 2011). One would suppose that anthropologists should focus on the meanings that real

Walmart shoppers give to what they do. We should use their language. I am hired, as a business anthropologist, to discover the shopper's language, which means calling a shopper a shopper and not a consumer, and calling shopping shopping and not consumption. Why don't we see this? What has seduced us to do otherwise? Consumption is the word Walmart uses. Certainly these things, these video games, movies, gifts, and team jerseys, are

implicated in how we make or re-make or contest meanings in our lives, but is it consumption that shapes what is going on? Or, is it the world of love and pleasure, of sharing or greed, of loss and grief and

struggle, which inform our business anthropology story? Remember those mothers in Bill's stores at midnightcan't their words inform our anthropological understandings better than the words that Doa Walmart uses? Will calling those women in his store at midnight "consumers" help Bill and his banker audience give voice to the unspoken reasons why those women don't "come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m."? I doubt it. But I still love working in Walmart and it sounds like a lover's question.

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Works Cited

Briody, Elizabeth 2011 Interview Notes with Sales Executive. Women's Intimates Project for a Global Apparel Manufacturer. Los Angeles: Pacific Ethnography. Bloomberg News 2011 Walmart Reviewing Management at China Stores after Pork Probe. October 24, 2011. Accessed at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-25/wal- mart-reviewing-china-store-management-after-pork-mislabeling-incidents.html Cardozo, Sara Azevedo 2011 Team Debriefing Notes, Epson Brazil printer User Research. Pacific Ethnography: Los Angeles. Davies, David J. 2007 Wal-Mao: The Discipline of Corporate Culture and Studying Success at Wal-Mart China. The China Journal. 58:1-27. Douglas, Mary 1986 How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Erickson, Ken C. 2010 Fieldnotes: Latino Shoppers Project for Global Apparel Manufacturer. Author's Files. Pacific Ethnography: Los Angeles. 2011 Fieldnotes: Women's Intimates Project for Global Apparel Manufacturer. Author's Files. Pacific Ethnography: Los Angeles. Graeber, David 2011 Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House. n.d. "Consumption." Unpublished manuscript. Author's files. 2011 "Consumption." Current Anthropology 52(4). Kraus, Chris 2000 Aliens and Anorexia. Smart Art Press: New York. Moin, David 2011 Rethinking Apparel Again, Wal-Mart Shuts N.Y. Office. Women's Wear Daily. October 26, 2011. Accessed as pdf from wwd.com/retail-news/mass-offprice/walmart-to-close-new-york-buying-office-5335140

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Miller, Daniel 1998 A Theory of Shopping. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Portillo, Ely 2010 Ex-manager Alleges Bias in Walmart Suit. Charlotte Observer November 18, 2011, available online at http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/12/22/1929065/former-wal-mart- manager-says-chain.html. Simon, Bill 2010 Wal-mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE:WMT). Presentation at Goldman Sachs Seventeenth Annual Global Retailing Conference, September 15, 2010. Mr. Simon's presentation, much discussed on the Internet, is available online at http://investors.walmartstores.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=112761&p=irol- EventDetails&EventId=3354725 Schneider, Mary Jo 1998 The Wal-Mart Annual Meeting: From Small-Town America to a Global Corporate Culture. Human Organization 57(3):292-299. Walmart 2011 Financial Report. Walmart: Bentonville, AK. United Food and Commercial Worker's Union 2009 UFCW, Partners Announce New Agenda Challenging Walmart to Change Practices for the Sake of the American Economy. UFCW Press Release, September 1, 2009. Accessed November 11, 2011 at http://www.ufcw.org/press_room/index.cfm?pressReleaseID6.

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