walmart: not merely taking manufacturing jobs from working americans

... Now taking retail jobs from working Americans, too!

So I was at the local Wal-Mart today, looking to pick up some consumer electronics at low-factory-wage-covering prices. Now, the store was staffed with plenty of blue-aproned minimum-wage shopwalkers. But one of the checkout counters advertised self-service. No way was I to leave without trying this thing out, wide-eyed scrivener that I am.

And it is pretty astounding. I got to recreate those happy moments swiping bar codes at Price Chopper. I avoided eye contact with the harrijans. And I saw Wal-Mart's clever solution to the shoplifting possibilities that had long hindered the advent of similar self-serve checkout stations: after one swipes their product, they place it in a bag on a weighing station. Any failure to produce the item with the correct weight will, presumably, end the transaction and alert the local police. I didn't test the process today, though -- I wanted to establish a baseline. Maybe next time.

And of course, the self-serve station is right in front of the supervisor's stand. So they don't really save money from reduced workers as they do improve the shopping experience.

This may be the first time I've ever bought anything from Wal-Mart (it was a $25 "Durabrand" discman with car adaptor kit to go in the Jaunty Volvo (a Blue Volvo, might I add)). It was a moment of Friedmanian rapture when I walked down the aisle and surveyed the unfolding visions of cheap consumer goods. A Continental Theorist would have more to say on the subject, probably involving the words 'reify' or 'reification,' but the goods on offer are an approximation of expensive doo-dads that I could never have imagined in the Caldor-roaming days of my youth. Leather footrests, satellite radios, barstools: these would be luxury goods, if a luxury good cost less and lasted longer than a fill-up at Mobil. In the lee of the economic gales are the working middle-class who fill their homes from those shelves.

Should talk more about purchase as identity and other hip themes, but it's late and this is less coherent than I'd like. I can't talk right, but by gum can I rant on the keyboard, generally.