The giant retailer's low prices often come

with a high cost. Wal-Mart's relentless

pressure can crush the companies it
does business with and force them to
send jobs overseas. Are we shopping
our way straight to the unemployment
line?

Therein lies the basic conundrum of doing business with the world's
largest retailer. By selling a gallon of kosher dills for less than most
grocers sell a quart, Wal-Mart may have provided a ser-vice for its
customers. But what did it do for Vlasic? The pickle maker had spent
decades convincing customers that they should pay a premium for its
brand. Now Wal-Mart was practically giving them away.
And the fevered buying spree that resulted
distorted every aspect of Vlasic's
operations, from farm field to factory to
financial statement.
Wal-Mart is not just the world's largest retailer. It's the world's largest
company--bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General
Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion
worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what
number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of
general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has
any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart,
J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined. "Clearly," says Edward
Fox, head of Southern Methodist University's J.C. Penney Center for
Retailing Excellence, "Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has
ever been." It is, in fact, so big and so furtively
powerful as to have become an entirely different
order of corporate being.

Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible
prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The
retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't
change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must
drop year after year. But what almost no one outside
the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000
suppliers knows is the high cost of those
low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to
squeeze profit-killing concessions from
vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of
everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off
employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from
overseas.

Of course, U.S. companies have been moving jobs offshore for decades,
long before Wal-Mart was a retailing power. But there is no
question that the chain is helping accelerate the
loss of American jobs to low-wage countries
such as China. Wal-Mart, which in the late 1980s
and early 1990s trumpeted its claim to "Buy
American," has doubled its imports from China
in the past five years alone, buying some $12
billion in merchandise in 2002. That's nearly
10% of all Chinese exports to the United States.

People ask, 'How can it be bad for things to come into the U.S. cheaply?
How can it be bad to have a bargain at Wal-Mart?' Sure, it's held
inflation down, and it's great to have bargains,"
says Dobbins. "But you can't buy anything if
you're not employed. We are shopping
ourselves out of jobs.
WHAT KINDS OF QUESTIONS DOES THIS
RAISE?
WHAT PUBLICATION DO YOU THINK THIS IS?
FAST COMPANY & BUSINESS REPORTING
WHAT IS CULTURE?
Rational or irrational?
Feelings?
Religion
Family / Heritage / Neighborhood / Identity
Race
Set of practices
In their ordinary social- science usage, invocations of culture are often
associated informally with an implicit theory of action as based on habit,
belief and routine, rather than on rational choice. Arguably, there is
nothing inherently necessary in this association, and culture is still
relevant even when one views actors as reflexive and rational. Since
rational, reflexive action is to be found in the financial markets if it is to
be found anywhere, those markets provide a useful arena in which to
explore the usefulness of the concept of culture in contexts in which
such action is prevalent.4
Evaluation cultures MacKenzie


CULTURE ALL THE WAY DOWN
Different cultures at print publications different questions.
MacKenzie: Different cultures of evaluation led to different ways of
pricing ABS and CDO
Set of practices
What does this have to do with literature?
Stories, cultural products, are one way of asking new questions.
THE CORRECTIONS
What does it mean to evaluate your family, your emotions, and your internal life
as incentivized quantitative data points?
What does it mean to question the system if you cant get outside of it?
What does it mean to be privileged?

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
What does it mean to live a real life?
What do we owe each other: husbands and wives, family members,
members of the same society?
What is freedom?
Is it freedom to exist isolated and alone? If being free is doing and
seeing what you want, what if what you want involves cultural products
which by definition require an audience and a social context?
Freedom from the group vs freedom in the group
GOOD WRITING / GOOD INVESTING
Approval is not the goal of investing. In fact,
approval is often counter-productive because it
sedates the brain and makes it less receptive to
new facts or a re-examination of conclusions
formed earlier. Beware the investment activity
that produces applause; the great moves are
usually greeted by yawns."--Warren Buffett
Substitute writing for investing and I think the old Oracle of Omaha is
giving some sage craft advice.
This is an economic story:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/harvard-is-no--438-in-these-college-
rankings-191356253.html

WHERE DOES MORAL RESPONSIBILITY BEGIN
AND END?
I focus on the ethical dynamics of complicity--the moral
risk of outsiders becoming implicated in conspirators'
designs. Despite its lurid melodrama, The
Moneychangers takes up complex questions about the
spread and scope of moral responsibility in a financial
crisis. How far did accountability extend when designing
insiders relied on the actions or resources of outsiders to
carry out their plot? Were individuals morally
accountable for outcomes they never wished for or
predicted, even if their actions directly contributed to
them?
David A. Zimmerman. Panic!: Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction
(Cultural Studies of the United States) (Kindle Locations 1741-1744).
Kindle Edition.
For Sinclair and his contemporaries, the fate of individuals'
moral autonomy and the notion of republican
responsibility hung on these questions, for if individuals
could not resist becoming party to a financial conspiracy,
or recognize that they were doing so, how could they act
as virtuous citizens?
The UC system, the Clark Kerr Master Plan were always and inextricably
BOTH cultural and financial stories
The markets and the universities are both cultural creations
Freedom is a social good
People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness
of white people in order to console me for the
wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the
American failure does not console me and it should not
console anyone else. That hundreds of thousands of
white people are living, in effect, no better than the n---s
is not a fact to be regarded with complacency. The social
and moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the
bitterest, most terrifying kind.


JAMES BALDWIN NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME
The people, however, who believe that this democratic anguish has some
consoling value are always pointing out that So-and-So, white, and
So-and-So, black, rose from the slums into the big time. The existence
-- the public existence -- of, say, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr.
proves to them that America is still the land of opportunity and that
inequalities vanish before the determined will. It proves nothing of the
sort. The determined will is rare -- at the moment, in this country, it is
unspeakably rare -- and the inequalities suffered by the many are in
no way justified by the rise of a few. [Emph. added]
A few have always risen -- in every country, every era, and in the teeth of
regimes which can by no stretch of the imagination be thought of as
free. Not all these people, it is worth remembering, left the world
better than they found it. The determined will is rare, but it is not
invariably benevolent. Furthermore, the American equation of success
with the big time reveals an awful disrespect for human life and
human achievement.

(xiv) The questions which one asks oneself
begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and
become ones key to the experience of others.
One can only face in others what one can face
in oneself. On this confrontation depends the
measure of our wisdom and compassion.
(1961)