Our (Conservative) Cultural Gatekeeper

Recently several women from Massachusetts sued WAL-MART for not carrying the morning-after-pill. This promises to be an interesting case since it brings to the forefront the often neglected issue of WAL-MART’s role in censoring consumer's choices. By choosing to carry such a broad range of products, the depth of product options is surprisingly thin. For example, the store may have a hundred ice scrapers for your car in-stock, but there will actually only be two or three different types of these scrapers, all made by the same company. Then there is a far more insidious type of censorship. WAL-MART edits out the “explicit lyrics” for all of the music that the store carries. WAL-MART refuses to sell racy magazines such as Maxim. Or, even more alarming, WAL-MART censors books like The Daily Show’s America: The Book (because of the infamous picture of naked Supreme Court Justices...)

The problem of censorship stems from the fact that WAL-MART is a retailing monopoly. To even the biggest corporations WAL-MART’s contract is a must-have, forcing them to kowtow to the company’s slightest whim. In many ways WAL-MART’s suppliers are abused just as badly by the golliath as anyone else, forced to accept whatever price and modifications Bentonville imposes upon them. So you can imagine the chilling effect on entire industries when WAL-MART makes it clear that something is a little too risqué for their customers. Music producers will do whatever is necessary to have their album carried by the world’s biggest distributor of music, even if that means pressuring their artist to clean up their lyrics enough so as not to offend the Walton’s. Although we rarely see it, WAL-MART has truly become our cultural gatekeeper.

This fact becomes positively disturbing when you consider WAL-MART’s conservative Christian credentials. The company is the darling of the Religious Right, for the impression it has created as a good Christian family company. I see the signs of this carefully constructed facade every day at my store. When I walk into the store in the morning the first thing I see on Wal-Mart TV is FOX News parroting the Republican talking points of the day. Next off I sign on to my register, which is blanketed with magnetic yellow ribbons demanding that I “Support Our Troops.” Then, still before I have seen my first customer, I hear over the intercom the latest NASCAR standings being broadcast. And don’t think that I am basing WAL-MART’s cozy relationships with the neo-cons of the Bush Administration on mere anecdotal evidence. The best example is the memo that was leaked last fall whereby Bush’s Labor Department made a secret deal to alert the company two weeks in advance of any investigations about child labor law violations. For this nice little gift WAL-MART had to give up nothing, except of course the few hundred thousand dollars it had contributed to Republican coffers across the country.

But to be honest, I don’t think WAL-MART is controlled by crazy constituents of the Religious Right. To have membership in this club would require genuine beliefs and morals, something that the company does not have. Once again, WAL-MART is a soulless, profit-making machine. They do not care about politics or social issues so they take the path of least resistance… unless it is going to affect their bottom line. In this case the powers-that-be down in Bentonville have decided that it will, so they play to their base just as a politician would. They know full well who shops at WAL-MART, so they are sure to announce the NASCAR standings and carry several versions of software that reads The Bible aloud. Ultimately though, WAL-MART drops the act when they realize that the other side offers the promise of greater profits, as they did this Christmas by sticking with the more inclusive greeting of “Happy Holidays” over “Merry Christmas.” The moral of the story should be clear: we will only change WAL-MART’s cultural gatekeeping, or any aspect of the company, when we prove a significant threat to their profits.