Wal-Martians After Profits, Not Censorship (Gwen Moriz commentary)

The exposure of Jayson Blair, poster child for bad journalism, has made it acceptable to question the rightness of anything reported by the formerly sacrosanct New York Times. So let’s talk about the article, generously reprinted on the front page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, warning of the undue sway Wal-Mart now holds over American culture.

The article by David D. Kirkpatrick also gave other discounters — Target, Kmart, Costco — credit for having “bent American popular culture more toward the tastes of their relatively traditionalist customers.” But it was clearly the “Bentonville Behemoth” that was most worrisome to the critics, named and unnamed, who fear the Wal-Martization of America.

If I’m reading it right, Wal-Mart’s strict refusal to stock items likely to offend significant numbers of shoppers is threatening to create an intolerable shortage of explicit books, movies, magazines and compact discs. What’s more, the discounters are force-feeding Americans cultural pablum like country singer Toby Keith and ultraconservative political commentator Ann Coulter while denying us meatier stuff like Eminem and Maxim magazine.

Setting aside the article’s subtle undertones of derision toward middle America, both economic and geographic, I just don’t buy the basic premise that Wal-Mart and the other discounters are imposing their value systems on the American culture. On the contrary, I’m persuaded that even retail giants are just trying to maximize their profits by stocking merchandise their target market is likely to buy. You can rest assured that Wal-Mart stopped selling Maxim because the potential profit lost by offending a broad section of its demographic outweighed the potential profit to be made by carrying a magazine whose editors think “hottie” is a real word.

The chairman of AOL Time Warner’s book division told the Times that retailers had “obviously reached the Bush-red audience in a big way.” One could argue, I suppose, that the Wal-Martization of ideas had contributed to the country’s conservative shift over the past decade, but then one would have to explain why Wal-Mart is selling Sidney Blumenthal’s “The Clinton Wars” and “Angry Blonde: Uncensored Lyrics of Eminem.”

I don’t know about you, but I never say to myself, “I think I’ll buy a new CD. Let’s see what’s on the Wal-Mart-approved list.” Instead, I become familiar with an artist or song — from radio or a friend or one of those video channels on cable television — and set out to buy that music. What Wal-Mart stocks doesn’t influence what I buy, but what I decide to buy may influence where I shop.

And we have plenty of places to shop — more of them all the time. Wal-Mart is big, but it is nothing like a monopoly. The minute its business plan ceases to be advantageous to the consumer, either because its prices are no longer competitive or because it doesn’t stock what its customers want to buy, another retailer will be able to grab market share by the fistful.

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A HarperCollins book executive told the Times that Wal-Mart’s policies toward racy covers and explicit content had influenced her company’s decision-making well before publication.

“They have not dictated to us, but we are very smart about serving that channel the way they would like to be serviced,” she said.

And AOL Time Warner has decided to start a religious book imprint because a buyer for Wal-Mart revealed that Christian themes made up more than half its book sales.

So are Harper Collins and AOL Time Warner victims in the hijacking of American culture? Or are they co-conspirators? Or are they simply business enterprises responding to the market demands of their customers the same way Wal-Mart responds to its customers?