Shopping for a better life
I really like tall buildings, be they condos or commercial buildings. They satisfy my sense of aesthetics in many different levels at the same time. Because of this, I was pretty pissed off that the planned 50-story landmark building is not actually going to be realized, thanks to the usual suspects and their arguments in tune of "Not only do we own the land under us, but we own the line of sight from our land all the way down to the lake five miles away, so you can't build anything on your land below this line of sight".
The tall buildings form quite a contrast to Finland, where a building with seven stories would be considered extremely tall. This is probably on purpose, since it seems to me that city planners of the major Finnish "cities" (assuming you can call a town with 200,000 people a city) actually cynically try to lower the supply of apartments and houses, to make the real estate that they own to be worth more. It is no wonder that when I compare the apartment prices online in Tampere and Mississauga, for the price of our 1200 sq. ft. condo apartment in Mississauga we could have bought something perhaps half the size of that in Tampere, or third of that size in Helsinki. And it would be of significantly worse quality in every respect, and forget any ideas of a doorman, gym, security system etc. (The average Canadian or American would probably laugh and cry at the same time if they saw what the average Finnish apartment is like, and not in a good way.)
Even though me and my wife are carfree, we live three blocks away from the aforementioned huge shopping mall that sports a Wal-Mart and three other department stores. For us, owning a car simply does not make financial sense. My wife works four blocks from where we live, and I once computed that I actually make a pretty good hourly tax-free "wage" by taking the public transit and reading books as opposed to travelling by car and paying for the car itself, insurance, gas, parking and what have you. (Being carfree made even more sense back in Finland where cars and gas cost about twice as much as they do here, due to massive special taxation.)
I have been a longtime fan of James Kunstler's ideas about opposing sprawl and the associated automobile-addicted culture. (Daniel Mocsny is even more adamant in the same question.) It is so refreshing to see an intellectual who supports nuclear energy and can write something like
Cultural relativism will be discredited in an era when it becomes necessary, even for intellectuals, to make distinctions between good and bad, between excellence and worthlessness - because our lives may depend on the ability to make these distinctions. Hierarchies of value will become normative. Elitism will no longer be a pejorative but rather a recognition that some things really are better than other things.
I
disagree with a couple of Kunstler's views, though. First, I just
really don't get his opposition of tall buildings, since if you want
density, tall buildings are pretty much necessary. He comes up sounding
a bit like all those little Finnish old ladies who say that no more
construction should be done since they already own houses and
apartments.
My second ideological difference to Kunstler is in
the idea that Wal-Mart is somehow responsible for the sprawl. I don't
see why Wal-Mart can be blamed for maximizing its profits under the
constraints that the sprawl-friendly politicians with their ideas of
automobility impose on it. I don't see why Wal-Mart would be inherently
any less friendly towards the idea of a city than any other store
chain. We happily shop at Wal-Mart, and I don't quite understand all
the bad press the company gets or why it would be any way worse than
Zellers, Bay or Sears. I love shopping at Wal-Mart, knowing that
whenever I buy something, my money does not go to support some fat
union member who makes a $60K salary in his manufacturing job, and
whose union dues are used to promote the idea of "protectionism for
everything that I sell, free market for everything that I buy".
(As
a side note, I wonder how the typical union member would react to the
idea that the workers that produce the products that he uses would also
similarly unionize and the prices of these products were raised
accordingly. If every industry is unionized, and the unions force the
salaries to be, say, 30% higher than they would be under free
individual negotiation, what exactly is gained when everything in turn
costs 30% more?)
I have learned from the blogosphere that this
attitude is bad: I should be shopping at CostCo instead. We do have a
CostCo membership, but the local outlet is further away and we have to
take a bus ride there, so it is more of a weekend trip. I do love
CostCo too, though. A common argument why CostCo is better than
Wal-Mart seems to be the higher salaries that they pay for their
workers, and because of this, Wal-Mart should be boycotted by all
right-thinking morally superior people until they start paying their
workers equally high salaries plus all the benefits. Actually, if you
look at the revenue and profit figures, Wal-Mart's profit margin is
surprisingly thin, and most definitely does not support the idea of the
company being "greedy". In fact, I didn't do that math but happily bet
Wal-Mart would go deep in red if it increased the salaries and benefits
to the CostCo levels.
Besides, couldn't we similary argue that
one should boycott CostCo until they pay their workers the same average
salary as, say, Merrill-Lynch? I can already hear the readers
protesting that this is different, because these companies work in
completely different areas whereas CostCo and Wal-Mart are both mass
retailers. In fact, the important thing is not that the companies work
in different areas, but the fact that they hire from two separate pools
of applicants. For this reason, comparing Wal-Mart and CostCo is
comparing apples and oranges the same way that comparing CostCo and
Merrill-Lynch would be.
How do I know that Wal-Mart and CostCo
hire from different pools of applicants? Actually, I don't, but I can
make an educated guess based on my everyday observations. For starters,
it is not hard to see the difference between the Wal-Mart associates
and CostCo workers, even though both do essentially the same jobs. In
fact, I bet that if you randomly selected five workers from both places
and brought them to me in their civilian clothes where I had a couple
minutes of non-work related chat with them, I could bet with an amazing
accuracy which person works in which company. And I kinda doubt that
things are much different in other parts of North America. Regardless
of their ethnicity, the people working in CostCo seem like... well,
normal people that you would want to associate with in real life,
whereas the people working in Wal-Mart constantly give the impression
of being one step above the underclass. Actually, saying it this way it
a bit unfair, since this particular area is so teeming with recent
decent immigrants, and not very many companies other than Wal-Mart
would probably hire a middle-aged woman with little education who
doesn't speak much English. If Wal-Mart goes out of business, who is
going to hire all these people and put them to work?
(As an
amusing side anecdote, I remember how I was once queuing for the
service desk in Wal-Mart, and the woman working there noticed to three
other associates behind the counter that hey, their names are MaryAnn,
SueAnn, SherriAnn and LuAnn, the spelling here of course being my best
guesswork. I probably don't need to describe the general appearance of
these women much more.)
Now, whereas you can pretty much get a
job in Wal-Mart if you can write your name to the application, I have
read several people write that they are waiting for CostCo to start
hiring again and how there are dozens or even hundreds of applicants
for every open position. Since CostCo can take their pick of only the
very best applicants, I bet that their workers are worth the higher
salaries that CostCo then pays them. The average Wal-Mart associate
probably isn't quite as productive, and therefore the Wal-Mart
associates couldn't go to work for CostCo any more than CostCo workers
could go to work for Merrill-Lynch. The correct comparison is then not
"Wal-Mart pays a worker $7/hour while CostCo pays a worker $15/hour"
but rather "Wal-Mart pays a worker $7/hour while CostCo would pay that
same worker $0/hour", so it seems to me that Wal-Mart is the good guy
here and CostCo is the scroogelike evil miser. But the well-known
humanitarian that I am, I intend to keep shopping in both places.
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