Your Call Is Important To Us (22 page)

I
f you were dropped from the sky on the outskirts of Anytown, North America, it would take you a long time to figure out exactly where you were. There would be plenty of signs, but they wouldn’t help much. You would see a big-box store, probably a Wal-Mart or The Home Depot, maybe a mall, with roads and parking in the foreground, and a glass complex or two humming fluorescently in the middle distance. There would probably be three or four kinds of fast-food places close by, but not within walking distance, because nobody walks around these parts. There aren’t even sidewalks here. These are the park-and-drive places, twenty to forty minutes from the heart of downtown Wherever. And they are everywhere. The sprawl in Cali may be surrounded by palm trees, and the ones in Quebec may have signs that say
vente
instead of
sale,
but for the most part they are all the same. You got your concrete, you got your offices, you got your hangars full of merchandise, you got your drive-thru grease kiosks, all in one convenient traffic snarl.

There are a couple of different factors that helped these sprawls grow and thrive. The improvement of the highways opened up more space for urbanized land, and urbanization has been the trend ever since. Between 1982 and 1997, according to a study on sprawl by the Brookings Institution, the amount of urbanized land in the United States increased by 47 percent, from about 50 million acres to 76 million. At the same time, the overall population increased by only 17 percent, and only a handful of cities became more densely populated. Increasingly, people settled in suburban communities rather than urban ones. Today, fully half of Americans live in suburbs. There’s a correlation between having more space and buying more stuff: The shopping simply followed the big houses, aching to be filled with wonderful things, to the cheap land on the outskirts of town. Shopping used to be an urban phenomenon, but now it’s primarily a sprawl thing. Most dying downtowns feature the ghostly hulk of a formerly swanky department store, long since lured to the burbs to anchor a mall, or slain by those low, low big-box prices. Environmentalists bemoan this doughnut effect. The city’s historic core rots, leaving pockets of poverty and decrepitude behind. More outlying fields get paved, pollution spreads, and municipalities have to extend the radius of the areas they service. People end up wasting more time, gas, and money in their cars, as well.

There are some downtown malls in larger cities, like Chicago and Boston and Toronto, but the majority are built a drive away from suburban developments, in the sprawl. The big-boxes have also helped contribute to, and further accelerate the growth of, sprawl. Since a big-box takes up more than 25,000 square feet, retailers like Wal-Mart and The Home Depot have always gone for the cheapest land they can find, setting up camp at the edge of town. Then all the other businesses, the fast-food joints and plus-size clothing chains and pet care warehouses and electronics stores and Dollaramas and Buck-or-Two junk shops, soon follow, opening strip malls and big-boxes of their own. And so, a hundred thousand sprawls bloom.

Malls and big-boxes are destination shopping, shrines to the boundless bounty of consumer choice. Remember that last long postwar boom, the one where everyone’s income went up? With this came a new willingness to buy things just for the hell of it, a desire inflamed by advertisers and the ad-makers’ new buddy, television. As theorist William Kowinski put it in his 1985 book,
The Malling of America,
the mall is an extension of your television; it disposes the products and lifestyle the television proposes. This is not even to mention the way that relatively, if regressively, cheap credit has fueled the flames of constant consumption. North Americans are the world’s greatest consumers. We can, and will, buy anything. Fifteen years ago, hardly anyone drank bottled water, and today little plastic flasks that read
naive
backwards are as ubiquitous as asphalt. When an oxygen bar opened in Toronto, I didn’t know whether to laugh or weep. Part of me thought, silly yuppies, paying for air. The other part of me pictured my future monthly oxygen bill; luxuries have a sneaky way of turning into utilities. The ability to buy whatever you feel like buying has become like a state religion, the very living manifestation of big, beautiful words like
freedom
and
choice.
Shopping isn’t just something that we need to do. It’s something that most of us want to do.

Shopping isn’t just our leisure activity of choice. When the boom went bust and the stock markets were a shambles, who was called on to keep the economy from spiralling into full-blown recession? It wasn’t the CEOs, or the government, or even the military, but you, Joe Visa, and you too, Sally MasterCard. Only the consumers could save us now! Zero percent financing and multiple cuts to the interest rate were all attempts to stimulate the mission-critical shopper. Part of the reason why consuming all that can be consumed, like a ravening pack of piranhas, has been elevated to the status of an inalienable right is that the American economy relies heavily on consumer overspending. Previous generations at war have been urged to scrimp and save and have had their food and goods rationed to help the war effort. The avatars of the war on terror urge us to shop till we drop. Changing, or even questioning, our gluttonous binge consumption would mean that—cliché alert—the terrorists have already won. Immediately after September 11, North Americans were told that the best way they could help New York was to go there for dinner and a show and some shopping. While this was, admittedly, a relief effort closer to most people’s skill sets than signing up for Doctors Without Borders, it was only what we are usually told to do. Which is, in case you missed the 50 million ads, to spend like a Gabor sister with a fresh husband.

Like every minute of every ad, every inch of retail space entices us to buy more stuff. Between 1970 and 2003, the amount of retail space in the U.S. doubled, and then doubled again, from a billion and a half square feet to 6 billion square feet. I have had the pleasure of being part of the vast mall-o-sphere in my own little way, as a wage slave in a bookstore. You bid adieu to a couple of niceties when you work retail. There are no seats for the serfs. Most retail jobs mean standing all the livelong day, for no reason other than to signal to your customers that you are alert to their every whim. Few are the windows in your average mall. There might be an atrium, but there will be no windows. All that outdoors might distract your eyes from the merch. The mall is climate-controlled, which means it’s always the opposite of whatever’s happening outside; in the summer, the mall is blissfully cool, and in the winter, it’s toasty. It is highly unlikely that you will find a clock, unless it’s on sale, because the last thing any store owner or manager wants you to notice is exactly how much time you’ve spent in the mall. That would totally harsh on your retail mellow. The mall has its own time, promotional time. This is holiday-based, and proceeds seamlessly and ceaselessly from New Year’s to Valentine’s Day to St. Patrick’s Day to Easter to Mother’s Day to Memorial Day to Father’s Day to Labor Day/Back to School to Halloween to Thanksgiving to Xmas/Hanukkah. This never-ending holiday is part and parcel of the mall’s effort to be a fun destination, a place you want to go. But it’s a delicate balance; make the mall too comfy-cozy, and freaks who have no intention of buying anything will show up, hang out, and drive the actual shoppers away. If you build a village, even a phony one, eventually, the idiots will come.

In the burbs, malls are pretty much the only place for people to hang out. They are ersatz Main Streets, the gathering places for folks with time on their hands, like seniors and teenagers. Some malls have wholeheartedly embraced the idea of serving as a sort of community center. A few of the earliest mall developments, like Bergen Mall and Garden State Plaza, built in New Jersey in the fifties, included municipal services and meeting rooms for community events. Now that malls are taking it in the face from big-boxes and category killers, many have started renting space out to government and community services, lest they become half-empty dirt malls. But, unlike the town squares of old, or the streets and sidewalks in the city, each and every inch of a mall is privately owned. There have been debates all over North America about whether or not citizens have the right to public assemblies in malls. In the 1980 Supreme Court case of
Pruneyard Shopping Center vs. Robbins,
the justices ruled that it was up to individual states to decide whether malls were the kind of public spaces where people could get their First Amendment on. Some states, like California, Oregon, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, have all recognized malls as a sort of semi-public space, and have protected speech rights in malls.

This is the sort of thing that sends private-property types into conniptions. I think the malls asked for it, with all those walkways and benches and come-hither plastic foliage. But malls only want to be public insofar as you define public as full of people. Besides, these days, hellraisers setting up leaflet tables at the mall is the least of management’s worries. I’m sure mall developers fairly long for the days when they had to go to great lengths to keep people out of the mall, now that they face the challenge of getting people to go to the mall at all. About a half billion square feet of the almost 6 billion square feet of retail space in the U.S. is vacant, mainly in dead or dying malls. The new urbanist movement calls them grayfields, and in several states they are trying to refashion them into living communities.

Malls aren’t totally dead yet, but they are certainly in decline. The iconic Sherman Oaks Galleria, original home of the eighties Valley Girl, recently closed its doors. Malls have been given a royal beating by a couple of different factors. First of all, micro-malls have leaked into spaces such as offices, airports, and universities. These siphon off some of the burb mall’s revenues, but worse still, in making all the world a mall, they make the mall itself less desirable as a place to go. Internet shopping hasn’t taken off like the geeks hoped it might, but it’s still approximately 44 billion clams that people did not spend at the mall in 2002. The malls that are still very successful, like the West Edmonton Mall and Minnesota’s Mall of America, market themselves as destinations.

The biggest enemy of the mall, however, is the new face of retail, the big-box store. Wal-Mart is, of course, the undisputed king of the big-boxes, the grand poobah of the superstores. Wal-Mart is like Mall Lite, all the tasty stuff with less idle meandering. It supplies a wide selection of different goods, just like a mall does, but without the architectural frippery, and for slightly lower prices. Retailing doesn’t get much more minimal, ambience-wise, than the Wal-Mart model. Whereas the mall still maintains some semblance of strolling up a street to shop, the big-box store presents you with nothing but the things themselves, in all their cheap profusion. The sheer abundance, if not the quality, of the merch is the star. Each and every Wal-Mart store is simply a giant, fluorescent-lit room, crammed to the unadorned rafters with things, glorious things. Nothing says low, low prices quite like the total absence of decor. No ball room for the kiddies, no coffee for mom, no benches for anyone. Nevertheless, despite the lack of classy blandishments, Wal-Mart is both the number-one retailer and number-one employer in America today. The Walton family has occupied top spots on the annual
Forbes
listing of the richest people in the U.S. since the eighties. In 1979, Wal-Mart finally cleared a billion dollars in sales. By the nineties, they did that much business in a week. In 2003, Wal-Mart’s net sales were more than $256 billion. In 2004, they did even better, making $285.2 billion.

Sam Walton, the chain’s founder, laid out some of the secrets to his success in his autobiography,
Made in America.
It’s a dilly of a read, festooned with fulsome blurbs from Ross Perot, Billy Graham, Bob Hope, and Jack Welch—a helluva barbershop quartet—equating Sam with all that is good and great in the grand U.S. of A. Walton tells the Wal-Mart story from his frantic early days buying and selling bulk cheap wares to his eventual success. His eureka moment came when he was a wholesaler of women’s unmentionables. When he tried to sell them for 50 cents, they moved sluggishly. But if he offered three pairs for 99 cents, the panties fairly flew off the shelves. This realization, that lower prices make for greater sales volume, is the cornerstone of the Wal-Mart way. If you make it cheap, people will buy lots more of it, whatever it happens to be.

Sam doesn’t list this rule among his top ten tips for building a business. Those are pretty cornpone and commonsensical: Commit to the enterprise and share profits with your partners, Sam’s chosen euphemism for his minimum-wage workers. To ward off the specter of unionization, you have to motivate your workers by calling them things like partners or associates, and encourage employee loyalty with rituals like the infamous Wal-Mart cheer. You also have to communicate everything to the partners, blah, blah, blah. While there are a handful of longtime Wal-Mart employees who got in on the ground floor and made a bundle on their stock options, the vast majority of Wal-Mart workers do not participate in the stock option plan. In fact, most of them can’t even afford to participate in the health care plan, let alone the investment plan. Most Wal-Mart workers make wages near the legal minimum, and work a full-time week that can be as skimpy as twenty-eight hours. Average U.S. retail wages, which Wal-Mart has helped keep nice and low, are about 200 bucks a week. Way to share.

In a January 2005 article in
The Nation,
writer Liza Featherstone notes that Wal-Mart got its start in poor communities, has always made most of its money off the poor, and relies on poverty for its continued growth. In an inversion of Henry Ford’s policy of paying workers enough to buy his product, Wal-Mart drives wages down so people can afford to shop only at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is a notorious union-buster, and made headlines in 2005 for closing a store in Quebec after it went union. No word yet on whether the Quebec workers will sue, but Wal-Mart is among the most sued entities in the world. Several of these suits involve labor law infractions, like making people work off the clock, or allegations of discrimination against the women and minorities that make up the bulk of the Wal-Mart associate force. In June of 2004, courts certified the largest civil-rights class action suit in the U.S. system,
Dukes vs. Wal-Mart,
which alleges that the retailer systematically underpaid and underpromoted over a million female workers. Wal-Mart is still appealing the decision.