Nothing Much.

Just look at the social costs of Wal-Mart's 'Low low, prices', and this is even the start...

squashed:

Johnbrissenden, nikography, and karmcity have had an interesting mini-discussion on Wal*Mart and its attractively low prices. Nikography and Karmcity essentially argue that people are just trying to get by, which is why Wal*Mart’s low, low prices are so attractive. And people shouldn’t be blamed for just trying to get by. Johnbrissenden’s argument is a bit more complex and involves the structure of global agricultural market. Read it here and here.

I’m not anti-Wal*Mart. Or, to be fair, I’m ambivalent on Wal*Mart. When there are no alternatives, it’s hard to be too critical. And it has done a lot of good things on the environmental front. (It’s got a ways to go on the labor front.) But I have two criticisms to add.

1. Those low, low prices may not be particularly lower than that Mom & Pop store. If Mom & Pop are selling at the farmers market, their produce is likely to be both cheaper and better than Wal*Mart. However, Wal*Mart is very convenient in a car-centric culture. When I lived in Boston, it was a whole lot more convenient to get my hardware at the hardware store, my fruit at a little fruit stand, my records at a used record store, my software at the software store, and, of course, my books at the book store. All of these were on my walk back from school. But if I were driving, I would want somewhere with a giant parking lot where I could do everything in one stop. As the Mom & Pop stores become fewer and further between, patronising them becomes less convenient, regardless of their prices.
2. While that single parent might want the $2.99 pack of toilet paper rather than the $3.99 pack of toilet paper, the math might change if the single parent knew the social cost of delivering the product. If you were offered a $2.99 roll of toilet paper and knew that purchasing it would support a subsidiary that exclusively used old-growth forests for raw materials and ten-year-olds were forced to labor for pennies a day and cast aside when their adorable little fingers were caught in the machinery leaving them maimed for life, but managed to do this by bribing a genocidal government to look the other way, would you pay the extradollar for whatever the fair-trade equivalent of toilet paper is? (In fairness, I don’t know whether any toilet paper company actually does this—but nasty environmental and labor practices by subsidiaries in the global south are quite common.) On one hand, we’re not personally doing all the wage-slavery and all that, but we are sort of paying somebody else to do it for our low, low prices. I don’t mean to condemn capitalism as a heartless system—but the information corridors that connect the heart of capitalism to the brain of capitalism are missing.