Jeremiah Tolbert

Joe Landsdale has a really lovely essay up on the Mulholland Books web­site today.  One part in par­tic­u­lar res­onated with me, and got me think­ing about my own reac­tion to Walmart:

Well-​​dressed man had one impor­tant thing to say. It was what moti­vated him the most. Walmart stores lead to the clos­ing of down­towns. They do. No ques­tion about that. Not that this bas­tard had ever seen a small down­town, and the clos­est he’d been to Walmart was a scathing edi­to­r­ial in some news­pa­per some­where. He looked at me and decided I should be brought into the con­ver­sa­tion when all I wanted was to remind the clerk I needed a wake-​​up call. The man asked me what I thought about Walmart.

I asked if he had ever been in one. “Why, of course not,” he said. I asked him where he shopped. He told me.

They were expen­sive places. I told him, “you know, most of that stuff, except the stuff you don’t need, you can get cheaper at Walmart.” The clerk liked it. I liked it. I reg­is­tered my wake-​​up call and went upstairs, left the author­ity on Walmart in the lobby, pissed off and pontificating.

I real­ized after read­ing this that I often par­rot the same rea­sons for strongly dis­lik­ing Walmart.  But the truth is, I don’t like Walmart because it reminds me of where I come from.  It reminds me of how poor we were grow­ing up.  Walmart may be the source of some awful things in our soci­ety, but for the poor, it’s been a boon.  It’s def­i­nitely increased the qual­ity of life for peo­ple who were already liv­ing pretty tightly. (And yes, I know you can argue that Walmart cre­ates the con­di­tions for that poverty itself—we won’t get into that today).

Like a lot of folks who have climbed a rung or two up the finan­cial lad­der, I get uncom­fort­able when reminded that I used to be a lot worse off.  Admitting that I don’t like being reminded of what it was like to be poor doesn’t come eas­ily either.  So I’ve papered over that dis­com­fort with nice, liberal-​​friendly rea­sons for hat­ing the place.

I’m not deny­ing the valid­ity of those argu­ments at all.  I think it’s good that we are always ques­tion­ing the role of things like Walmart in our com­mu­ni­ties.   But the cold truth is, my per­sonal oppo­si­tion is based in noth­ing more than a base dis­com­fort with my roots. (It also reminds me of Laramie, and every­thing asso­ci­ated with liv­ing there, but that’s another post prob­a­bly). K-​​marts make me even more uncom­fort­able, because my ear­li­est child­hood mem­o­ries are filled with shop­ping there. Walmart didn’t come along until later.

So now that I’ve iden­ti­fied that, I can work at get­ting over it and maybe be a lit­tle less judge­men­tal.  I’ll still prob­a­bly pre­fer Target, but I can be hon­est with myself about why.