Look on the Web site: You will read about Wal-Mart's "three basic beliefs."
The act of exchange is fulsome. It contains within it implicit expressions of cultural and social values shared by those engaged in the transaction. This is especially true, it seems to me, at the local level -- in the winding lanes of Tokyo or the back streets of the quartier in Paris. Anyone who has ever shopped in either Japan or France knows this to be so by way of the small rituals and courtesies one is expected to observe.
Anyone who has shopped in America over the past decade, let us say, also knows this to be so -- but only by omission. Here is America, where we have marketized everything, including our neighbors, we don't even have to say "please," or "thank you" any longer. The American way of shopping is thus equally an expression of our social and cultural values. In the American case, it happens to express the evaporation of public space and consciousness: Here's the money, give me the bucket, and there's nothing more to say.
RSS