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Is shopping at Wal-Mart immoral?

By Mark Harrison
The Times-Journal

Published May 31, 2005

If shopping at Wal-Mart is immoral, I might be in trouble. I shop there a lot. I fuss about not enough people to man the checkout counters, complain about the super- stores being too big to navigate but do I still shop there? Guilty.

After all, Wal-Mart has a massive selection of goods in one location – potato chips to television sets, and usually at the lowest prices. Wal-Mart is Fort Payne’s largest retailer and, as such, brings the city tons of sales tax revenue. Plus, the store provides needed local jobs. So it’s all good, right?

It depends on your perspective. Lately, there’s been a lot in the news about how Wal-Mart stores can actually have a detrimental effect, especially on small to mid-sized communities. The main complaint is Wal-Mart puts smaller shops out of business, eliminating as many jobs as it creates.

A recent article on msn.com posed this question: Is shopping at Wal-Mart immoral? According to the article, in the early 90s, business owners on the island of Kodiak, Alaska hired a consultant to analyze how a proposed Wal-Mart store would hurt them.

But the consultant gathering data for the group found how the store would actually help another local group – the poor.

Low-income people there wanted the Wal-Mart because they perceived the store’s lower prices as a way to effectively lower their cost of living.

The flip side of the argument is low prices and job opportunities offered at Wal-Mart stores don’t alleviate a community’s struggles with poverty in the long term, and there are questions about pay scale and benefits.

The question of morality arises when debating the up side of Wal-Mart stores versus the down side.

Should one shop at a store that has a detrimental effect on the local community? That would be an easy enough question to answer if it weren’t so obviously more complex than it appears on the surface.

First, one must satisfactorily answer a tougher question: do Wal-Mart stores really have a detrimental effect on local communities?

Economists, notorious about being unable to agree on much of anything, continue to debate the issue. It really all comes down to personal perspective and choice.

I’ll likely continue to shop at Wal-Mart and I doubt it will cause me to think of myself as immoral. Whether or not I should continue to eat at Hooters is another dilemma altogether.

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