Growers and Grocers

Perhaps you could put a link to some scary music whenever you say “Wal-Mart” or “corporate interest”.

What does Wal-Mart want? Same thing every other business (including the small individually owned farms, etc) want: to maximize profits.

Why are they offering organic? Because there’s a demand. What will they provide? What they can sell.

Wal-Mart doesn’t hold a gun to suppliers’ heads or threaten to break knee-caps. They haggle for the best deal they can get. Sometimes suppliers may feel like they’ve made a deal with the devil, bending over backwards to get such a huge contract, but it shouldn’t be Wal-Mart’s duty to know the supplier’s best interest. The supplier needs to know their own interest and their own break-even point and how best they will maximize their profits. Sometimes suppliers make mistakes and over extend themselves at too low a price. Sometimes they sell a bazillion widgets and make a gazillion dollars because of a Wal-Mart contract. No different than what happens on a daily basis in every economy big or small.

Certainly Wal-Mart benefits by this competition — its employees (including the clerks and truck drivers) and its shareholders (including many a retirement plan). But also the consumer, who will get a better product at a better price. Afterall, one of the biggest problems with organic is the price. People always complain about how, allegedly, Wal-Mart employees can’t afford to shop there. (When in fact, it’s more the case that that’s the only place they can afford to shop.)

Well, I wonder how many farm workers can afford to buy food at a farmers market? I shop at them most of the year and thank goodness I make decent money because they’re generally waaaaay more expensive than Wal-Mart or Safeway.

ExtraMSG,

I always appreciate your commentary: It helps me know I’m not just preaching to the choir. I like the idea of ominous theme music. One for Wal-Mart, one for Monsanto, and one for Whole Foods. I’ll look into it.

My problem with the uber-free-market-it’s-just-good-business philosophy is that somehow responsibility and long-term consequences never end up as line items.

It’s cheaper to industrially farm, complete with chemicals, GMOs, and so forth. Environmental cost, topsoil degradation, and the peril of monoculture? The company’s not going to pay for it. We are, both at an environmental level and a fiscal level as taxpayers fund cleanup. The flip response is that shoppers can give their money to farmers doing things right, but a) there’s imperfect information about who’s doing what and b) the lower price point will always have a market, even if the rest of society has to suffer the consequences.

It is cheaper to mass-produce food. But what of the culture of blandness we have?

It’s good business to obliterate local , community-based stores when your chain moves, but what of the long-term cost to that town’s spirit.

It’s cheaper to pay your employees so little that they qualify for Medicare even when they’re full-time. Why lower your own health care package prices when you can just hire people to help your employees fill out the government forms. Again, we pay the costs of Wal-Mart’s free market thinking.

So I don’t buy your every-company-for-themselves free-market attitude. It’s short-sighted and pushes the costs onto people who wouldn’t choose them. It removes the humanity from the discussion and doesn’t hold companies responsible for the real costs they impose.

So my guess on Wal-Mart and organic? It’ll be good business to hire lobbyists who help dilute the label. That way, the company gets to sell to organic-hungry consumers without actually changing anything about our toxic agricultural practices.

I know we could go back and forth on this ad nauseum, but I’ll just add a couple responses.

It’s worth noting that regulations and labeling, including things like the organic labeling, are usually industry methods of protecting themselves or marketing gimmicks. In a truly free market, people, not governments, would own rivers, eg, and you wouldn’t be able to just set a regulation that says you can have X ppm of cyanide float down the length of the Mississippi. Regulations such as that have historically been implemented in order to allow industries to get by having to deal with lawsuits and land/water owners. But I know that’s a very far-sighted libertarian explanation that sounds extreme.

This same sort of thing, though, happened in the meat industry. People like to point to The Jungle and how Roosevelt fixed the problems with American meat. Not very accurate. In truth, as usual the government was late to the problem and was truly just trying to reassure a public (and foreign buyers) that the meat was good and give the industry some protections. The market had already slapped the meat industry down and without intervention they would have had to PROVE themselves to foreign and domestic buyers. The regulations actually had the opposite effect that people give them credit for.

That’s exactly what has happened with the organic labeling. I’m no fan of the lobbying to water down labeling either. But I think it’s part of the nature of such labeling when the government gets involved.

The left thinks they’re protecting people by involving politics in such things. Usually, they’re merely giving people a false sense of security based on rather arbitrary choices and further diminishing people’s sense that they should look out for themselves and make informed choices.

NO ONE should own rivers.

I so dont get that and dont know how a person gets there.

“free” market doesnt mean scot”free” from ethical responsibility. Clearly, as is quite obviously evidenced in the present American Culture and way of life, “free” market doesnt provide for a moral society (neither does a theocracy for that matter). It is the “free” market mentality of the corporation in this country that results in the inequities in the distribution of wealth.

I guess I just dont feel the need to suplicate before the altar of the “free” market to feel like a “real” American.

No one on the left asked the USDA to step in, they fought it tooth and nail. Its illusion and deception to imply that it was invited.

Water rights and food security were political issues 10s of 1000s of years ago, you cant say these vital issues are not inherently political and wash your hands of it.

Ever read John Brunner’s “The Sheep Look Up?”, read of his lovely “Puritan Foods”? THAT is so completely Wal-Mart doing the organic thing.

Buy it, check it out if you still go to public libraries, read it, might be of interest to you.