You know me. I love Wal-Mart. For lots of reasons I love Wal-Mart but mostly because they take all the foo foo out of shopping for staples, and with it, the foo foo prices. Part of my epiphany in becoming conservative happened while standing in line at Wal-Mart, but that's another story.
Yet another story is how I long ago gave up on consumer boycotts. Retail marketers are far too sharp to be fooled by consumers, but consumers are, by definition, too dumb not to be convinced by marketers. The organizing power of boycotts cannot stand up to the power of marketing. Boycotts are informationally slow and can only sustain a few messages to the millions, whereas marketers get inside the OODA loop of boycotters and outsmart them every time.
Wal-Mart is even smarter than the average smart marketer, and now they've delivered a third coup, which is to turn boycott logic back onto the sort of people who go in for that sort of thing. You may recall the World Orgasm for Peace. No? It's just as well, it didn't work. But of course it works on the same simple-minded principle as boycotts, that of spontaneous people power. If only 20 million people did X, so the logic goes, we could change the world. Such logic is especially appealing to brain dead celebrities, who through no talent of their own, are marketed to the millions, rake in millions, and then proceed to do anything they please. I would propose that the more sentient and moral of them recognize this fundamental equation of popularity and imagine it can be a power for good, rather than just their own nihilism. Good on them for the thought, but the practice sucks. No such people-powered boycott can last longer than a hit song.
Every once in a while, however, such people-power reaches the level of sustained mass hysteria. One such example is the Green Movement, which started out sane, but now has degenerated into religious platitudes and inconceivably mindless assertions. Good intentions can often be wrecked by bad company. Some people are INSPI(RED). More of us are BO(RED). Most such organizations simply don't scale. This is not so much a political criticism (although it is) as a rational exercise in information theory. To scale up the consciousness of issues as complex as environmental conservation, you have to use mass market devices rather than real intelligent content. More people can wear a red t-shirt or watch a movie like "The Day After Tomorrow" and consider themselves 'part of the solution' than actually are a part of it. But the myth of people-power persists.
And so Wal-Mart has launched a Green site. It may have something to do with environmental conservation, but this is something only an institution like Wal-Mart is capable of actually doing, unlike going to a Bono concert. Wal-Mart says:
If every Wal-Mart shopper 180 million of us bought just one compact flourescent bulb, it would reduce emissions the same as taking 1 million cars off the road.
Of course this is disingenuous. Wal-Mart would have to 180 million such bulbs in their supply chain. The bulbs retail for $16.88 (the lowest price) and they're manufactured by GE. Nobody expects Wal-Mart to sell $3 billion in lightbulbs any time soon. Wal-Mart naturally squeezed GE as a supplier to get the best price, and both companies are forward thinking. My bet is that these are very high margin products, and that they have to be since they're practically durable goods.
My point is that people-power works through institutions and combinations of institutions like Wal-Mart and GE, and that they are motivated by shaping consumer trends and locking them into brands. This is the same whether or not the use of a product is considered politically correct or not. Leaders of boycotts are kidding themselves if they believe that goals such as theirs are achieved by moral suasion alone. There has to be a market made and a market sustained, and that is a risk calculated by smart money as exemplified by Wal-Mart and GE, two of America's best run companies.
McDonalds has worked this way in the past, and BP is doing that in its current 'Beyond Petroleum' advertising campaign. Speaking of which, I'm going to spend an hour or so checking out Steve Koonin.
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