Wal-Mart and Oil Spills Spell Trouble In the Food Chain.

First, let me apologize to loyal Paper Walls readers for the recent extended hiatus. In addition to the holiday I have been busily working on my new book, Five-By-Five, The Simple Approach To More Effective Communications. Available January 15, 2005 from amazon.com.

Last Friday yielded two events, the similarity between them not being apparent until today when I heard two separate radio programs discussing them and their impact.

On Friday, I traveled to the colonial town of Easton, Maryland to visit my mother. Her and I, along with my two older sons enjoyed a late lunch at a local restaurant. Afterwards, we stopped at the local Wal-Mart for a little shopping. I was rather shocked that at 2 p.m. on Black Friday, the Wal Mart was less crowded than on a typical Sunday afternoon. For the first time in my experiences with the nation’s largest retailer, I actually walked into an open but empty check-out aisle!

Yesterday and today has generated significant business news articles and commentary on the fact that, despite a supposedly robust Black Friday, Wal-Mart sales went flat for the remainder of the Thanksgiving weekend; a significant and perhaps foreboding economic indicator.

I returned to my home Friday night. Around midnight, I was standing on my back porch when I noticed the air had a distinctive scent of heavy oil. My home sits barely one-hundred yards from the Delaware River and about 7 miles mile south of Friday night’s spill of 30,000 gallons of crude oil from a ruptured tanker.

Local public radio did an excellent job today of bringing together various experts to discuss the ecological impact of the spill on the environmentally challenged Delaware River. One expert offered the glum forecast that even after the massive surface sheen and tarry shores have been cleaned, large heavy globules will remain on the river bottom for years poisoning the smallest creatures who make up the bottom of the food chain, and impacting the river’s recovery for years to come. Some refer to this legacy as the “bubble-up” problem.

Later in the day, another program discussed the Wal-Mart sales story and I couldn’t help but see a clear correlation. I say this with all humility for I am among this class, but the people who regularly shop Wal-Mart are the base of America’s economic food chain and the retailer’s poor performance should be a clear warning that something may be terribly wrong in the economic environment.

Those of us who shop Wal-Mart, do so because saving $5.00 here and there means a lot more than the practice of spending more for slightly better quality and the “experience” of shopping a Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Lord & Taylor or even Sears & Penny’s.

The fact that an appreciable percentage of this “class” of shopper apparently did not have the financial ability to shop this weekend at the Mecca of bargain basements is a telling sign of the impact of the proliferation of George W. Bush’s $8 an hour jobs and $2 a gallon gasoline!
It is the labor and spending of the Wal-Mart class that feeds upward to fund the lifestyle of the still comfortable middle-class. For every 60 cubic yards of Wal-Mart goods not sold there is one less truck on the highway, one less trucker employed, one more person who loses a job with health care, one more draw on the unemployment line. Before you know it, those fortunate white-collar executive-types who have hovered just above the line where their job can be out-sourced to India, find themselves without a position.
George H.W. Bush, when campaigning against his eventual running mate in the 1980 Republican Primaries called Ronald Reagan’s tax-break and spend philosophy, “Voodoo Economics.” Apparently whatever did ‘trickle down’ from George W. Bush’s tax cuts, has trickled-out and the barrel is starting to run empty from the bottom up. All those extra dollars that have been spent this year for every tank of gasoline and can’t be spent on Christmas gifts at Wal-Mart, are the sub-surface tar balls now bubbling upward to destroy the Bush myth of a “robust economy.”