Sure, the price is right, but is the price really right? Or are we bargain-hunting our society into permanent poverty? A whole-systems look at WalMart from FastCompany suggests that the dime you save on socks may mean stealing a working wage from your neighbour ...

But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.

FastCo is short on solutions in this piece, and I can't blame them because it is a unifying thread in a lot of our economic woes: The loss of community cohesion thinking is the why of a lot of our societal ills, from poor education (why pay for your neighbours' kids schooling?) to environment (why pay more to save some Kentucky farmer's skies?) to military action (why not just force our pipelines to Kazikstan?) to even the ICT collapse (who needs good software when we can have Win/XP today?) and the RIAA (who needs local music when I can have a virtual Celine Dion sing at my wedding?)

A contrast to this is the largely successful anomalies that exist on our fringes; whether it's a confederate camaraderie or a den of thieves, we don't have to look far to find real-world communities who behave like communities, who look out for each other. Everyone knows ethnic neighbourhoods where every cousin gets at least some job, religious sects and cults where all purchasing and provision is kept inside the community. We may have labelled protectionism as a defacto bad thing, but is it really? Or are we succumbing to media rhetoric propping globalization stewarts like WalMart who stand to make oodles of cash at the expense of our social fabric?
h3. social and software

The two are not inherently the same. Social networks exist all around us, and they work. A local church, a service club, a new immigrant community, those all work very well at ensuring overall community success ahead of individual gains and savings, but what is also true is how these networks transmit this co-ordinating information by methods which are eminently modelable, methods which are there in those so-called social software projects such as Ryze or Linked-in or Ecademy, and in small pockets those networks probably do form subnets of people looking out for each other, but a larger and more interesting question: Can we replicate and foster the essence of looking out for each other and thereby create new communities? If so, then can we effect the first steps and bring back that pioneering all in this together Spirit of Amerika? ... and can we do it now, while there are still a few still working?

Or is our plummet into the black centre of a WalMart Universe inevitable? Certainly the megachain had no trouble whatsoever moving into Owen Sound; all they had to do was dangle tax revenue and "jobs" before the town council -- in our early InfoCor project, an ill-fated attempt to foster ICT for our local rural development, one of my more adamant points was the necessity to eschew attracting call centers and other low-skill minimum-wage job factories and instead work to attract real high-tech while simultaneously fostering local education to help ensure that the techie jobs, the lucrative expert jobs, that these were staffed from the local population. As I put it at the time, the last thing we wanted as the image of our region was Wiarton Willie with a Borg eye.

In the wake of eyes hungry for instant opportunism, our region got nothing, Owen Sound got a call-centre with a few general construction jobs meted out locally to build it, and these days, in the ecology the box mall and call centre has created, as I grope for any sort of employment to even just pay the trustee fees so I can actually go bankrupt, the only recommendation my neighbours can proffer is $10/hr in a call-centre, or less working for WalMart or Home Depot.

This is not to say the people who have those jobs are in any way making a mistake. They are not. They are doing the best they can with what is available to them for survival.

No, it's not them, them who are on the outside. It is the rest of us, those on the capital inside, those of us who left these local economies with only these absurd choices. We are the ones who made the mistake, we stopped caring about our communities and we sold them out, all in our bid to lower our own family expenses, to get a better deal, a lower price, and as usual, we're getting what we paid for.

Only it's not just about personal choice and comfort. If what FastCo says is true, this is about our collective survival.

A New Consumerism

I don't know how we might affect it, but I think it is possible: We need to endear a new consumerism that thinks of the "lowest price" as socially irresponsible as the "non-recyclable", "non-biodegradable" or the "carcinogenic" -- in the early days of recycled materials, I paid more for my re-pulped printer paper because I knew we had to create a demand, that the demand would create the market which would then realize benefits of scale. And it worked. Within only really a few years the price of my recycled printer paper (and toilet paper) was competitive with the virgin stuff, and today, it's often cheaper. We won that round.

My late friend Cyril told me he would rather buy less stuff of superior quality than to dive into any illusions of success inherent in goods that only superficially appear to be quality. He had no grand world-model economic rational for this, it just seemed to him to be a better way to live, and while they had, as a family, not much to their name, what they had was good, it was the best, and they appreciated what they had for what it was.

Perhaps Cyril was only instinctively annealing to a choice in buying habits that has now become a question of survival, only now, in addition to a quality constraint, it's time to start also thinking about the community constraint, in the same way recycled means less refuse in your own landfill, buying within our community means less human refuse on the dole. The ticket paid is not just a higher price for the vain sake of quality of goods, it is a price on the goods plus a real and tangible capital investment in our community future.