The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [91]
So instead of Wal-Mart providing many employees with health care coverage, the American taxpayer does. Nor does taxpayer support of the company end there. We unwitting taxpayers have heavily subsidized Wal-Mart’s success. Good Jobs First maintains a project called Wal-Mart Subsidy Watch that tracks and exposes how U.S. taxpayer money supports Wal-Mart’s operations, like the “more than $1.2 billion in tax breaks, free land, infrastructure assistance, low-cost financing and outright grants from state and local governments around the country.”79
And just try to put a dollar value on the social fabric of a community, which Wal-Mart megastores have repeatedly undermined. What’s the value of pedestrian-friendly town centers and neighborhoods, bustling with a diverse and locally-based retail mix, with storekeepers who know our names leaning over their counters to ask our kids how school is going or willing to let us pay tomorrow when we accidentally left our wallet at home? Priceless.
Not to mention the wetlands, farmland, and forests which are often cleared for the twelve-acre plots that an average big-box retailer plus its mandatory parking lot takes up.80 Wal-Mart also operates over 100 distribution centers in the United States, vast warehouses churning away 24/7, each with five miles of conveyor belts that pump nine thousand different tracks of Stuff into waiting trailers.81 Each of these distribution centers takes up 400,000 to 1 million square feet of space.82 To put that in perspective, 1 million square feet is about twenty football fields. Across the country, Wal-Mart has eviscerated thousands of small towns and natural landscapes; those losses are part of the true cost of the “always low prices” too.
And the costs don’t end there. What comes between the raw materials, factories, distribution centers, and stores? Those trucks, container barges, and airplanes I mentioned earlier. Not surprisingly, no company has more trucks on America’s roads than Wal-Mart, with more than eight thousand drivers racking up more than 850 million miles per year.83 Wal-Mart, like most major retailers, frequently deals with trucking brokers who sell their services as independent contractors. This means Wal-Mart doesn’t have to buy or maintain the trucks, pay for fuel, or provide benefits for these contracted drivers—no health insurance, unemployment insurance, workers’ comp, Social Security, pension plans, vacations, or sick days. This also means they’re not required to ensure compliance with federal OSHA (Occupational, Safety and Health Administration) regulations for drivers.84 A study in New Jersey found that 75 percent of truckers (statewide, not Wal-Mart’s alone) were independent contractors, earning just $28,000 per year on average, with zero employer-paid benefits.85 Like Wal-Mart’s store employees, these drivers have to rely on public health care programs, so taxpayers are essentially also subsidizing Wal-Mart’s and other retailers’ transport systems.
Given all of this, it’s hard to take Wal-Mart seriously when it broadcasts its commitment to sustainability. Yes, Wal-Mart has made some real environmental improvements in its operations. Sources that are closer to the company than I am swear there’s a sincere environmental awareness growing among many within the company leadership. Wal-Mart has switched its corporate fleet of cars to hybrids, made more of its packaging biodegradable and recyclable, installed solar panels on some stores, and even committed to eliminate PVC shower curtains and kids toys containing the toxic chemical phthalates.86 The question is whether, in the big picture, these steps even matter. Wal-Mart still has a major problem with scale. It is moving so much non-durable toxic-laden Stuff