How Wal-Mart Sells Itself and Why People Don't Buy It

David Grinsfelder

Professor Mark Brilliant

American Studies 101

How Wal-Mart Sells Itself and Why People Don’t Buy It

Wal-Mart is the largest company in history. Not just the history of multinational corporations, not just in the history of the United States, but in the history of the world. It is the world’s largest private employer with almost two million employees (or “associates” as Wal-Mart refers to them). Wal-Mart first opened its doors in 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas, focusing on small towns in southern states to avoid direct competition with larger retailers. During the early 1980s, aggressive expansion became Wal-Mart’s key to domination of the retail industry. For two decades, the corporation averaged 140 store openings per year, replacing longtime rival Kmart as the nation’s largest discount retailer. By 1997, Wal-Mart had expanded into all 50 states and operated 2,362 stores nationwide (Neumark 2005). However, over the course of its fifty-year rise to the pinnacle of the retail industry, Wal-Mart has made a considerable amount of opponents. Some are simply cantankerous shoppers who begrudgingly enter its doors because of the irresistibly low prices the store can offer, while others are organizations with more power who criticize the questionable business practices and traditionally low wages that allow the corporation to provide such bargains in the first place. How has Wal-Mart achieved such omnipresence in the American marketplace, and how do communities react to the arrival of this corporate behemoth at their doorsteps? In this paper, I will investigate how Wal-Mart made efforts to market itself to members of the Contra Costa County in 2004, and I will explain why individuals and organizations fought the introduction of Wal-Mart into the region.

The bigger Wal-Mart grows, the more opposition it faces to its continued expansion. The world’s largest corporation attempts to remain in the good graces of the American people via three main methods - declaring that it is quintessentially American, touting its low costs and consumer convenience, and working relentlessly to cast itself in a positive light. In Wal-Mart’s 2004 battle to install a super center in Contra Costa County, it employed each of these tactics to try and overturn a zoning ordinance intended to keep the company’s superstores out.

Americans have always supported companies that share their ideals. Wal-Mart seeks to capitalize on this fact, and routinely “presents itself as a proud embodiment of American patriotism, democracy…and free market principles” (Copeland and Labuski 2013). Wal-Mart’s 2005 annual report stated that 3,200 Wal-Mart associates were on active duty, and “many more” had served in the country’s military. Former company President