by GARGA CHATTERJEE
If we are going to buy American, why not adopt the American way of giving local bodies the right to refuse entry to super stores in their area
There is the United States of America and then there is the ‘idea’ of USA that exists in the minds of significant portions of the middle classes all across the globe. How this looks in real life varies slightly according to the region of the world, reflecting specific aspirations and anxieties. In the subcontinent, the latter idea is increasingly not made in a Hollywood basement, given the ‘IT-coolie’-fired traffic to the U.S. One important element of the newer idea of USA that flows back daily by television, Skype, photographs, phone conversation and emails is the ease of the consumer experience in multi-brand retail stores as big as football stadia, with the variety of wares on offer seemingly endless — from bananas to bikinis and beyond. Walmart is unquestionably the most prominent of these chain-stores, a super-brand. Viewed in another way, it is a ‘shop’ whose name is more famous than the brand names of the things it sells.
The shopping experience
I have been living in the U.S. for the last few years, more or less in east coast cities. The last six have been in the Boston area. Many separate municipal towns constitute much of the Boston area. My location however deprives me of the quintessentially ‘American’ experience of shopping at Walmart. I live in Cambridge and hence I am at least 10 miles away from the two Walmarts in the vicinity. Given that I use public transport and my bicycle to move around, both these locations are quite inaccessible for me. Walmarts and stores like that cannot exist in the U.S. in the absence of the stupendous subsidy to the highway systems that make the stores viable, not to mention the mass culture of individual car ownership that makes such stores reachable. If one were to look at a map of Walmart locations across the U.S., it corresponds very well with a population density map of the nation. That said, the absence of Walmart in my neighbouring areas and the preponderance of such stores all over the nation is a phenomenon that needs to be explained.
The Hindu for more