Wal-Mart and Priuses
I was reading Salon.com this evening, and I ran across two articles which revealed a strange juxtaposition of values. In the article about Wal-Mart entitled Who is guilty of killing downtown?, money seems to be the underlying motivation:
The obvious question is, do the costs outweigh the benefits? And there are plenty of good reasons to argue that they do; that the total cumulative impact of Wal-Mart on the fabric of society is negative. But the unfortunate reality is that few minds are going to be changed by one-sided reports that do not even begin to acknowledge the very real reasons that people have for shopping at Wal-Mart—or the responsibility that those shoppers bear for what kind of changes are wrought in their local communities.
In the Salon.com article Why do people buy Priuses?, the argument is that people want to communicate an image of green citizenship to others.
For a majority of the owners surveyed, the purchase of a hybrid is not motivated by fuel-saving concerns. The real incentive is one’s own image as a responsible green citizen of the world. The symbolic effects of hybrid ownership are at least as powerful, if not not more so, than the functional reality.
Because their concern is not just about self-image—it’s also about communicating an image to other people. Prius owners know that their purchase of a hybrid isn’t going to make the air they breathe any cleaner or solve U.S. dependence on foreign oil, and hey, it might even have some environmentally negative consequences for the world, if those big nasty hybrid batteries turn out to be hard to dispose of somewhere down the line. But at least in the sample taken by the U.C. Davis researchers, hybrid owners are hoping that by making a statement in favor of environmental responsibility, they can convince others to join the hybrid movement, and that somewhere down the line, real change will ensue.
If I were to extrapolate further meaning from these two articles, it seems to me that they encompass the extremes of pragmatism (money) and idealism (convincing others to change their minds). The question is whether those extremes are mutually exclusive, or can be ameliorated in some way. Clearly, they are two very strong forces in society today. For the people who are concerned only with price, what would it take to change their shopping habits?
Or, as I’ve mentioned before, is this an issue of education levels? Or perhaps even class? Of course there are some people who are not in a position to focus on anything other than price. Changing the way the market functions is thus the responsibility of people who have flexibility in their spending.
On other thing. It occurs to me now that in questioning the responsibility of people shopping at Wal-Mart, the analysis of “saving money” could very well fall short in describing the true motivation. Could it be that people who shop at Wal-Mart gain just enough disposable income to make themselves feel better? Is shopping at Wal-Mart as much about class aspiration as it is about the actual monetary savings?