Walmart is the REAL world

“Vanity Fair” never seems to learn. It got into the polling business many decades ago and predicted noisesomely that Alf Landon would defeat Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. (Landon did carry two states.) Even my Republican dad admitted to voting for FDR that year.
So “Vanity Fair” went out of business—a rare instance of something actually dying of embarrassment. It came back a few years ago and now it’s back in the polling business—and is expressing shock at its own poll results. It seems that just about half the people who took the poll think Walmart “symbolizes American today”.
“Vanity Fair” sputtered that “only a cynic would really THINK that.” “Vanity Fair’s” problem is that doesn’t get off Manhattan Island (located far off the coast of the United States somewhere). I’ve lived on Manhattan for years—loved it. But I tried never to lose sight of reality.
Periodically I would find myself looking for a particularly American product, not available on that island. I would apologize for my persistence, explaining, “I was raised in a foreign country.” To the inevitable question, which one?, I would answer, “The United States.”
What the editors and poll takers at “Vanity Fair” don’t really understand about this nation is that its culture and life style are built on LOW PRICES. This precludes a lot of shopping at places like Bergdorf’s, Tiffany’s, Gucchi’s, Georg Jenson and the like.
Long before Walmart, there were discount stores on Fifth Avenue—E.J.Korvette’s was just a couple of blocks down from Saks in the 1960s. The America we know and live in was built on stores like Korvette’s, K-Mart, Costco and Walmart, to name a few.
They enable us to own luxuries, look prosperous and faintly stylish with an outlay that leaves us enough for groceries. A comparison between French female secretaries and their American counterparts that I read years ago makes a good point about this country.
The Parisian women owned three or four outfits—all stylish, well made and enduring. They thought nothing of wearing the same outfit twice in a week, knowing it bespoke quality. The New York secretaries wouldn’t have been caught dead in the same outfit twice in a week—even twice in two weeks.
They bought much cheaper outfits and lots of them. Their closets were FULL of variety without undue quality. Reminds me of a young woman I knew years ago. She went to Kmart and bought a new winter coat nearly every year—for about $69.00 each.
I suggested to her that if she went to a better store in this area and bought a coat for, say, $175, it would last her for five, even ten years—a clear savings. She was horrified. She lived for the variety, the change. Walmart, when it came along, was designed for her.
Lee Iacocca, an icon in America for style and dash in his automobiles, was never accused of building QUALITY into his machines. No one ever mistook a K-car or a Mustang for a Mercedes. The buyer just wanted something that might look a bit like a European equivalent. And cost less.
They are right. Walmart symbolizes America. It’s not cynicism; it’s reality. Walmart above all allows us to be what we like to imagine we actually are (I doubt if the French girls are under nearly as many illusions about themselves).
However that may be, Walmart R Us.