Good evening.
I mentioned that today was the grand opening of a new Walmart for Whitewater, larger than previously and with a proper grocery section. A Walmart here or there isn’t a big deal; what Walmart does each day, in so many stores, is a big deal. Thousands of items, in thousands of stores, stocked and replenished each day. You know, and I know, that it’s not the most sophisticated store in America; it’s not even the most sophisticated store in our small town. I wouldn’t buy a car from Walmart, but then they’re not selling cars, either.
Yet, whatever its deficiencies, it has the advantage of offering consumers a choice, where they might otherwise have lacked for one. Why would fewer choices be preferable to more choices? The new store is clean, brightly lighted, and has aisle upon aisle of food and other goods.
I once heard the last Alistair Cooke say that one of the pleasures of growing up in the British Empire was the array of foods, from so many distant, exotic places, one could purchase. I’m sure that was a pleasure, to eat bananas from faraway places (especially when other peoples ate none).
America’s Walmart offers more than the British Empire’s mercantilism ever did. Common men and women can buy goods in a Walmart the like of which an Edwardian aristocrat could only have dreamed (if he even had so much imagination as those dreams would require).
All and all, a good day, indeed.