My 7-year-old son doesn’t know a world without Wal-Mart. Before he could read, he recognized the familiar logo. “Wally World!” he declaims every time the ubiquitous trademark comes within sight.

But I remember the world before Wal-Mart.

Here in Maine, it wasn’t that long ago. In the month of Wal-Mart’s entrance, Hurricane Andrew was swirling into a raging storm that would devastate Florida. Ross Perot was swirling into a raging storm that would devastate the first President Bush’s hope for a second term.

Maine’s first Wal-Mart was built in August 1992, though a Sam’s Club came a year before. Thirteen years later, three Sam’s Clubs, 12 Wal-Marts, plus 10 Supercenters, dot our landscape.

Giant footprints

Perhaps “dot our landscape” is inapt. The footprints of these retail leviathans can cover four football fields – not including parking. The average Wal-Mart Supercenter covers 186,000 square feet and includes 116,000 items for sale.

Wally’s footprint covers more than mere terrain, however. In just over a decade of retailing in our state, Wal-Mart has come to employ 6,742 Maine workers, becoming the state’s second-largest private employer – outstripping other in-state giants like Bath Iron Works, L.L. Bean and MBNA. Wal-Mart employs more than half the number of Mainers working in our pulp and paper industry.

Interestingly, edging out Wal-Mart in Maine employment is competing retail behemoth Hannaford.

(By the way, Hannaford has grown a lot since its humble origins in Southern Maine in 1883. Hannaford now has 22,000 employees across five states and is itself owned by global grocery giant Delhaize, a Belgian company with 2,565 stores stretching from Indonesia to Slovakia to Farmington, Maine. But I digress …)

Loving to hate success

Nothing reveals our schizophrenia about global capitalism more than our love-hate relationship with Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer.

While becoming hugely successful (2004 retail sales hit $265 billion), the company has becoming the favorite whipping boy not only of those who throw chairs through Starbucks windows in Seattle, but also of ordinary people who continue to shop there. If you look at the recent record, Wal-Mart gives us ample reason for unease:

Last month, Wal-Mart paid the federal government $11 million to close an investigation into its alleged violation of immigration laws by using cleaning contractors who hired illegal aliens. The probe began after government agents arrested 245 illegal aliens working as floor cleaners at 60 Wal-Mart stores in 21 states.

This came on the heels of a February announcement that the company would pay $135,000 to settle the government’s case that Wal-Mart violated child labor laws. An internal Labor Department investigation was launched after this settlement was called a “sweetheart deal.” (The settlement also required the department to provide 15 days of notice to Wal-Mart’s headquarters before inspecting any store.) Wal-Mart allegedly violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by allowing 16- and 17-year-old employees in three states to operate heavy machinery.

When it became known last year that Wal-Mart planned to build a store in Dunkirk, Maryland, residents in the quaint town agitated for and passed tough regulations to limit the size of big-box retailers to 75,000 square feet. Wal-Mart, however, did not become No. 1 by taking no for an answer. Now the company “plans to build a 74,998 square foot store cheek by jowl with a 22,689-square-foot garden center. The two Wal-Marts – each with its own entrance, utilities, bathrooms and cash registers – would have a combined area 30 percent larger” than the recently enacted limit, according to the Washington Post.

PBS’s Frontline has reported that Wal-Mart is responsible for a significant share of our $150 billion trade deficit with China. In fact, according to a new book, Wal-Mart imports more goods from China than the entire countries of Britain or France do.

Aggressively anti-union, Wal-Mart will close next month its store in Jonquiere, Quebec, which last September became the company’s first unionized store in North America. According to the Associated Press, the closest a U.S. union has ever come to winning a battle with Wal-Mart occurred in 2000 at a store in Jacksonville, Texas, where 11 workers in the store’s meatpacking department voted to join and be represented by the United Food & Commercial Workers. That effort failed when Wal-Mart eliminated the job of meatcutter companywide.

But that’s only half the story.

Here in Maine, Wal-Mart provides work for many people who might not otherwise find it. At a reported average wage of $9.98 per hour for full-time associates, Wal-Mart’s payroll pumps tens of millions of dollars back into Maine’s economy. According to Dunn & Bradstreet figures reported by Wal-Mart, during the past year the company spent $151,654,371 for merchandise and services with 356 suppliers in the state of Maine. As a result, Wal-Mart supports 13,116 supplier jobs in the state of Maine.

Furthermore, the retailer reports that last year it collected more than $48.3 million in sales taxes for the state and paid more than $12.7 million in state and local taxes in Maine.

During the past year, the company claims that Wal-Mart stores and Sam’s Clubs contributed $1,075,508 to local causes and organizations in the communities they serve in Maine, and raised an additional $643,003, for a grand total of $1,718,511. These funds include literacy grants ($25,000), Safe Neighborhood Hero grants ($37,500), and Teach of the Year grants ($29,000).

Nationally, the McKinsey Global Institute, a respected think tank, concluded in a 2001 report that Wal-Mart’s managerial innovations had increased overall productivity by more than all the investments in computers and information technology of recent years. Another recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Wal-Mart’s cheap prices have a substantial positive impact in holding down inflation.

Fortune magazine routinely names Wal-Mart as one of the “most admired” companies in America and one of the 100 best companies to work for.

How do we reconcile these contradictions about Wal-Mart? My short answer is, don’t bother trying. Wal-Mart is neither good nor bad – it has no morality. Corporations are legal constructions that exist at our pleasure because they have proven effective at delivering goods efficiently. They are incapable of moral feeling. Only human beings can have morality and ethics. So while the managers, shareholders, employees and customers of Wal-Mart may know right and wrong, the corporation itself does not. Wal-Mart is, at its essence, a reflection of those of us who shop there, work there and own the company stock.

Love it or hate it, the new economic reality occasioned by the rise of Wal-Mart was brought about by our own impulses and actions. Or, as Daniel Gross wrote in Slate, “Every day, millions of Americans ratify Wal-Mart’s strategy by shopping there. Stores don’t kill economies, consumers do.”

I would add that we can build economies, too. The world with Wal-Mart is still what we make it.

Richard A. Bennett, a former president of the Maine Senate, is a consultant in corporate governance. He lives in Norway, and may be contacted at [email protected].