I recently watched the documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005, d. Greenwald). The film designation “documentary” is analagous to the label “non-fiction” in the publishing world. Go into a bookstore and one will find numerous sub-categories of the non-fiction meta-category. Non-fiction encapsulates everything from cookbooks to biographies to the latest opinionated tomes of political pundits. The designation documentary is too large and needs similar sub-categories. The High Cost of Low Price is akin to editorial investigative works such as Fast Food Nation and has more in common with films such as Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room or Super Size Me than it does with an episode of Nova.

The High Cost of Low Price is biased and makes a specific argument—in a word, that Wal-Mart’s current business practices hurt society. Because a film makes an argument does not in itself discount the research of the filmmakers or the merits of their claims. One cannot expect, however, that they are watching a completely objective work. (Whether or not objectivity exists is not something I wish to discuss in this post.) Admittedly, I came to The High Cost of Low Price already sympathetic to any work that criticizes Wal-Mart. As the son of small business owners, I find many of Wal-Mart’s business practices to be detrimental to the economy and fabric of society. That said, I believe that The High Cost of Low Price is an articulate and moving work, though one lacking differing opinions.

The first story of the documentary hit me in the face. The film opens with a vignette of a family-owned hardware store. The store is in a small town in Ohio and Wal-Mart has recently opened. My parents’ business is a retail hardware store and Wal-Mart will soon open in Sanger, California—the town where I grew up and where my parents have their business. I was in tears as I watched three generations of the family discuss how they grew their business and what Wal-Mart would do and was doing to them. The stories, the arguments of the family and their employees were almost exact copies of those I hear from my family (my brother is set to take over the family business when my parents retire). The vignette ends in completely unsurprising fashion, with a liquidation of the store’s inventory and the final closing of the business. Another story of family-owned supermarkets also resonates with my parents’ experience when facing big business. The supermarket owners complained that their city was giving Wal-Mart concessions in terms of zoning and taxes that they themselves could not receive. The City of Sanger has actively courted Wal-Mart despite the outcry of several businesses, many of which have operated in Sanger for decades. When my parents and other business owners asked the city for breaks in taxes or permits to build or expand that were given to Wal-Mart, the city turned down these business owners. The film asks my question, “Why does Wal-Mart, the largest retail chain in the world need to be the recipient of such breaks?” One mayor in the film says that if they didn’t concede to Wal-Mart’s requests, the company would have simply set up shop right outside city limits. The city’s business would still go to Wal-Mart, but the city itself would not benefit from the sales tax revenues.

From there Greenwald paints a thorough picture of Wal-Mart as a bad business. Wal-Mart may bring in low prices, but according to the filmmakers, they drive down retail wages $3 billion annually. The company offers a buy-in health care policy for its workers, but many cannot afford the payments. Former store managers and regional Wal-Mart supervisors recount how they offered education to workers so that they can go on government assistance such as WIC, Medi-Cal, or Medicaid, costing state governments millions of dollars each year. The High Cost of Low Price also addresses issues of customer safety, unions, and manufacturing in China.

I appreciate the multiplicity of stories found in the documentary. Though the film itself has an agenda, the people interviewed fall all over the political spectrum. There are self-avowed conservatives who own small businesses that are afraid of Wal-Mart’s presence. There are pro-labor liberals who decry the efforts Wal-Mart takes in shutting down any organizing activity. Perhaps the most moving section of the film comes at the end. Two parallel stories are told of two very different communities fighting the opening of Wal-Mart’s in their neighborhoods. One is an urban setting in Inglewood, California, and the other is in suburban Glendale, Arizona. The two women they follow were active in organizing efforts to stop Wal-Mart in their respective contexts. In the Inglewood story, we hear the Episcopalian priest, Rev. Altagracia Perez proclaim that Christians are not about capital, but about people. We see Perez making speeches on television with Rep. Maxine Waters and Jesse Jackson in the background. In Glendale, autographed pictures from Ronald Reagan and the Bush family hang on the walls of Sandra Laney’s house. Both women oppose Wal-Mart because they are concerned that the store will affect their communities’ ways of life to negative extents. They organize their communities against the retail giant and both are successful. These vignettes offer hope, but it is a hard hope. I believe that Wal-Mart can change and that it is up to us as consumers to be a part of that process. Wal-Mart will continue to win, though, because we let traditional disagreements keep us from working together. It is not good for either labor or business for a Wal-Mart to open in a market and both sides will oppose a new store, although for different reasons. If they could put aside their differences and realize that they have the same goal, they would likely succeed more often. That is not to say that these parties would have to agree on all issues in the future or the present, but that I believe it is possible to work together in the short term for a common goal. The Industrial Areas Foundation has a principle in their organizing work that says there are no eternal allies nor eternal enemies.

The film works less well, however, in that it does not directly address many of the claims that support Wal-Mart. That is, the opposite perspective, the one that says why Wal-Mart is good for society is nowhere to be found outside the claims of Wal-Mart president and CEO Lee Scott. For example, a common retort to the statistic that Wal-Mart drives down retail wages in the US is that the low prices of the company’s products actually increase real wages by keeping money in customers’ pockets. I would have appreciated it if Greenwald would have interacted with such an argument.

I recommend the film highly, but watch it with a grain of salt. If you want more information, you can check out the film’s website, which can be found here.