The Wal*Mart Conspiracy

A couple of days ago i noted that Wal*Mart's marketpower was sometimes a good thing since it brought red-state sensibilities to the cultural marketplace. Now the New York Times has weighed in and they concur in part (red-state sensibilities) and dissent in part (a good thing).

The article tries to sound the alarm (the Philistines are coming) but it is not tightly argued and shows how urban elitism can distort a reporter's vision.

Until five years ago, few people other than devoted evangelical Christians had heard of VeggieTales, a small company's series of cartoon videos about talking cucumbers and tomatoes learning biblical lessons.

Those evangelicals, just a tiny little demographic hardly worth noticing. Except the Times's own Nicholas Kristof noted a few weeks ago that evangelicals make up 46% of the population.

Music executives say the chains have helped turn country performers like the Dixie Chicks, Toby Keith and Faith Hill into superstars.

Ah, yes, those boys in Bentonville stoking the star-making machinery. What Wal*Mart did was make record buying more convenient (and cheaper) for its customer base. This probably helped sell country records. However, it is record buyers, not the seller, who make specific artists popular. Moreover, in the specific cases of the Dixie Chicks and Faith Hill (and Shania Twain as well), they probably owe their superstardom to a handful of music video channels headquartered in New York.


The growing clout of Wal-Mart and the other big discount chains — they now often account for more than 50 percent of the sales of a best-selling album, more than 40 percent for a best-selling book, and more than 60 percent for a best-selling DVD — has bent American popular culture toward the tastes of their relatively traditionalist customers.

Sounds scary doesn't it. Another way to look at the matter is that "traditionalist" consumers are a market segment. Profit-motivated media companies sell stuff these consumers like through a channel they find convenient.

But with the chains' power has come criticism from authors, musicians and civil liberties groups who argue that the stores are in effect censoring and homogenizing popular culture.

I can't quite figure out how selling Veggie Tale videos or Ann Coulter books censors anything. South Park DVDs and Eric Alterman's books are still available-- you can find 50 Cent or Nelly on multiple cable channels and in thousands of stores. Similarly, adding a Coulter to an Alterman sounds like diversifying opinion not homogenizing popular culture.

"It is going to hurt sales of anything that is at all controversial, and if the stores are not going to put the CD's on the shelves, then the record companies are not going to make them," said Jay Rosenthal, a lawyer who represents the Recording Artists Coalition, a lobbying organization whose founders included the performers Don Henley and Sheryl Crow. (Wal-Mart banned one of Ms. Crow's albums because it criticized the chain for selling guns.)

I doubt many devoted Sheryl Crow fans passed on her album after Wal*Mart dropped it. After all, even in the boonies, there are places to buy CDs other than Wal*Mart.

In another worrisome trend for the entertainment business, the discount chains' narrow selection is increasing the industry's dependence on hit books, albums and videos, making it harder to call attention to new work and sell older work. "Once a book gets on the best-seller list, it becomes entrenched at the big discounters," Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, said. And other bookstores offer discounts on books from the best-seller list, so in that way the chains "help determine what gets sold at traditional bookstores as well," he said.

Huh? No doubt the entertainment industry has become addicted to block-busters. But that is not because of the chain stores-- there are a host of peculiar economic factors and business practices that push the industry in that direction. Given that addiction, the industry is rightly eager to find books and CDs that it can sell through a chain that 100 million Americans visit each week. Reliance on Wal*Mart is a result of, not the cause of the block-buster syndrome.


The stores have pushed best-sellers' sales to new heights by putting deeply discounted blockbusters into the hands of millions of customers.

Read that again. The chains "put" the books and CDs into our hands. We don't buy them, they put them in our carts. Sounds sinister.

Or you could say that stores like Wal*Mart have helped increase over all sales of popular titles by cutting margins.


The mass merchandisers' ability to sell vast quantities of deeply discounted albums has disproportionately benefited performers more likely to appeal to a rural, small-town or suburban audience, generally benefiting country and hurting rap, several music executives said.

It's the Times, after all, so we can't have a story without implying some harm to minorities. But does selling more country "hurt" rap artists in any meaningful way? Isn't it better described as expanding the market for CDs and increasing the variety of available music?

Mr. Kirshbaum of AOL Time Warner's books unit said he decided to start a religious imprint because a book buyer for Wal-Mart told him that more than half its sales were Christian books.

So Wal*Mart provided useful feedback about a potential market and a publisher decided to capitalize on it. Note, Wal*Mart wasn't trying to proselytize, they just pointed out what their customers bought. So they were not actively "shaping the popular culture," just trying to gauge the true shape of it so they could make a buck.

At what point does the discounters' selling prowess combine with their restrictive standards to influence new work from record labels, book publishers and film studios? Their executives all call that possibility remote.

Wow, after all the scary insinuations we get to the end and find this admission.