Walmart Inc. announced at the end of February that it will be closing two of its locations in Portland, Oregon by the end of March — and laying off 600 employees in the process.
A Walmart spokesman gave the following statement regarding the closures:
The decision to close these stores was made after a careful review of their overall performance. We consider many factors, including current and projected financial performance, location, population, customer needs, and the proximity of other nearby stores when making these difficult decisions
This is a perfectly normal decision for any capitalist firm to make; it is the inevitable logic of the capitalist firm put into action.
Like all capitalist firms, Walmart Inc. exists for one reason, and one reason alone: to generate profits for its shareholders, especially the monopolist families who own the largest stakes. If one of its locations is “underperforming,” if it is failing to generate profits at an acceptably high rate, then the firm will dispassionately cut its losses and shutter its less-profitable stores — no matter how many workers are left jobless in the process,; no matter how the poorest and most vulnerable consumers in the surrounding community are affected. Such retreats are individually of little consequence to a massive firm: Walmart Inc. owns around 5,000 locations within the U.S. alone. Closing a few “underperforming” stores is nearly insignificant to the corporation’s monopolist major shareholders. And so, Walmart’s executives, as the dutiful servants of these monopolists, will reflexively amputate their “excess” properties without a second thought, the same way a millipede might instinctively amputate one of its own multitudinous legs.
All of this is straightforward enough. But the U.S. corporate media has an odd way of “interpreting” Walmart’s closures.
In a December 2022, interview with CNBC, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, made the following remark:
Theft is an issue. It’s higher than it’s historically been. [McMillon cites no evidence for this claim, because there is no evidence.] And we’ve got safety measures, security measures, that we put in place by store location. I think local law enforcement being staffed, and being a good partner, is part of that equation… It’s really city by city, location by location. It’s store managers working with local law enforcement. And we’ve got great relationships there, for the most part. That’s the way we approach it.
Note that McMillon regards the U.S. Empire’s police forces not merely as a public “service,” but as a “good partner” to the capitalists. His characterization is absolutely correct: the police in this country, as in all capitalist countries, exist not to “protect and serve” the people, but to protect the private property, and thus the profits, of the capitalists, and to serve the capitalists by repressing, through everyday brutality and terror, the poor and the racially oppressed masses — the so-called “criminal elements.”
When asked if it “matters” that police sometimes neglect to arrest shoplifters “below certain levels” — as if anyone should care that someone walks out of a Walmart with a few unpaid-for cans of food, or a pack of socks, or a handful of school supplies — McMillon replied with a warning: “If that’s not corrected over time, prices will be higher, and/or stores will close.”
McMillon’s warning is at best a half-truth. Shoplifting is an infinitesimally small component of that determination. But exactly how small?
Lost merchandise is known as “shrinkage.” According to reliable reports in the capitalist press — that is, by the capitalists’ own admission — Walmart’s shrinkage amounts to approximately $3 billion per year, against a nearly $300 billion in total annual revenue (or, a loss of about 1% of its annual revenue). Of this shrinkage, about one-third is due to normal accidental breakage, another third to “employee theft,” and the last third to shoplifting. Thus, in sum, shoplifting costs Walmart about 0.3% of its total yearly revenue — a drop in the bucket, and a drop that every retailer, from mega-corporations down to the corner stores and street vendors, accounts for ahead of time, in the form of insurance. In other words, practically speaking, shoplifting costs Walmart Inc. absolutely nothing whatsoever.
When Walmart and other retailers raise prices, the underlying reason is not shoplifting. Prices rise, generally speaking, as a “normal” adaptation to inflation. At certain moments, prices may also rise when certain capitalists gain a momentary advantage in the market — for example, when they’ve rooted out competitors and cornered the market, when they’ve formed trusts and achieved a local monopoly, or during moments of acute crisis, when demand spikes and it becomes possible to price-gouge consumers.
Why, then, do Walmart’s corporate executives and spokespersons claim that petty theft is to blame for rising prices? In order to cast blame away from their firm, as an actor within a capitalist market; in order to fool its consumer base into blaming the public at large, and especially the poor — those most likely, owing to the desperation of poverty, to commit petty theft. This scapegoating of the poor appeals to reactionaries, especially to middle-class “small business owners,” professionals, and wealthy homeowners, who share with the capitalists an interest in exploiting and repressing the working-poor.
Some corporate media outlets have latched onto McMillon’s “old news” December 2022 interview with CNBC. These outlets are now spinning a narrative that Walmart’s Portland closures were forced by purportedly “rampant” shoplifting and “record-breaking retail theft” — that the mega-corporation has been so horribly bullied, abused, and taken advantage of by local poor people that it now has no other choice but to abandon Portland. Apparently, we are supposed to believe that Portland has descended into a kind of hellish anarchy, with hordes of bandits roaming the streets, mercilessly driving retailers out of business — one stolen can of soda and bag of chips at a time.
The fascist Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, even went so far as to allege on Twitter: “This is what happens when cities refuse to enforce the rule of law. It allows the mob to take over. Businesses can’t operate in that environment.” Liberals, including Portland’s Democrat mayor, Ted Wheeler, quickly pointed out to Governor Abbott that several Walmart locations across Texas have closed in recent years — but this is beside the point.
Needless to say, this hellscape-Portland narrative is nonsense, and only the most gullible, slack-jawed, dead-eyed, corporate-media-poisoned dolts will buy it for a second.
Actually, there is nothing exceptional about circumstances surrounding the Portland closures. Portland has not, in fact, descended into a hellish chaos of roving bandit mobs, like something out of a post-apocalyptic action film.
In fact, Walmart’s announcements of closures in February included ten locations across several states, including Arkansas, D.C., Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wisconsin; only two of those listed were in Portland. At the time, the company announced that the closures were due, simply and straightforwardly, to “underperformance.”
Even some liberal economists — those who aren’t out for blood, for expanded police militarization against poor and racially oppressed communities, at least — have acknowledged the unlikelihood that Walmart is closing its Portland stores due to shoplifting. A better explanation is that Walmart simply failed to corner the market in Portland; its overall market share was smaller and less competitive, and thus less profitable, than it wanted, so it packed up and left to find more fruitful territory. In one article, a market analyst is quoted as follows: “Walmart typically needs to be where they can be a big player and capture all the shares. There are some locations where they’ve struggled to gain a strong foothold, and they’ve left those places.” This explanation, straight from the mouth of a liberal professional whose very job is to advise capitalists on profiteering strategy, is straightforwardly correct.
Why, then, is the U.S. corporate media shamelessly lying about a purported Portland “crime wave” forcing retailers out of business?
Because the U.S. corporate media, in all its shades, is the loyal mouthpiece of the ruling monopoly-capitalist class.
That’s why even an event as mundane as an enormous retail firm closing a few of its less profitable stores must be twisted by “our” corporate media into a Poor Law narrative about the rapacious, self-destructive greed of the stupid, unwashed, savage poor, who must be reigned in by “our” military-dictatorship police, lest these animalistic masses tear apart “our” country’s very social fabric by a thousand cuts of petty theft.
The U.S. corporate media’s hatred of and contempt for the poor masses knows no bounds, and its propensity to demonize these masses with clumsily spun narratives and outright lies is untempered by any sense of human decency, journalistic integrity, or shame. But this wretched profession serves a purpose: in broadcasting their hatred and contempt for the vast majority of this country’s, and the world’s, human beings, for the poor and the dispossessed, the corporate media talking-heads serve, day by day, to normalize the misanthropic ideology of the capitalists. Our rulers will gladly watch as we starve, as we succumb to plague by the millions, as we suffer daily state-terror at the hands of the fascist police — so long as they can stave off a decline in their rate of profit, just a little longer. But the rate of profit is declining all the same, for this decline is a process built-in to the capitalist mode of production; it is a fundamental law of capitalism, and it will bring even the biggest firms crumbling down, just as erosion flattens even the tallest mountains.
