Big Box

By Crispin Sartwell

This is blameworthy, but I shop at Wal-Mart. A lot.

The complaints against Wal-Mart are myriad, formidable, and familiar. Wal-Mart sucks business out of downtown areas and local control, turning all of America into a sea of big-box mediocrity. It accomplishes this feat by underselling everyone, which it is able to do by its vast scale. And it can sell a pair of jeans for $12.99 because those jeans were made by the sad, overworked, infinitely exploited workers of Guatemala and Indonesia.

I live in farming country, but I am buying California strawberries at Wal-Mart. There's a new little local bakery in town, but I'm coming home with plastic containers full of bad Wal-Mart donut holes. The Amish make nice outdoor furniture, but I went to Wal-Mart and bought a $99 poplar bench.

I end up at Wal-Mart several times a week: it pulls me in like a black hole. And like a black hole, once you wander in, it's hard to wander out. The Supercenter is huge, and you find yourself crisscrossing it back and forth, contemplating cat toys, or posters of Britney Spears, or chainsaws.

Here's the deal: We live out in the country and don't have a lot of close options. We have five kids. Four want to go to Wal-Mart (the other will accept only Abercrombie and Fitch). Our lives are a touch . . . hectic, and you can get everything you need at one place.

In fact, you can get more than you will ever need at one place. Wal-Mart is an infinite multiplication of consumer abundance: a plethora, a myriad. In its own cheesy way, it's a temple to our Gods: choices and things.

Last time I had to buy a personal computer, I just more or less closed my eyes and spat: I really could not get ahold of the choices before me of operating systems, models, RAM, and so on.

In a situation of abundance, no choice can ever be non-arbitrary or completely confident, because each choice is a choice between too many things. Thus the life of consumers like me is an anxious life.

And yet we demand the sense that we are making choices perhaps more than we demand anything else. I teach a course called "The Ethics of Art and Design." This semester we have been studying World War 2-era Britain, in which in order to conserve timber and textiles, the government started designing furniture and clothing, and requiring manufacturers to make things according to those designs.

My students can hardly even get their heads around this idea, even as an emergency wartime policy. How could you only be able to buy one kind of bureau? But even though having no choices must have been irritating, it must also have been a bit of a relief.

Choice between consumer goods seem at times to be the freedom Americans value most. But like all freedoms it is also a source of anxiety. And underneath the apparently limitless multiplication of choices, we participate in their own limitation as well.

I'd like to run Linux, for example. I think open-sourcing is a great way to do software. But I don't even have time to check it out, frankly. Windows, though it kind of sucks, is the easiest to grab. So I do. There are literally billions of sites on the internet; making the internet useful involves marking five of them as your favorites and limiting yourself basically to them. Otherwise you just can't deal.

And though Wal-Mart might seem to provide infinite choice, its arrival in Shrewsbury has also cut down on every choice but to go to Wal-Mart. So that even as I am insisting on my consumer choices, I am living in the box.

Perhaps the notion of the "big box" is the best way to understand the extent of choice that we want or could exercise. We want choices, but we want walls. And in some ways, maybe both the choices and the walls are delusions with which we comfort ourselves.

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Crispin Sartwell writes from Railroad, PA. Contact him through www.crispinsartwell.com