The months of unemployment compensation ended with a part-time library job whose single-digit hourly wage paid less than the dole. Our household income had irrevocably plummeted. A few years earlier, in 1990, my technical writer's salary and freelance earnings were so ample we bought a new Mazda Miata. Such an extravagance, today or in the future, remains unthinkable.
As my close associate and I downshifted for the slow lane of life--the emergency lane beckoning--I was troubled: We were being forced to lay waste to our savings to cover unanticipated expenses. And too often when I went to the local hypermarket, I felt obligated to discard the Andy Jackson greenbacks. I felt poor.
My MBA mind mulled over a salient fact: the chain of hypermarkets, which need not be named, had been bought and sold more than once by investor syndicates back east during those money-grubbing 1980s. I knew the East Coast investors were demanding their bottom line and making me pay for it. Or so I thought as I fished out the twenties and felt worse for doing so.
One day, the checkers at the hypermarket went out on strike. A long, ugly strike lasting months. As a dues-paying union member, I couldn't cross the picket line for long. I made other arrangements for groceries.
What I did was drive six miles east into that disjointed swath of affordable housing known in Portland, Oregon, as Mid County. There I found WinCo Foods, a 24-hour, big-box retailer of groceries that promised the lowest price for a symbolic quid pro quo: customers bagged their own groceries and could only pay in cash or by personal check.
An incentive to try WinCo Foods was a conversation from years before with a financial planning client. He said WinCo's formula--low prices, high volume--had yet to fail in any market the company entered. WinCo's debut in the Portland market could only succeed. The authority of my client was that he was a snack food distributor and employed hundreds in the Pacific Northwest.
It didn't take much shopping at WinCo to convince me, strike or no strike, grocery shopping at the hypermarket was personal history. For across the WinCo shelves I saw comparative savings. Initially, I had thought every time I drove the extra miles I'd burn fifty cents worth of gas, a possible tradeoff to local shopping. But when I saw savings on one item alone of fifty cents, I became a believer.
Moreover, food prices at WinCo were more predictable and less prone to float upwards to what the market might bear. Bananas are a recent example. Early in 1999, a sign at WinCo announced, "Bananas--Our Price For 1999--39 cents." What did that mean? A fellow in produce said the price of bananas had not changed in two-and-a-half years. They had no great fear about publishing the price in advance. On December 26, 1999, I can say WinCo has kept its word. What a refreshing change.
Food is, of course, a major household expense, and I found shopping WinCo saved ten, twenty dollars a week. I was even more motivated to find other ways to conserve.
My cash consciousness dictated junking our few credit cards. Years before, I had--my clothing needs turning casual--fed the Brooks Brothers card to a pair of tin snips. The last credit card in my wallet was from Chevron. The account was more than twenty-five years old. Even so, this last credit card still met the tin snips. I had made one too many mental calculations driving by Arco gas stations (and similar discounters). For the fast gas-up by credit card at Chevron, I was shelling out fifty cents to a dollar more on each tankful (possibly $75 a year).
A predictable objection to discounters like Arco is, You pay less, you get an inferior product. Consumer Reports in 1991 tested major gasolines. Exhaustively, so to speak, to the point of measuring the burn residue for each gas sample. Arco's gasoline was the equal of Chevron's.
The idea that price-competitive retailers, like Arco, offer products and services that are among the best available, regardless of price, is not without precedent. Southwest Airlines, The Vanguard Group (a mutual fund family), and IKEA (the Swedish furniture retailer) are my three quick nominees for an honor roll of value-rich companies.
After identifying WinCo for food, I added two more stores to my high-value palette: Wal-Mart and Target. Not unexpectedly, both retailers have stores near WinCo, in the same Mid-County swath of households with modest income demographics.
One of the first things I noticed when shopping at Wal-Mart were the customers. They were not the sorts I saw in Nordstrom downtown. They were probably strangers to the Saks Fifth Avenue downtown too. No, the faces and figures I saw around me at WalMart were very much working-class, moving about with a purpose to their shopping.
Conversely, the shopper at Nordstrom or Saks Fifth Avenue downtown would not go to a Wal-Mart. (I'd known the feeling.) Not unless Wal-Mart were a position in her investment portfolio and she wanted direct knowledge of what the company did. If the Nordstrom/Saks customer were asked to buy anything at Wal-Mart--anything personal like clothing--a likely answer might be, "Never, they don't have anything that suits my taste."
But for me, surrounded by these people, many of whom would not know Brooks Brothers from Blues Brothers, I was struck by the reward: I was not self-segregating myself from Others. The Others often have faces of immigrants--Mid County has many Russians, Latinos, and Vietnamese. But, truthfully, the Others are people unlike ourselves in some way we know best. They're people with whom we won't--if we are to stay ahead of the economic curve--identify.
What I had in common with these Wal-Mart (or WinCo or Target) shoppers was that we were not questing for status. The high style of Abercrombie & Fitch was downtown, not Mid-County. We were trying to make dollars last. We wanted value. If low prices sometimes meant the selection was limited, more akin to shopping at an Army PX, that would do.
Thus, when I hear people making cutting comments about Wal-Mart, I first consider if the objection is really about the merchandise and the corporate power. Or is it about the customers of modest means, of lower-middle economic circumstance, that shop there?
Still, controversy dogs the Bentonville, Arkansas, juggernaut, the world's largest retailer. Wal-Mart seems most often hijacked as a convenient and visible vehicle to protest the spread of global capitalism. Activists will single out the chain because it sells goods from other countries, China in particular. If that is not damning enough, then the charge escalates: Wal-Mart sponsors slave-labor camps in China. (Like any paranoid's complaint and Berkeley's unobserved tree in the forest, what you can't see is tough to disprove.) Nonetheless, most concede the Chinese work for wages that would be pitifully low in the USA.
Honestly, I wish 83 percent of the world could afford $50,000 SUVs, live in $500,000 homes, and have desk jobs with plenty of vacation time. But reality gives us, instead, 5 billion poor people on this planet. They demand more than wishful compassion. Although I pay union dues, I don't resist sharing the wealth with others, even if it means less wages for those living in upper North America. I am not about to boycott purchase of goods from China or any other developing country.
In the late 1970s, we vacationed in Belize. Our cabdriver, whom we got to know over the course of one week, told us there were few company jobs in the country. The poverty we saw made this obvious. He said that a blue jeans manufacturer from Texas had come to Belize City recently and opened a plant that employed women. It was very much welcomed, but they needed more of the same.
I think reactionary postures about global capitalism come down to the paramount question, Do we deny the world's poor their main chance? I had in my mind real people in Belize sewing when I bought my non-USA blue jeans from Target. Global capitalism is easy to attack: it's a faceless phrase. The blue jeans fabricators in Belize are glad for the work, what it pays. And we must keep in mind that many of these workers, as I heard, forgo buying lunch away from home to save money: They save money and pay weekly life insurance premiums (which I observed) to guarantee their children's education.
In contrast to the plight of the world's poor, my financial concerns are minor. But empathy for the makers of many of the low-cost goods I buy adds a perspective that helps transcend my consumer conditioning.
I had to ditch a catechism of brand names if only because I now bought products better characterized as no-name and unbranded. Thus buying a pair of sneakers meant focus on sneakers qua sneakers. Were they durable? I picked a style Target called skate shoes (those favored by skateboarders). I scrutinized the seams, the materials used (genuine cowhide uppers) and checked the fit with deliberation. Besides Target, I had been to Wal-Mart and Kmart, trying on sneakers in each store. The result was a pair I've worn for more than a year. Cost: Target's affordable $19.99, no tax to Oregon buyers.
Similarly, for inclement weather, I opted for the durability of hiking shoes. Of course, one can spend $150 on a pair, with possibly less in the way of man-made materials. I also know, however, that improved quality tapers off fast with higher prices. Here again, my final decision was another Target pair at that agreeable price point of $19.99.
Granted, buying this way I had fewer choices than if I were out ambling a mall. In and out of stores, I'd talk to sales clerks, eager to tell me the wonders of their expensive, but "worth-it," shoes. But the point is I've saved myself money, energy, and shopping mall-induced headaches by accepting the limited, but affordable, choices I find by cost and value-conscious shopping.
Plus, high-value stores offer more than utilitarian merchandise. When Target, as an example, ventures off into fashion--they carry post-modern architect Michael Graves' collection of kitchenware--it's affordable. Our Michael Graves design toaster (Black & Decker manufacture) is the least-expensive, best-looking toaster we've ever bought.
A good example of quality merchandise at a great price was a walkabout AM-FM radio I bought for my sister at Wal-Mart. Total cost: $7.99. My sister, in Providence, for years had wanted to get the signal of a well-known, much-loved classical music station from the Boston area. She shared this frustration with other people, some having gone on to mail order one of those Bose radios that costs $349, plus shipping and handling. That was the known good solution to the Boston radio reception problem. My sister, no electrical engineer, was ready to do so, if she ever found the discretionary funds.
So with nary an expectation, she took the Wal-Mart radio I gave her and tried tuning the Boston station. It came on clear as a bell. She was impressed and soon attached external speakers (mere inches high) that work with walkabout radios, so she could hear the radio without earphones. When I called her one day, I heard, in the background, the $7.99 wonder singing out classical music.
Besides satisfactory purchases, I've found, over time, our finances stabilizing once I systematically started trading with low-cost, high-value stores. The sense of being poor went away and being in the stores has brought a sense of gratitude. No longer do I look around and anguish over what I can't afford to have. Now, amid more affordable merchandise, with a healthier relationship to money, I look about and see much that I don't need--it's there for other people. What few things I want or need, I know I can afford. I now have enough.
And, of course, we have money left over to save. We are not living paycheck to paycheck anymore, despite the fact that both of us work part-time, 30-hours-per-week jobs. Much of our savings goes to an index mutual fund in The Vanguard Group. It seems fitting that shopping these stores leads to saving money to invest.
Something more than stanching excess cash outflows, though, has changed for me. If a financial tide were to miraculously lift our household income to former levels and beyond, I don't think that my shopping habits would revert to the old ways. I have in mind Stanley and Danko's book, The Millionaire Next Door: Millionaires are four times as likely to have a Sears credit card as one from Brooks Brothers. After Sears, their favorite retailer card is J.C. Penney. Living well within one's means is, it appears, probably an indispensable gambit to living well, period.
I can no longer look at a guy's tasseled loafers and tell by their seams he shops Brooks Brothers. I now see status in others less by the clothes they wear, less by the sneakers on their feet. To the extent that I can "unbrand" individuals, I see people more as they are. More importantly, perhaps, I judge myself less by the standards of seductive, media-fed materialism. I feel a richness being satisfied with enough. My $19.99 hiking shoes keep me warm and dry in the winter. They are nothing special, really, except for their extraordinary ordinariness.
