Grocery Update #50: Walmart ÜBER ALLES

The Mass Merchant At The Center Of The U.S. Food System And What To Do About It.

Walmart ÜBER ALLES.

It’s the sheer size, to start with. Bigness as business model. Maximalism. Not clean and simplified largeness like Kroger or Target, who excel in retail brutalism. Assortment breadth times retail execution, times efficiencies of scale times inventory management, times pricing strategy, all in, all the time.

It is a architecture of dominance, an inhuman scale. Lewis Mumford would have called it the megamachine. The ceiling is high and far away. Industrial corrugated metal, with exposed beams and struts and support columns, painted a plain off-white, the occasional skylight allowing a semblance of natural light to compete and enhance the artificial sunlight. Very bright. The signage, high up in the line of sight with person sized letters.

Old Sam, the founding patriarch. Daddy Sam Walton would be so proud of where it’s all gone. Sam never met a good idea he couldn’t steal. From Carrefour, K-Mart, Costco, Meijer, the mom and pop’s he purged across the heartland. There is nothing original about Walmart. They just maxed it all out.

Welcome to Walmart. Maximum grocery.

The shelving is tall, it limits most of the horizon but still so much lower than the ceiling that you can still see across the store from end to end, a dense, crowded, busy, loud vastness, filled floor to almost ceiling with every kind of consumable merchandise from food to automotive to apparel to electronics to odd knick-knack tchotchke dollar store bullshit, plus signage, retail and industrial rack shelving, coolers, freezers, lone shoppers with their carts, whole families dragging screaming kids along, elderly greeters finding meaning in their kindness, and the occasional, busy stock clerks in their blue vests, plus, always, security personnel with holstered sidearms making sure there is no expropriation of the merchandise, all under the harsh fluorescent track lights, bright as a thousand suns, but still climate controlled at a refreshing 70 degrees farenheit. The perfect temperature to separate you from your money, to the tune of nearly $300 billion a year in grocery sales off of 25% gross margins. Almost always first, second or third in local market share, data mining your every need into the world’s most complex, efficient and unsentimental supply chain, a value funnel that extracts almost 30 cents of every U.S. grocery dollar straight into the bloated, gas giant-sized portfolios of the Walton Family.

Their Q3 comps, over 5%, unheard of at this scale of business, over 4700 stores, with grocery leading the way. Over 30 cents of every U.S. grocery dollar, down the Walton gullet. Ecommerce charging hard at Amazon with 24% annual growth and 26% advertising growth, really unstoppable. Market share increasing over 1.5% nationwide since 2022. Drawing in high income customers while drawing the working poor away from Dollar General. Walmart is eating everyone’s lunch.

Walmart is the center of the food system, governed out of Bentonville, Arkansas, the supermassive black hole about which all else rotates, never escaping the gravitational pull. This is just math. Gravity is just math. Retail, just math. And if you want to reach American grocery consumers and understand American food consumption, where it all begins and ends, the math that is the alpha and omega of grocery.

All those billions of products, handled by millions of supply chain workers, supplied by thousands of vendors, traveling tens of thousands of miles, one million shipping containers of imports a year, just to end up in your humble cart or basket. All based on highly complex algorithmic forecasting, inventory management, financial projections, and adverse payment terms that favor Old Sam Walton’s profit margins so that you could have everything you need at best in market prices (at least most of the time, *ahem* Aldi).

Walmart stores are just the final terminus points, the physical ends of supply lines that run across time and space from all over the world, disproportionately from China, but also Indiana and India, Laredo and Thailand, Missouri and Chile. Supply lines that start with the creation of a purchase order, as if divinely inspired by the minions out of Bentonville, but more likely just sent via digital networks.

Back in the 1970s, Old Sam was an early adopter in satellite telecommunications. He saw the future, just as the U.S. economy was pivoting to a retail and services based economy, decades before the Clinton-Bush NAFTA alignment shed thousands of domestic manufacturers to overseas production, Walmart knew globalization and offshoring was the future. Purchases based on lopsided supplier agreements rooted in U.S global trade agreements, negotiated at the business end of an intercontinental ballistic missile and leveraged on narrow, feeble interpretations of antitrust laws. Supply chains that draw raw materials, labor, energy and time into the largest privately owned and long term planned economy in human history.

Yes, Walmart is a planned economy, built on top-down financial forecasts and lopsided labor relations. Bentonville’s globalized command economy, still dependent on Chinese imports, the externalized costs, the negative feedback loop of environmental, labor and human health borne by society at large and not included in the Walton balance sheet.

Yes, capitalism’s greatest miracle, the world’s largest for-profit, publicly traded, but still mostly family-owned corporation, is a planned economy, erasing Mises and Hayek from any contemporary relevance to real and existing business practices, except in the minds of their most diehard dogmatic adherents.

Planned economies the size of large governments, archipelagos of private sector tyrannies, union-averse, at-will employers, family owned in the dynastic sense, pharaonic, imperial, what Musk and Thiel fantasize in their most fevered nightsweats, like pasty American Hanovers, Tudors, Windsors, Romanovs, Habsburgs, Bourbons, Rockefellers. Waltons.

“Fascism is corporatism”, articulated by Mussolini a century ago, before he was gutted and hung upside down in a public square at war’s end, back when he was just a thug who realized it was much more lucrative to be a thug for the oligarchs. And somehow we lost this key insight into corporatism and top-down, bureaucratic, centralized, command and control, privately-owned enterprises, the polar opposite of the economic liberty of both small scale entrepreneurship or worker power in the workplace, and then forgetting in the haze of consumerism, as the corporate economic model consolidated all around us. Corporatism is now status quo.

Over $15 billion in 2023 profits, $9 billion in buybacks and dividends, much of it hoovered up by the Walton scions, who own 46% of Walmart. Walmart, still family owned. All on top of the $40 billion in wealth accumulation during the pandemic and many more billions between then and now. A million dollar bills stacked up is 357 feet high. A billion dollar bills is 68 miles high, over 357,000 feet. Pandemic profits from 2020 alone, over 2700 miles high of stacked dollar bills piled into the Walton Family trust. Economics, the dismal science, a quasi-religious rationalization of systems of gargantuan, unheard of wealth accumulation. Not even a real science. Walmart though, is very real. And in order to generate these kinds of silly, ludicrous, absurd profits, very, very big. Corporatist. Maximalist.

You feel small when you walk in to the store. That is a strategic decision.

But at least you are greeted by a kind, elderly, blue vested greeter. Kindness, even in the megamachine, it goes a long way. Immediately on your left, a cooler of take and bake pizzas, 28, 30, 35 oz. of pure caloric density, protein, salt, fat, bleached flour, pepperoni, ultimate meat, five cheese, supreme traditional crust, for just $6, $7, $10, easily feeding a small family for a couple bucks each.

Yes, Walmart also sells produce. A lot of it, actually. If you walk into a Walmart, it is usually all the way to the left, you can’t miss it. A produce section the size of a small neighborhood supermarket. All the usual fresh produce arrays, leading with everyday low price signs and the ubiquitous yellow six pointed signet on blue background, a digital icon ever-present in stores, flyers, online, on receipts, like a little sunburst sparkle emoji of global domination, a corporate sun-wheel. Sell everything, more of it, cheaper than the other guys as the mode of dominance. Like this produce. Big racks of organic apples, pears, lemons, lines, all in see-through or mesh plastic, of course, to protect the merchandise from your grubby fingers but also to bend the light just enough so you don’t recognize bruises and imperfections. An upright salad cooler. A bounteous table of waxed, shiny grannies, $1.67 a lb, with a whole row of conventional bagged apples and pears in a random assortment of collapsible black or tan plastic bins or polystyrene line cardboard fruit bins.

A berry cooler, because Driscoll’s was made for the world Walmart created, centralized, extractive, the labor made invisible and always undervalued, the berries all homogenous, consistent year round, flavorless and always abundant at the Walmart scale.

And a bakery too. Pies. Cupcakes, cookies, muffins, bread “baked in store daily”. Par-baked or scratch baked? French, Italian, Kaisers, ice cream cakes and “party desserts”, but shouldn’t every dessert be party appropriate? Power stacked multi-tiered racks of tortillas in clear cello packaging with blue, yellow or red color blocks denoting brand, variety, corn or wheat.

It all looks fresh enough, belying the scale, complexity, enormity of the supply chains of wheat, oil, sugar, salt, additives, preservatives and emulsifiers from Cargill, Bunge, ADM. And the signs above them, people-sized, blunt force glamour shots of cupcakes, muffins, pies, just in case you were confused as to what you were doing here. Buying baked goods. Millions buy their baked goods from Walmart every day, it should be obvious.

There are no full service retail butchers at Walmart. There used to be, some of them tried to unionize and Clan Walton retaliated quickly. Self-service meat is now ubiquitous. Just rows upon rows, racks upon racks, coolers packed from knee high to overhead, of pre-packaged JBS, Tyson, Cargill sourced cuts and slabs of meat, sliced, wrapped, stickered behind the scenes, in cold, antiseptic, well-lit back rooms, or in far-away processing facilities, outsourced to the lowest bidder with the highest productivity, with the most undocumented and low paid immigrant labor in Colorado, Arkansas, Nebraska, Texas. The pool table sized signs make sure you know what species you are shopping. They even sell a smattering of organic and grassfed, but the overwhelming majority of tonnage, this vast landscape of packaged beef, pork, chicken and turkey, is from America’s enormous factory farm feedlots, big meat and big scale, fattened on Iowan, Minnesotan and Nebraskan corn.

America’s heartland is a meat colony, colonized JBS and Tyson and Cargill and Smithfield, this corn-fed, red blooded, MAGA-heartland really just overseered by Wall Street, Brazilian, Chinese, Arkansan-owned processing conglomerates who market their products under dozens of consumer brand labels, or just anonymously in a simply white stickered and clear plastic wrapped label around fresh, cold, raw, ready to roast, fry, bake or broil meat meat meat meat.

Meanwhile, the stink, the unholy stench of hog manure ponds, open air feedlots, gargantuan poultry breed-and-feed barns, nowhere near this cavernous, antiseptic, incandescent-lit retail experience. The rivers are unfishable, the lakes are unswimmable, there is a dead zone down river in the Gulf of Mexi-merica the size of New Jersey. But heartland meat stays on shelf.

Walmart is not the only meat buyer that matters, but at 30% of the grocery industry market share, their department sizes, store count, assortment, sku count and variety preferences means they are the most important and probably singularly largest contributor to the ecological and economic imbalance from factory farmed meat. So what, former President Biden said some stern words to the meat industry and his agencies launched a lawsuit here or there. Big effin’ deal. The USDA funded some tiny new abattoirs that will have to somehow compete with Cargill or Tyson’s enormous archipelago of meat manufacturing. They are missing the point. Customers buy meat from Walmart.

Walmart does not want to buy meat from a 1,000 tiny cottage scale processors just to make your conscience feel better. They have huge meat cases to fill daily. They need mass manufacturing, hand in glove with mass marketing. Scale begets scale. Big retail means big meat. Can’t have one without the other. Break up one, the other will just find ways to consolidate or vertically integrate to keep costs down, to simplify purchasing, handling, logistics, merchandising. Hundreds of meat items for thousands of stores from a handful or suppliers is one thing, but adding dozens, maybe hundreds of small scale suppliers to that equation would make forecasting, inventory management, cold chain integrity exceedingly complex. It would collapse and customers would freak the fuck out. To recap: Meat antitrust is just so quaint and precious when they only look at the processing side of the supply chain and think a lawsuit or a couple new undercapitalized facilities will break up Big Meat. People don’t buy meat from Tyson or JBS or Cargill. We/they buy meat from Walmart.

We/they, the people, also buy packaged groceries from Walmart. CPG. More than twice as much as they do at Kroger or Albertsons and their dozens of banners like Harris Teeter, Smith’s, Randall’s, QFC, Safeway, King’s, Acme, Fred Meyer. More than Costco. More than three times what they do at all of the Ahold-Delhaize banners combined, Hannaford, Giant, the other GIANT, Stop & Shop, Food Lion. Over 10 times as much as Trader Joes or Aldi or Whole Foods.

The groceries sold by Walmart, the elephant in the living room, supermassive black hole, center of gravity. Consumer packaged goods categories, dozens of consumer need states like cookies, cereals, crackers, confections, diapers, toothpaste, frozen meals, monopolized at 60, 70, 80% of sales by just the same 2, 3, 4 globalized processors and manufacturers, some of the largest companies in the world, Pepsico, Coke, Campbell’s, Kraft Heinz, Conagra, Mondelez, Nestle, Unilever, Mars, AB-Inbev. Who is their largest customer? Walmart. Scale begets scale. Same logic as meat applies, times ten.

While their groceries are not in the center of the store, groceries are the center of their business. 60% of Walmart sales are in food. It is why Target, with their vast discretionary merchandising, can’t keep up. Walmart is a grocery store. The grocery industry revolves around Walmart. Walmart is the center of gravity in the grocery industry.

Even a reawakened, courageous FTC, advocating for consumers, workers, farmers, small businesses, sued to prevent a Kroger-Albertsons merger that threatened to create another Walmart at the expense of consumers, workers, farmers, small businesses, even this FTC did not touch Walmart, and only by extension of their relationship with Pepsico.

Kroger won’t admit it to their shareholders, but their market share loss is too obvious. Target’s brutalist simplicity, comfort brands and hipster-cute private label, is still not a threat to Walmart, especially when they can’t manage inventories, their markdowns exceed their foot traffic, wholly cannibalizing their comps, and their omnichannel is laughable. Who actually orders online from Target? Indies know this all too well. The regional, family-owned, mom and pop grocers of all sizes have taken a pounding over the last 50 years, losing market share annually, as anti-trust regulators were asleep at the wheel, mesmerized by the Bork Doctrine, letting the Walton Gang binge, plunder and purge their competitors across the heartland and suburbs.

Now, discounters thrive in the interstices, dollar stores lapping up the crumbs left over from the generational retail carnage and the long collapse of main street commerce, insult to injury amongst the extractive corn, soy and meat monoculture economies of the heartland. The surviving regional scale mass merchants give Walmart the hard side eye. HEB, Winco, Publix, Meijer, HyVee, Shop Rite, watching Walmart pricing, assortment, e-commerce capabilities with eternal vigilance, they could be next.

The aisles are tall, claustrophobic, stocked to the gills with hundreds of items per set.

Once again, not just retail brutalism. This is maximalism, gigantism. Everythingism. Not simplified scientifically and rationally optimized like Target or Aldi. Everything, at market leading prices, chaotically jammed into massive 4 foot sets that stretch for 50 feet or more. The sets spill over into each other, not neat and clean like Wegman’s or Redner’s or Food Lion, just packed out to the gills, up, down and sideways. Case in point, nut butters bleed into jams and jellies, which is an awkward over under with honeys, local and organic brands alongside mass market brands, the occasional private label and more obscure products. The maxim is, “We have it all, at the best prices and we don’t go out of stock. We own this category, your wallet share and your shopping habits. We have it all and we have you too.”

Walmart doesn’t run out of near anything and when it does, it is replenished on shelf quicker than you can notice. Those blue vested clerks are always stocking. It helps that their employer demands 98%+ inventory fill rates from suppliers under penalty of discontinuation. They stay in stock so you stay in stock. Target or Whole Foods can’t figure this out, inventory management their Achilles’ heels, maybe the out of stocks are just part of the charm, part of the adventure of grocery shopping. No charm at Walmart, just maximalism. Everythingism.

Maximalism extends to the endcaps, displays, pallet drops and off-aisle racks. Big food revenue and maximum unit velocity. A rack of Frito Lay multipacks. Cheetos Flamin’ hots and Bag o’ Bones cheese curls. Great Value disinfectant wipes. Great Value, the largest private label store brand in the grocery industry, 85% U.S. household penetration, first among the top four private label brands all various Walmart labels, ubiquitous in the aisles, and here just humbly sharing an endcap with random Chlorox sprays. Hellman’s mayo with Starkist tuna, just like we grew up on. Progresso broths, still in their display cases, $1.98 everyday low price. Hispanic treats from Mexican snack conglomerate Bimbo, the barritas, gansito, bunuelas, conchas, mantecadas, familiar treats for anyone who has ever been inside a bodega or carniceria.

Cheerios, in limited seasonal edition flavors, $4.93 for each 24 oz. box, everyday low price, no trade spend for promotions, markdowns, BOGO’s, just deadnet lowest pricing until Walmart rips off the bandage for a price ROLLBACK, which they sign the hell out of in case you didn’t notice the ROLLBACKs everywhere. Yet another Frito display, $3 a bag Doritos in a pallet drop cardboard display shipper. Count Chocula, Boo Berry and assorted Monster cereals, family sized for your Tuesday Addams-inspired cereal geeks of all ages, $4.93 line priced with some other General Mills seasonal specials. A power stack of Coke and Sprite, an endcap of Pringles multipacks alongside family size mini’s of Rice Krispy treats. A rack of $4.98 supersize Oreos. More Frito Lay, a metal rack of Ruffles, Tostitos party sizes and Tostitos salsas, line priced at $5.94. An 18 pack of Frito Lay’s greatest hits ending in “-itos”, $10.46, less than 60 cents a bag, like a 90’s bodega price. Frito Lay is Pepsico, over 40% of company sales. Pepsico is really just Frito Lay, a snack conglomerate, soda tail wagging the salty snack dog, you can see that at Walmart, their largest customer, complete with FTC lawsuit dredging up Robinson Patman violations and discriminatory purchasing arrangements. Favoritism, monetized. Big retail, hand in glove with Big CPG, can’t have one without the other, scale begets scale.

A cooler bunker of $1.87 Lunchables cross promoted with the umpteenth overstimulating, overproduced Transformers movie, because nothing will ever really top the animated series of my youth, especially a Lunchables promotion. (RIP, Optimus Prime.)

Whole Milk $3.47 a gallon. Category killer, best in market, except for Aldi or Lidl. A couple shelves of almost tokenized plant based in the plastic ocean of fluid cow dairy. Silk, Califia, Oatly, Walmart’s new bettergoods private label knock offs with their “yassified” almost Snaxshot-worthy font and packaging design and category leading price point. Bettergoods appearing everywhere, trading up the value customers to something just slightly better, but a whole lot cooler looking or trading down the higher income, values-focused, special diet needs millennial and Gen Z customers that want to eat, feel, shop better.

The frozen aisles. A vastness of Great Value and household brands, several rows, hundreds of doors, stacked top to bottom, frozen fruits and vegetables, entrees, pizzas, ice creams, grab and go snacks. Conagra, Nestle, Unilever, Kellogg’s Schwan’s, a smattering of emerging brands. Gordon Ramsay and Guy Fieri frozen meals licensing deals, pick your king. A few hefty doors of plant based processed foods from Impossible, Beyond, Morningstar, Gardein, hidden among frozen fruits and vegetables, grown, processed and flash frozen all over the world, from Chile to Serbia, global trade deals in effect.

And tater tots, French fries, waffle fries, category prices up 60% in four years as 4 firms supply 90% of all the frozen, processed potatoes, wringing ever more profit out of your hashbrown habit, as Circana shares price and volume data in a way that is definitely not collusion. Or so we’ll see, at least once the discovery from the lawsuits hits the media. In the meantime, so much processed frozen potato at Walmart.

Dairy cases, endless juice, egg inventories hit by avian flu, yogurt, butter, spreads.

A locked case of Febreze and disinfectant sprays. A locked case. In a Walmart. The black market for Febreze must be booming to warrant such attention. Who actually shoplifts Febreze? What is the arbitrage on Walmart Febreze? Or Baby formula, four doors of it, Similac, Parent’s Choice, Enfamil. Locked up behind glass cabinets. A picture that tells a thousand words. Inaccessibility, child poverty, market share concentration and just plain meanness. Who locks up infant food in a store built to serve the working poor? Who is at fault here? The folks desperate enough to steal laundry supplies and infant food, or the executives willing to lock down and enclose such essentials?

It all tracks. Walmart is a singular race to the bottom for employees and their communities. Not just because the CEO earns 933 times the average hourly wage worker. Not just because of frequent layoffs, organizational restructuring and obscene profiteering by the Walton Gang. It is structural. When Walmart comes to town, living standards go down. Walmart openings lead to a 6% decrease in annual labor income and subsequently increase local poverty by 2%, due to lower annual earnings that drag on for a decade, with a 5% increase in the likelihood of poverty, particularly for younger adults without high school or college educations. Opening also lead to a 16% increase in government income transfers, you know, “welfare”, i.e, SNAP, WIC, Medicaid, and a 5% decrease in household tax revenues, as the earnings losses widen like a strip mine in the years following Walmart openings, time, labor, productivity, energy, passion, gusto for life sucked into the gaping, swirling, ebony maw of the Walton Family portfolio.

Everythingism. Maximalist.

The Walton family trust. The end point of the value chain, protecting profits from taxation. A not insignificant sliver of every retail penny is siphoned up by the Walton philanthropies, like a universal, privatized consumer excise tax, a tithe to neo-feudal overlords, enabling Walton scions to build more winding bike paths in Bentonville, throw chump change at regenerative farming and maybe build another insipid singing bridge over the Buffalo River. Strip mine capitalism, fueled by mass profit taking at a world historic scale, while the child poverty rates in Benton County, Arkansas skyrocket, while employee pay rates, especially relative to inflation, flatline, and rates of employee food insecurity, homelessness and downward mobility grow inverse to Walton profits and philanthropic outlays. The Walton family, throwing money at problems their business model exacerbates, underwriting environmental, civic, media efforts, Walton-washing economies throughout the globe. Cake? Let them eat singing bridges.

The food aisles come to an abrupt halt in a sea of apparel, Dickies workwear, Wrangler shirts, and Hanes underwear (also locked up. The shame.)

Make a few lefts and a few rights over to the registers. Dozens of registers, most them actually staffed by people, real cashiers, despite a busy self-checkout array. More Frito Lay, single serve bags of “-itos”, 2/$.98, the racks overflowing with nuclear radiation-hued Takis from Mexican snack lords Bimbo. A single facing of Dude Wipes. XL size, $14.97 just in case less-gendered butt wipes are not dude enough for you.

And a literal garage sale at the registers, a 12 foot run of the most random impulse buy dreck that some Bentonville-based category merchandiser decided in the haze of Bentonville’s best skunk weed would make soooo much sense while customers stood captive in the checkout line.

“Thank you for shopping with us” printed in two foot high letters at eye level across 20 feet of a wall hiding a massive click and collect Ecommerce fulfillment operation as you exit the store, but only once you show your receipt to the security guard.

Unique in and of itself, there is no other Walmart. Shrugging at Atlas. Emblematic of the omnipresent, multinational food economy far beyond the imagination of generic, boring neoclassical economists, yet somehow the ultimate expression of their globalized capitalism, wholly dependent on federally negotiated trade agreements, public tax dollars subsidizing employee food stamps and Medicare, built on decades of lax antitrust oversight, weak labor laws, absentee environmental externalities, easily manipulated ESG disclosures and always enthusiastically able to take advantage of a workforce not yet savvy, angry or stubborn enough to organize, collectively bargain and push back against this extremely lopsided power play.

Stop talking about food system reform in the abstract. This is the race to the bottom. At some point, Walmart’s pull touches everyone.

There is no other single lever to influence food supply chain assortment, pricing, labor costs and standards, ownership, product quality, food safety, ingredients and sourcing standards, centralization of production and complexity of distribution and logistics than Walmart.

America’s largest grocery store and employer, maximalism as retail necessity, gigantism as strategy, the Walton family’s eternal, colossal nest egg, still the center of the food universe, the all-consuming void, devourer of worlds, mighty scions of Bentonville and their insipid singing bridges and green, winding bike paths for the fortunate few of Benton County, Arkansas.

Old Sam Walton would be so proud.

…

Epilogue. LARPing The Future of Walmart.

The question remains, what would we do if we could? Is Walmart inevitable? Is there a future that does not involve this level of extraction and exploitation, in order for all these goods to reach the millions of families that frequent Walmart. How do we think beyond the confines of today?

Maybe we need to look to the LARP-ers (live action role play) for inspiration. LARP’ing was popularized by Milton Friedman’s kid, a bonafide anarcho-capitalist nepo-baby. Is it any wonder that Mencius Moldbug and the Musk/Thiel techno-determinist DOGE-bags now running the Trump Administration, stealing your bank account info and social security numbers, have shared philosophical roots with the LARPers that fetishize feudal reenactments? We too can build the world that we role play. And really folks, what is Walmart but a LARPing corporate sovereign state, the endgame for all the Friedman/Hayek/Mises shareholder primacy and privatized ownership at the global level? So let’s play the game. Let’s LARP the future of Walmart.

First, we expropriate. The company is a living, breathing antitrust violation that stole its foundational ideas from competitors and steals daily from employees and communities. The Walton’s have made enough money, for one lifetime, for a thousand lifetimes. There is no amount of Walton-scion chump change for regenerative agriculture or Bentonville singing bridges that should prevent us from LARP-taxing the Walton dynasty of 99.9% of their accumulated wealth, starting with their ownership stake in Walmart. Imagine what we could do with all that cheddar. A million miles of bike trails. High speed rail from coast to coast, from Duluth to Laredo, Bellingham to Key Biscayne. Free food delivery for all, fully subsidized grocery purchases for families earning up to $150K a year, hell, maybe more. We obviously don’t need to wait for a Walton expropriation to have this much fun, considering what our government spends money on, we can already afford much of this, but in the meantime, we can LARP together plenty of ideas. (Oh, wait, does asset forfeiture bother you? Just when it is done to working class people to the tune of billions of dollars annually? Or just when we are talking about expropriating the assets of billionaires? My bad.)

Next up, assuming God Emperor Cheeto Palpatine Donald Jefferson Trump gets his sovereign wealth fund up and running (and we are under no illusions that he will firesale public assets to fund this nation-state-level grift… but let’s go with this thought experiment, please, at least out of spite), we plug these public funds into a full national buyout of Walmart. Walmart, now owned by the taxpayer, 100% publicly owned, a public sector mass merchant, the people’s commissary.

Yes, ambitious! Relax, we are just LARP’ing, like those dorky tech kids in the park with their foam swords. Just play acting. It is a lot more fun that a SWOT analysis. If it helps, we can also LARP that we are Norwegian. Around 58% of the Norwegian economy is publicly owned and they are doing just fine over there. Oslo is beautiful in the summer. Have you seen those fjords? Viking economics. See, it’s fun!

Ok, so now that we the people LARP-own Walmart, we have optionality, as the Wall Street bros like to say. First, governance. We fire the current board and create a 9 member executive board that includes a slate of 4 long term employees, split evenly from both store management and rank and file retail operations, as well as a couple representatives of civil society groups concerned with economic justice, the environment and/or animal welfare. The public will be represented by 3 elected appointees who have expertise in retail, finance, management, and/or governance.

Next, since all retail and corporate employees will be freed of the Walton shackles, they will have the option of joining AFSCME, UFCW or other unions with none of the captive audience gaslighting, threats or risk of firing that Walton-era Walmart would have done. Freedom of association. Collective bargaining. Even some worker self-management or syndicalism, it’s really their choice. Most workers would unionize if they could.

After this, we bring cooperative capital into play, making Walmart a joint venture publicly-owned and consumer-owned behemoth, selling 50+% of shares to regular customers and employees, to ensure transparency, accountability and true “buy-in” of the model, but also create checks and balances for the ever shifting sands of public sentiment and partisan alignment. We don’t want some free market ideologues coming in to fire sale Walmart assets before we make the necessary changes.

The next big step would be a ten year Just Transition in retail operations, product assortment, supply chain and management strategies. This is where the LARP’ing will get really fun. We get to playdate the future of the biggest grocery chain and make it sustainable, holistic, transparent, fair and even regenerative. How, you say? It will be complicated, this is a very large, complex, globalized, planned economy to work through. But the table stakes should include living wages, employee profit sharing, better job security and advancement opportunities, pensions, and most importantly, the implementation of Good Food Purchasing Program standards to assortment and supply chains (remember, we are giving this ten years, not overnight), fair pricing and purchasing terms for vendors as well as investment in diverse, localized and regionalized food processing, manufacturing and logistics infrastructure in order to move away from inordinate dependence on the packaged food monopolies that dominate aisle after aisle of Walmart. Walmart as the solution to the problems it thrives and profits on? Crazier things can happen.

Really, this is just a sketch, a kick in the tukkis to rethink the possibilities of food system change, with Walmart at its center. Any further details are up to our Public Sector Walmart Viking Economics Cooperative LARPers. Have fun!

(Perspectives are 100% are own and do not reflect those of our sponsors.)

Tunes

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was from Cotton Plant, Arkansas and was not only one of the greatest Sanctified gospel singers of her generation, but was also a serious guitar shredder who was the real grandma of Rock and Roll.

peace.