Writing

Characters:
A: self-righteous “anarchist punk” (young white male)
S: holiday shopper (middle aged white woman)

Setting: Outside a Wal-Mart store

* * *

A. Don’t go in there!

S. Excuse me?

A. (excited that someone is finally paying attention to him) You shouldn’t go in there. Wal-Mart is the epitome of the oppressive patriarchal capitalist system! You don’t have to support it! The system only exists at the consent of those caught up in it – if we all choose not to participate, we can have a better world!

S. That would be lovely. I notice you’re a young white male, though.

A. I can’t help that – but I can withdraw my support from an unbalanced way of life.

S. So how do you live, then?

A. I live in a co-op, squatting an abandoned house on the other side of town. We’ve got a garden where we grow most of our own food, and we get a lot of raw materials for stuff out of the junkyard. Everything else we barter with homemade art and whatnot. T-shirts are my specialty.

S. Where do you get the materials for that?

A. Every now and then you can find t-shirts around, rich neighbourhoods on garbage day, college campuses, just gotta know where to look. Then one of the guys gets leftover paint from construction sites for me. Bam, there’s my t-shirts. You know, most people would spend tons of money on that stuff, with a little effort you can get it for free.

S. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

A. Exactly!

S. What happens when you can’t find t-shirts on the street?

A. My girlfriend shoplifts ‘em for me.

S. From where?

A. Big evil corporate chain stores like this one (indicating Wal-Mart with a sneer). See, you shoplift stuff, the corporation loses money, so they have to raise the price. Price goes up, people buy less stuff. It’s like two birds with one stone.

S. That’s cool. But where did the Wal-Mart shirts come from originally?

A. A sweatshop in Cambodia, probably.

S. And the cotton that the shirts are made out of?

A. Some plantation somewhere using way too much pesticide and slave labour.

S. And how did it get here?

A. Freighters and trucks.

S. And –

A. But here’s the thing! I didn’t pay for the shirts, so I’m not supporting the plantations or the sweatshops or the system that orchestrates it all.

S. They’re just supporting you.

A. (pause while he thinks about the implications of this) No. No, that’s not right. There’s something wrong with that argument. Gimme a sec.

S. Alright.

A. Okay. Yeah. So it’s all about supply and demand. If you stop buying stuff made by evil corporations, then the demand for that stuff will drop and they’ll go out of business!

S. Shoplifting reduces demand?

A. Not directly. But increasing the price reduces the demand.

S. How many shirts have you shoplifted from Wal-Mart in the past year?

A. I dunno. Fifty or sixty.

S. Okay. Let’s say sixty, at ten bucks each. You just cut Wal-Mart’s profits by six hundred dollars.

A. Not bad! I never thought about it that way. See?

S. How much business does Wal-Mart do in a year?

A. A lot.

S. Over a hundred billion dollars.

A. Jesus.

S. Yeah. And they probably made back that six hundred bucks by cutting somebody’s wages.

A. So I guess shoplifting isn’t the best way to change the world.

S. It is having some effect, just not a very big one.

A. Okay. But you have to admit that not giving money to Wal-Mart is important.

S. Absolutely. I’m not saying you should shop at Wal-Mart. But if your goal is to shut Wal-Mart down, you’re not going to do it by simply withdrawing your own business.

A. But if enough people withdraw their business – we could have a massive boycott!

S. Alright. Let’s say tomorrow, you launched your massive boycott on Wal-Mart. Lots of people jump on board, this parking lot becomes a ghost town, everybody takes their business to Target. What would happen to Wal-Mart?

A. It would go out of business!

S. In the long run, maybe. But what would happen tomorrow, if nobody shopped at any Wal-Mart anywhere on the planet?

A. They wouldn’t sell anything.

S. The demand would go way down.

A. Yeah.

S. But they’d still get their shipments in, right?

A. Yeah, I guess so.

S. And the next day?

A. Yeah, well stuff that was already coming over from the sweatshops –

S. Rob Walton wouldn’t call all the factories and tell them to stop producing?

A. Probably not in a day.

S. A week?

A. Eventually, if the boycott went on long enough.

S. So you’ve got all these shipments of stuff coming into all the Wal-Marts in the world, and nobody’s shopping there. The stockrooms get full, the shelves are overflowing, and still the shipments are coming in, every day. What’s that called?

A. The gluttony of capitalism.

S. No, seriously. When you’ve got tons of stuff and not enough people that want it, it’s…?

A. Oh. Over-supply.

S. Exactly. And when you get oversupply, what happens?

A. The prices drop.

S. And twice as many people are shopping at Target, but their factories haven’t started making enough stuff to cope with the demand. What happens over there?

A. The prices skyrocket.

S. So people get bored with the boycott and Target’s just not keeping up with the overload, and nobody can afford their stuff anyway. Are they going to keep up the boycott?

A. They should!

S. Do people always behave the way they should?

A. Of course not.

S. So all the energy you just put into that sudden boycott, it ultimately led to?

A. (dejectedly) Lower prices and less competition and more people shopping there.

S. You got it. Are people consuming any less?

A. No.

S. Are they seeing overconsumption as a bad thing?

A. No.

S. In the scenario we just talked about, do they have any alternatives to getting their stuff from a big box store?

A. No.

S. That’s why they won’t keep up the boycott.

A. Hey, but now people know that Wal-Mart is evil, the boycott got the message out, maybe people will think twice now.

S. Of course. You can’t underestimate the value of bad press. But you have to be careful that your campaigns don’t end up achieving the opposite of what you intended.

A. True.

S. A lot of people know that putting gasoline in their cars leads to foreign oil wars. How many people stop driving their cars because of that?

A. Not many. (laughing) A lot of ‘em will drive their cars halfway across the country for protests.

S. Exactly.

A. So if shoplifting from Wal-Mart doesn’t work, and boycotting them doesn’t work, what do I do?

S. You see now that you’re dependent on capitalism?

A. (grudgingly) Yeah.

S. It’s not a bad thing. The system is dependent on us, too, which means we can change it.

A. I guess so.

S. If you can play by its rules, you can change its rules.

A. What’s that supposed to mean?

S. That’s something you’ll have to figure out on your own. I’ve got to run.

A. Hey, what’s your name?

S. Rennie MacKay Quinn.*

A. Wait a minute! You’re not – ?

S. Yup. I was actually going in there to see if they’re carrying any of Daniel’s books, but I’m late for another appointment now. Nice to meet ya, kiddo. Good luck.

* Rennie MacKay Quinn is the wife of Daniel Quinn, a well-known activist writer.