Pass the Clicker — Stories in 60 Seconds

December 25, 2009

Some ads are pure genius.  In 30 or 60 seconds they can tell stories that capture the human experience more beautifully than many 2 hour movies (certainly better than Avatar does in 3 hours).

Check out the ad above for Coke and Wal-Mart.  Yes, it’s sappy.  But so are many movies.  What’s great is the way this ad captures certain relationships with little more than a gesture and a look in a few seconds.  I particularly like meeting his best friend and the on-line date.  Notice how the best-friend puts his arm around the date and she reacts uncomfortably and then relaxes, just like someone would on a first date. 

I also think the protagonist’s declaration of love for the first girl he ever kissed is just brilliant.  Notice how she is clearly there with her boyfriend and they are both shocked by his declaration.  She is then flattered and the boyfriend is diminished.

These are essential parts of the human experience and they are captured in just seconds.  Think about how many takes they probably had to do to get it just right.  Think about the acting skill involved.  This is art.

Leave a Comment » | Pass the Clicker, random pop culture | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Book Review in WSJ

December 15, 2009

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I have a review of the book, Boom Town, in today’s WSJ. It was odd reading a book about prejudices that seemed to contain so many prejudices of its own. Here’s a snippet:

If Ms. Rosen had wanted to identify resistance from white, rural Christians to diverse newcomers, she should have distinguished between Arkansas’s politics and its business and social life. Businesses like Wal-Mart and Tyson are progressive engines of diversity because they will recruit and hire able workers of any color or religion. The only color they see is green. Social integration has gone smoothly because local residents, assisted by religiously backed norms of politeness, have been generally welcoming. Unlike business, politics is a zero-sum game. Good-old-boy politicians in Arkansas (or anywhere else) are more likely to think that if they share power with newly arrived groups, they will lose some of their own. The few politicians we read about in “Boom Town” illustrate this point, trying to pit low-income whites against Hispanics. Clearly, they would rather be king of the Lilliputians than share a larger empire with the area’s newer residents.

3 Comments | Fayetteville, politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

You Mean Wal-Mart Isn’t Evil?

February 9, 2009

 

(Don’t blame me for the lousy photo-shopping.  Eduwonkette did it.  But I told her it made me look like David Byrne in his giant suit.  Pretty cool!)

David Kinkade at the Arkansas Project alerted us to this piece by Charles Platt, a writer at Wired Magazine, on his experience going “undercover” to work for Wal-Mart.  Platt writes:

” I found myself reaching an inescapable conclusion. Low wages are not a Wal-Mart problem. They are an industry-wide problem, afflicting all unskilled entry-level jobs, and the reason should be obvious.

In our free-enterprise system, employees are valued largely in terms of what they can do. This is why teenagers fresh out of high school often go to vocational training institutes to become auto mechanics or electricians. They understand a basic principle that seems to elude social commentators, politicians and union organizers. If you want better pay, you need to learn skills that are in demand.

The blunt tools of legislation or union power can force a corporation to pay higher wages, but if employees don’t create an equal amount of additional value, there’s no net gain. All other factors remaining equal, the store will have to charge higher prices for its merchandise, and its competitive position will suffer.

This is Economics 101, but no one wants to believe it, because it tells us that a legislative or unionized quick-fix is not going to work in the long term. If you want people to be wealthier, they have to create additional wealth.

To my mind, the real scandal is not that a large corporation doesn’t pay people more. The scandal is that so many people have so little economic value. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?

In fact, the deal at Wal-Mart is better than at many other employers. The company states that its regular full-time hourly associates in the US average $10.86 per hour, while the mean hourly wage for retail sales associates in department stores generally is $8.67. The federal minimum wage is $6.55 per hour. Also every Wal-Mart employee gets a 10% store discount, while an additional 4% of wages go into profit-sharing and 401(k) plans.”

He then concludes:

“Based on my experience (admittedly, only at one location) I reached a conclusion which is utterly opposed to almost everything ever written about Wal-Mart. I came to regard it as one of the all-time enlightened American employers, right up there with IBM in the 1960s.”

So, the path to higher worker wages is improved education, not unionization?  Luckily the unions do so much to help improve education that I guess we are in great shape!

8 Comments | economics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Walmart Shareholder Meeting

June 6, 2008

This morning I went to the Walmart shareholder meeting held in the University of Arkansas basketball stadium.  The theme was the new marketing slogan, “Save money.  Live better.”  They presented impressive evidence and compelling anecdotes of how Walmart saves money for families of modest means and, in doing so, improves people’s lives. 

The best example they provided was their $4 prescription drug program.  Lee Scott, the CEO, emphasized that policymakers have been trying to get more people to switch to cheaper generics for years.  But Walmart has been able to succeed where the government has failed, by bringing the price down.  How did they do that when the government hasn’t?  Walmart was able to squeeze the pharmaceutical companies in a way that the government won’t.  Just think of the Medicare Drug Benefit program that has been a near-total flop, failing to make drugs more available while costing taxpayers dearly. 

It struck me that if Walmart were a government program, designed to provide basic goods to low-income families at reduced prices, it would be lauded as a great success on the order of the New Deal or the Marshall Plan.  Books would be written about how it worked so well.  Conferences would be organized to sing its praises.  But because someone is actually making a profit while serving low-income families, somehow the whole thing is ruined.  It’s as if social progress can only be made if taxpayers lose money.

It’s not accurate to say that Walmart is only able to provide low prices because it underpays its workers, who are themselves often low-income.  In fact, Walmart pays its workers above the industry average and offers health benefits rarely found in retail.  The reality is that Walmart primarily reduces prices by squeezing its suppliers.  Remember the prescription drug companies?  Ironically, anti-Walmart activists are really pro-Procter & Gamble.  Their chant should be “Charge poor people more for shampoo so that Procter & Gamble thrives!”  I guess that wouldn’t be a very good chant at a rally (I’d make a bad activist), but you get my point. 

Of course, the other groups that get squeezed are the unions.  But even if you believed that unions provided significant benefits to workers, we should all recognize that it would have to come at the expense of low-income consumers.  There is no free lunch.  And keep in mind that Walmart workers already receive above-industry-average wages and health benefits, so the additional benefits of unionization are more dubious.  Furthermore, outside of North America Walmart workers are mostly unionized (as are the workers of all of their major competitors in those markets) and the company still thrives. 

I know.  People will hold this post up as an example of how I’m somehow in the employ of Walmart.  Just to set the facts straight — I’m an employee of the University of Arkansas and am primarily paid by the taxpayers of Arkansas.  I’ve never heard anyone suggest that my (or anyone else’s)  receipt of money from the government presents a conflict of interest that disqualifies them from evaluating government programs.  I’m as free to criticize Arkansas policies as to criticize Walmart.  (And I do have criticisms of Walmart.  For example, the produce is lousy and the stores in Florida, when I lived there, looked dingy.)

It’s true that my department received a $20 million gift from which I draw some income.  But that $20 million endowment was initiated by an anonymous foundation (not connected to the Waltons) with a $10 million gift that was then matched by the University’s matching grant program, which applied to all gifts that met certain criteria.  It’s true that the matching grant money originally came from the estate of Sam Walton, but he passed away in 1992 and neither the Waltons nor Walmart control those dollars.  So, my connection to Walmart exists, but it is tenuous.  They certainly have no ability to control what I say or do.

But even if I were a corporate executive at Walmart, the issue is whether my argument is true, not with whom do I have a financial connection.  Walmart executives could make an argument and be right.  The intellectually honest way to exchange ideas is to address the merits of other people’s ideas, not analyze their motives for articulating those ideas. 

My assessment of the evidence is that Walmart really does help people save money and live better.  If you disagree, rebut the evidence.

11 Comments | politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene