Wal-Mart says it’s looking out for Tucsonans this year with the Consumer Choice initiative, which–if passed by voters on the November ballot–would bust the city’s ban on grocery sales at Big Box stores. Good ol’ Wally-Mart says it’s unfair that the city is blocking it from undercutting grocery stores that have union workers and pay decent wages.

We’re hearing whispers from City Hall that the proposed proposition may face a legal challenge, because it involves zoning law, which isn’t subject to the initiative process.

Pete Zimmerman, the political consultant handling the initiative drive, says he thinks the effort is on solid legal ground.

“I’m not a lawyer, but our lawyers think otherwise,” says Zimmerman, who remains hopeful that his signature gatherers will have enough petitions to make the ballot. “We’re operating from a standpoint that this is a restraint-of-trade issue.”

More on the initiatives in next week’s Skinny.

This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2007.

Getting hassled by The Man Mild-mannered reporter

3 replies on “See Ya in Court”

  1. To anybody interested in this issue, be sure to rent the movie, “Wal-Mart: The High Price of Low Wages,” an excellent (if unabashedly biased) documentary about the many ways that Wal-Mart rots communities from the inside. It’s well-done and convincing.

    I believe there is also a Frontline doc about Wal-Mart, titled something like, “Is Wal-Mart Good for America?” Considering the quality of Frontline shows, this is probably worth a look.

    Some people would like to boil this down to a simple free-market issue, but there’s much more to it than that. Wal-Mart is a symptom of the exploitative nature of the global economy, which is all about undercutting markets via low-wage workers, minimum-quality products, and high-volume sales. Wal-Mart is like a parasite that kills (or severely sickens) its host. Many of the smaller communities where Wal-Marts have cropped up have seen their town centers turn to ghost towns. Ironically, city officials tend to offer sweetheart deals to Wal-Mart (paying for nearby infrastructure like roads), believing that the stores will bring in jobs and boost the local economy and employment rate. The opposite tends to happen, though, with a lot of people working at low-wage jobs, and resultingly having very little money to put back into the economic food chain. (This renders the “savings” of cheaper Wal-Mart products negligible.)

    Most of the Wal-Mart products come from China, which has labor practices and production standards that recall Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” We’ve recently seen a few negative impacts of this, such as the poisoning of pet food and, for another example, harmful substances finding their way into vitamins and counterfeit toothpaste. Many factory workers live in factory “dorms” and work ungodly hours. Though there’s supposed to be labor laws, they are activelely encouraged to break them and lie about it.

    Anyway, I look forward to reading more about this issue in the Skinny.

  3. It’s “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” If you’re interested in seeing it, there will be a screening at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 30, at the Oro Valley Library, 1305 W. Naranja Drive, with a group discussion afterwards.

    Learn more about the film at http://www.walmartmovie.com

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