Neither subject interests me much, but the juxtaposition caught my eye over breakfast: A Fashion Identity Crisis at Wal-Mart. It reported on the decline in the chain’s clothes sales and the judgments it needed to make about what kinds of clothes to sell in order to sell more. I’m not picking on Wal-Mart, everyone’s corporate bogey-man; it’s just that the story that caught my eye covered their business.
“With so many shoppers trading down during the recession, Wal-Mart missed an important opportunity to grow its clothing business by giving its shoppers more fashionable everyday apparel,” the WSJ reported,
But sticking to just the most humdrum clothing is a risk for Wal-Mart, too, as it carries lower margins than more fashionable apparel and isn’t as much of a traffic driver or an impulse buy. That is something Wal-Mart could use . . . .
I was struck not just by the chain’s need to encourage impulse buying, but by the fact that the writer assumes, as do probably 99.8% of the readers, that impulse buying is a good thing. But being impulsive is never a good thing.
“She’s so impulsive” is never a compliment. “Impulsive” is never a commendation in a reference. “He follows his impulses” is never something you want to hear about a future son-in-law. “Poor impulse control” is never a line a parent wants to see in a school report. You do not want someone for whom you are financially responsible to use “impulsive” and “shopping” in the same sentence.
And yet impulse buying is an essential tool in modern sales and apparently a key to the success of companies like Wal-Mart. They depend upon encouraging people to be what they should not be: not rational creatures who use their resources for ends they’ve chosen after due thought, but creatures of appetite, who take what they want without due thought, including adequate consideration not only of their ends but of the resources they have.
I know the gluttony or lust to which they appeal (I have to stay out of bookstores), and it’s my own fault when I give in to it, but encouraging people to live impulsively, and particularly to spend money impulsively, is wrong. It’s like serving an expensive wine at dinner, perhaps to show off your wine cellar, when most of your guests are alcoholics you know are barely keeping it together. They have free will and can ask for water, but that does not excuse your tempting them. Actually, it’s worse than that: it’s as if you tempted them to drink because you will benefit in some way by their beginning to drink again.
Companies that make money by tempting people to act impulsively aren’t going to change. There’s too much money in it to operate by a high view of man as a rational creature. The culture in which one just didn’t tempt another like that is long gone, if it ever really existed. (Think of the days when hotels wouldn’t let unmarried people share a room, when now almost any major chain offers a selection of pornography piped straight to your room.)
What we need, maybe, is a campaign for deliberative buying. And a greater use of the disciplines of the spiritual life through which God tames our own impulses and appetites and makes us ever more rational and deliberative creatures.
August 3rd, 2010 | 2:28 pm
David,
I have the same problem with bookstores. It’s one reason I only go to Portland, OR about every other year. Powell’s is too great a lure for me.
I’d have to agree that WalMart has missed the boat. I would be very surprised if their general sales don’t follow with the dip in their clothing sales. Stupid, stupid, stupid. When I have Ross, TJ Maxx and Marshall’s all less than ten minutes from my house and have to drive over twenty to a WalMart . . .
As for impulses? I’m learning to train them. But then, I suppose at the point when they are bowing to training they are no longer impulses.
Kamilla
August 3rd, 2010 | 2:53 pm
Maybe this is just because I’m an arch-yankee east-coast elitist francoanglophile tea-drinking dijon-mustard-eating J. Press Republican high-Catholic, but clothes are the very last thing I would ever think to buy at Walmart. That is, if I ever went to Walmart.
And as for my spending habits, whenver I get money I buy books, and if any cash is left I buy food.
August 3rd, 2010 | 3:07 pm
good article
August 3rd, 2010 | 3:57 pm
The thing is, our entire society, let alone our economy, is built on its citizens obeying their whims and desires. As long as they do so, they are more easily manipulated by marketers and politicians (so they have no motivation to see this arrangement change). It would take a lot of creativity to come up with an economy that didn’t rely on virtually limitless obedience to manipulable desires. But that can’t happen unless and until the culture trains people to embrace self-control in all its various forms. How is that going to happen?
August 3rd, 2010 | 6:18 pm
Yes. I, like Brian, want to know whether a capitalism that doesn’t appeal to desire and impulse would be as dynamic and robust as ours has been, or would have generated as many innovations as ours has. Can we have it both ways? Would a capitalistic culture that appealed to prudence and sobriety create the lifestyle of early 19th century simplicity that environmentalists, liberals, and others desire, hence drop us to second- or perhaps third-world conditions and geo-political status? If not, why not?
August 3rd, 2010 | 8:13 pm
I’m impulsive and flaky by nature, and have had some shopping experiences at WalMart that are now part of family canon
(the time I became convinced at 3 am that I wanted, no, needed black purses with Tinkerbell emblazoned thereon–luckily I made the return after a few hours of sanity-restoring sleep)
and cannot arrive at a balance. I’m an impulse shopper teetotaler, subsisting on the ginger beer of Goodwill shopping and have turned to mostly sewing my own clothes.
Thing is, Walmart has a really good discount table for apparal fabrics…
August 4th, 2010 | 12:01 am
I don’t get this. It seems unnecessarily long-faced. Does “impulse” buying, as used by the industry, mean “reckless” buying? People buy clothes impulsively because they come upon something they like. You can’t anticipate a particular cute paisley lime green blouse. Instead you keep an eye out what appeals.
So department stores have some moral obligation to be a tad drabber or something?
WalMart should put little burkas over their coffeepots and barbecue grills so that the weak won’t be tempted?
If you are going to start a campaign against unnecessary stuff, why don’t you start upmarket with Neiman Marcus?
August 4th, 2010 | 9:23 pm
One way to fight impulses is to “fast” from whatever kind of impulsive behavior bothers you most, even — or, perhaps, especially — otherwise innocent behavior. Not only will intentional fasting help you learn to restrain your impulses, but it can also prompt you to make that self-restraint a spiritual offering.
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