Wal-Mart's devious profit motive

Posted by David Roberts at 1:11 PM on 07 Aug 2006

Read more about: Wal-Mart | business | greening biz operations

I'm in the midst of writing an op-ed about Wal-Mart's green transformation. One theme that comes up frequently in the commentary is this: Wal-Mart is "only" doing these things because they'll improve the bottom line.

Um ... yeah.

It's a business. It's supposed to make money. As a publicly held corporation, it's required by law to make money. If it went around doing things that deliberately reduced its profits, it would be subject to a shareholder lawsuit.

The whole point of the green business trend is that green makes business sense. Reducing waste is good management. What kind of bizarre message does it send if a business sees the light on this issue only to be told that they get no credit because their motivations are financial?

Sometimes I'm just not sure what greens expect.

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If profit comes first . . .

Well, in a sense you're right ---- what people who make the comment that WM is only doing it to make money are really saying is that we shouldn't be fooled by green actions that are profit motivated precisely because of the profit motivation. Why? Because reserving, a priori, the profit motive as paramount is to say that you will stop the green behavior as soon as it costs something.

Yes, stock issuing corporations are required to put profit first--which is why environmentalists need to be questioning the corporate model of organization, not accepting it as a given. Environmentalists are the ones who founded the Project on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD), simply because they realized that the root of virtually all the environmental degradation is that corporations have managed to dominate the public sphere, using their resources to capture and dominate the government that supposedly regulates corporate behavior.

The idea of limited liability, necessary for creating the Hudson's Bay Co., is no longer appropriate for the finite and rapidly depleting world. Wal-Mart is the epitome of the voracious corporation unleashed, so spray painting it green doesn't help much.

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by JMG at 6:08 AM on 08 Aug 2006

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