Held to answer

It’s just as well that Walmart has been getting rid of its greeters, considering it’s the retail chain everyone loves to hate. Who needs a smile and a greeting from Walmart?

Certainly not Steve Novick, the city commissioner-elect for Portland. He doesn’t take office until January, but he’s already got big plans for his city: More parking meters to raise revenue, and an anti-Walmart flag that he hopes to display in his office window.

The flag used to fly in Mayor Sam Adams’ office window. But this year Walmart bought a Portland software company, and now there’s a WalmartLabs only seven blocks from City Hall.

So Novick wants Adams’ old anti-Walmart flag.

“Somebody should have it up,” he told Willamette Week. “If it’s Walmart, I’m against it – whether it’s a lab or a store.”

That’s what Novick says now. Someday Walmart could be his new best friend.

Like many politicians, Novick has a fondness for taxes. Without a vibrant middle class, how else can he acquire revenue?

He wrote an op-ed a couple of years ago trying to say he was opposed to a sales tax, but he ended up making excuses for why Oregon needs one.

“If you’re trying to run a state without a sales tax, your other taxes have to be unusually high or you’ll have really lousy services,” Novick wrote in The Oregonian.

However, to make money from sales taxes a city needs somebody making sales. That’s why cities in states that have a sales tax, such as California, lust after Walmart. Cities there will compete to win a Walmart so they can snag the sales tax revenue that the stores usually generate.

Of course, these hot pursuits don’t happen in California cities like Beverly Hills or Santa Barbara. When you’ve got a comfortable, high-income population you don’t need Walmart – either for shopping or sales tax revenue.

Perhaps Novick thinks Portland belongs among those select cities who can snub a low-brow Walmart. If so, he apparently hasn’t been to the Walmart at Southeast 82nd Avenue and Holgate.

It’s as Portland as New Seasons.

On a recent afternoon, I pulled into the Walmart parking lot and before I could get out of my car, a young man with dark blonde hair, bloodshot eyes and a blue bedroll approached my window.

“My wife and I are trying to get a meal today,” he said.

The young man would’ve been right at home among the homeless outside the downtown Central Library.

Adjacent to the entrance at Walmart was a table and a couple of young black men soliciting donations for Livingstone Fellowship, a youth outreach group.

Walmart has always made them feel welcome, one of them told me.

Inside roaming the aisles were kids, parents, grandparents, teenagers, women wearing Vietnamese conical hats and women in Indian head scarves. I overheard four languages, as well as the usual family dramas. (“Don’t put that over your face – it’s sanitizer! You’ll get a rash! Will you listen to me? Listen to me!”)

I saw nothing to rival the laugh-out-loud pictures on “The People of Walmart” website. It was almost a letdown.

What was surprising was the number of people buying groceries even though this Walmart is not one of the chain’s grocery stores; the food selection here wasn’t as varied as a supermarket.

Some of the shoppers seemed like newcomers to the store.

“Do you know where the ground beef is? Do they sell that here?” a woman asked me.

We chatted briefly about the popularity of Walmart-bashing. It didn’t bother her. She was pleased to have found some child’s pajamas, and to discover that several canned food items she liked were 80 cents.

Back when Adams was a city commissioner, he announced that Walmart was a company that had his enmity. He was proud that he had kept the stores out of Sellwood and Hayden Island.

“They treat their employees poorly and the communities they go into with total disdain,” he said at the time.

Where would Adams and Novick have Walmart employees work? Portland’s home-grown New Seasons chain?

Not only are there not enough New Seasons jobs for everyone who applies, but earlier this year the Seven Corners New Seasons was the site for a rally to reinstate a long-time employee who had been fired. The employee had been linked to efforts to organize New Seasons employees.

If the motto at Walmart is “Save Money, Live Better” at New Seasons it could be “Spend Money, Live Better.” This store even offers Rad Cat premium raw food for cats, including pasture-raised lamb, $5.49 for 8 ounces.

New Seasons calls itself “the friendliest store,” and that certainly applies to the produce staff. But how much of this customer friendliness that so many stores now advertise evolved from Walmart’s greeters?

And while stores like New Seasons can point to its community involvement, Walmart has more than kept pace in that area.

“We focus our support on three key areas: Feeding the hungry, educating our youth and improving our environment,” says the New Seasons’ welcome on its website.

Using similar language, Walmart talks about what it is doing for environmental sustainability, empowering women, ethical sourcing, etc.

“In 2011 Walmart donated 338 million pounds of food to hunger relief – enough to feed NYC and LA for a week.”

Why pick on Walmart when the problem is that we have a lot of people who eat what they can afford – not necessarily what they want. We have a lot of people who work at jobs they can find – not necessarily jobs they want.

This month the Census Bureau released figures showing that 46.2 million people in America were living in poverty in 2011. For the fourth consecutive year, the poverty rate has gone up.

Given that reality, Sam Adams and Steve Novick might show more respect for a guy who was born and raised in Oklahoma, grew up during the Great Depression and opened a store in Arkansas that grew to a multinational enterprise.

Instead, they disdain Sam Walton.

What could a businessman, whose roots are in Oklahoma and Arkansas, possibly teach a rare rose like Portland?

– Pamela Fitzsimmons