Why I've made peace with Walmart

Lately, I've started to wonder if everything I know about shopping responsibly is wrong.

It seems like it should be obvious, right? You shop at local businesses when you can, but when you can't, you go for the businesses that have a greener, socially responsible image, like Trader Joe's, Costco, or IKEA. And if you absolutely have to go to a big box store like Target, you can at least console yourself that it's better than the most truly evil of all evil megacorporations, Walmart. (I've only set foot in a Walmart store once, when we wanted to get my parents a bread maker for Hanukkah and literally could not find one anywhere else, and I felt dirty for the rest of the day.)

From time to time, I've questioned whether Target is really any less evil than Walmart. Occasionally I try running a Google search to dig up an answer, but usually I can't find a straightforward comparison between the two. The closest I came was a 2013 rant by Ralph Nader on Huffington Post, and since he also insisted there was no difference between Al Gore and George Bush, he's lost all his credibility as far as I'm concerned.

However, last week, I was taking a survey that asked me about my views on various major retailers, and I decided, before giving Target higher marks than Walmart, to look once again for information on how they compare. This time, I tried searching on "Target vs. Walmart social responsibility"—and that search led me down an Internet rabbit hole that appeared to end up in some sort of Bizarro World, where all the facts I'd come to take for granted were turned on their heads.

First, I found a piece on Retail Dive entitled "Why Wal-Mart is a retail sustainability leader (but doesn't really want to talk about it)." I was flabbergasted to read that it's actually been over ten years since Walmart adopted three major sustainability goals: to use 100 percent renewable energy, to eliminate waste in its operations, and to offer "more sustainable" products in its stores. Today, the article continued, Walmart is "the leading company in the U.S. for total on-site solar capacity and installations," with 25% of all its operations powered by renewable energy and a goal to double that by 2020; it has reduced its plastic bag waste by more than 38% (since 2005) and has diverted 81% of all material from its stores and distribution centers from landfills; it cut its carbon footprint by nearly 650,000 metric tons in 2016 alone.

Why hadn't I heard any of this before? Because, apparently, Walmart has deliberately chosen not to talk about it. Its typical customers don't really care about this stuff; they care about value, and green labeling might actually turn them off because they assume it will mean higher prices. So far from engaging in corporate greenwashing, Walmart is doing exactly the opposite, what you might call brownwashing. The article also notes that in its letters to customers, employees, and shareholders, Walmart talks about its green initiatives (when it talks about them at all) in terms of the money they can save the company. In other words...they're ecofrugal.

Reeling from this discovery, I tried to recall what else I'd heard about Walmart over the years that had led me to boycott them. Well, they treat their workers pretty badly, right? Like, forcing them to work after they've officially clocked out so they don't have to pay overtime, and paying so little most of their workers qualify for public assistance, thereby foisting off their costs onto the state? That's bad, right? Not anymore, apparently. In 2017, the Employee Benefit Advisor reported that Target was raising its starting wage for workers to $11 an hour—in an effort to one-up Walmart, which had already raised its minimum hourly wage to $10.

Still searching for an answer to my original question, which big box was better, I turned to The Good Shopping Guide. This site doesn't directly rate or rank different companies, but you can search for a company name to find out what news has recently surfaced about it, positive or negative. There I learned that Target had also committed to 100 percent renewable energy—but in November 2017, ten years after Walmart. It had also set a goal to source 100 percent of its cotton sustainably by 2022, so that looked like it gave them a slight edge over Walmart in terms of eco-cred. But then, I searched Walmart on the same site and discovered that it was one of 900 major U.S. companies that had pledged to abide by the Paris Agreement even after President Trump had officially pulled the country out of it. This group also includes Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and Kellogg's—names that green bloggers normally only mention to revile them for their alleged Earth-trashing practices. (I checked the website of the group, the "We Are Still In" coalition, and found Target has signed on also.) Big businesses pledging to to the right thing when our government won't? What in heaven's name is going on here?

I made one final attempt to locate a simple ranking of the two companies by searching for "retailer report card," and that led me to a site called Mind the Store that was almost what I wanted. It had rated 30 major retailers and given each one a grade, but only on a single issue: toxic chemicals. Yet here, once again, I was baffled to see that Walmart was almost at the top of the rankings, with an A-minus. (Only Apple, the only company to earn an A grade, did better.) My much-beloved IKEA, I was relieved to see, came in just behind, with a B-plus, as did Target...but Costco, which I'd always viewed as the responsible alternative to Walmart, only had a C-minus (though even that mediocre grade was high enough to put it in the top ten). And which retailer came in dead last, with a score of zero out of a possible 135 points? TRADER JOE'S! According to the site, the company has made "no significant public-facing commitments to address the safety of chemicals used in its private brands or in the other products it sells." Say it ain't so, Joe!

Now, I realize there's more to being a responsible company than just screening for unsafe chemicals, and Trader Joe's still gets high marks for its workplace practices. But Walmart—the company I used to look on as the epitome of corporate evil—appears to get high marks on every measure of corporate responsibility. They're doing a great job of avoiding toxins and shrinking their carbon footprint and paying workers a decent wage. And while Target is not doing too badly on these points either, they appear to lag behind their larger competitor for most of them.

Under the circumstances, there simply seems to be no way to justify shopping at Target while continuing to boycott Walmart. I have to either declare that neither one is virtuous enough to suit me—a decision that would also put pretty much every major retail chain in the country off limits—or acknowledge that they're both basically okay.

So today, on the very blog where I first announced and then withdrew my boycott of Hershey, I'm announcing that I am officially no longer boycotting Walmart. Mind you, this probably doesn't mean I'll be shopping there very often; of the two, Target still seems to offer a better selection of sustainable products at a reasonable price (as highlighted in the Harvard Business Review). And, as Business Insider observes, Target stores just have a more appealing atmosphere.

But the next time I'm searching for products online and the best price I can find is at Walmart...into the cart it goes.