The following opinion piece by the executive director of americansforwalmart.org appears in the December 19 issue of DSN Retailing Today, a retail trade magazine serving the food, drug, mass and specialty channels. It is addressed to readers in the retail business.

Why I’m fighting for Wal-Mart
–By Luke Boggs

We are living in the Golden Age of retail choice in America. Year after year, retail competition and innovation is creating tremendous benefits for real people, folks with kids and mortgages and retirement plans.

The irony, as you well know, is that there is now an entire cottage industry devoted to criticizing modern American retailing. While small in number, such critics are making a big splash in the media, which tends to amplify their various doom-and-gloom complaints.

The critics’ ire is currently focused on Wal-Mart, America’s largest retailer and top employer. The company is criticized for just about everything, from its size to its competitive spirit to its employment practices to its supplier relationships to its "always low prices."

Today, Wal-Mart is a booming success because of millions of individual consumer choices. As it has grown, Wal-Mart has lowered the cost of living and lifted the standard of living for millions of Americans, even non-customers.

In fact, a recent Global Insight study found that Wal-Mart, by maintaining downward pressure on retail pricing over the past 20 years, saved the American people $263 billion in 2004 alone—or $2,329 per household.

Bankrolled and directed by organized labor, Wal-Mart’s most vocal critics paint themselves as friends of low- and middle-income Americans. But people of modest means stand to lose the most if opponents succeed in injuring Wal-Mart.

Truth is, labor leaders are primarily interested not in helping workers but in trying to help themselves to the prospective union dues of Wal-Mart’s 1.2 million U.S. employees, none of whom are currently unionized.

Contemptuous of the free-market system that has made our economy the envy of the world, Wal-Mart’s opponents fairly begged for an independent response. Last month, we began giving them one with the launch of americansforwalmart.org, a grassroots consumer campaign not affiliated with or sponsored by Wal-Mart.

It all started about a year ago, when I was having lunch with a buddy. We talked about the absurdity of an American company—any American company—being unfairly hounded merely for serving customers and succeeding in the marketplace.

In the ensuing months, as the attacks on Wal-Mart grew ever more outrageous, I kept thinking about the company’s 130 million weekly customers. I decided to give voice to those customers, and the overwhelming majority of Americans who still believe in economic freedom. That, ultimately, was the genesis of americansforwalmart.org.

In a free-market system, Wal-Mart will continue to try to attract customers. Competing retailers will do the same. And that’s as it should be. Our beef, then, is not with competing retailers but with the hired-gun public relations flacks trying to deny Wal-Mart the chance to compete freely for customers.

You may be tempted to think that if you compete with Wal-Mart, its opponents are your friends. They are not. To its critics, Wal-Mart is only the most obvious symbol of modern retailing. And, if opponents manage to turn public opinion against Wal-Mart in any significant way, it will not help the companyís competitors but harm the entire industry.

Wal-Mart has a great story to tell—and so does the modern retail business. You’re giving people what they want, and, on behalf of your customers, thank you. After all, when retailers compete honestly, the American people will always come out ahead.