ALDIrage
I never read the junk mail from Supermarkets that clog our mailbox. The comparative prices of canned tomatoes, BBQ sauce and sausages is the responsibility of the purchasing department of our marriage. I am more into the manufacturing, wholesaling and distribution than retail sales. So I don’t read the supermarket junk mail.
Perhaps because Parliament is in winter recess and most of the other inmates have flown to summer climes, I picked up the Aldi catalogue from the mailbox and idly leafed through it until I was stopped in my tracks. There was an electric jackhammer of the size and power I wanted at an absurd price, half of what the major hardware stores charged. Anyone who has had to break up concrete with a steel chisel and sledgehammer knows the next time they will use a jackhammer. Further one of my sons had told me we needed one. (I cannot think why I need one, so I guess that was the royal “we”.) But anyhow, all men know that you can always do with an electric jackhammer in the shed, especially at that price.
I have never been into an Aldi store and I did not know they sold white goods and large electrical appliances. At those prices I knew I had better be early as these kinds of specials always disappear quickly. Thursday morning, 8:20am, I pulled into the shopping complex up the Aldi end, only to see the car park half filled long before opening time. Outside the shutter doors were about one hundred oversized shopping trolleys lined up in front of mainly retired men and women grasping the catalogues. I hoped they were mostly after the other specials otherwise my jackhammer would be gone before I even got through the shutters.
Then a man, dressed like a builder’s labourer, wearing dark glasses pushed to the front of the line and started talking on his mobile phone. The man with a shopping trolley protested that they had been there since 8am and he should go to the back of the queue. He broke off his call, and with the foulest language I have ever heard told him to mind his own business. Several other men jammed their shopping trolleys together and joined in a chorus telling him to stop swearing and to get to the back. The builder’s labourer guy, yelled at the men and told them to mind their own business, and if anyone objected he would see them in the car park to settle the matter. Every word was supported by the filthiest swearing. Then the blonde woman, who must have been 75 years old, poked him with her trolley and told him to stop swearing in front of all the women. A chorus of other women joined in. These were the descendants of the Sabine women and I would never take them on. He faced them all as the men joined in the chorus. He retired to the corner of the shutter, defeated. An outcast. A pariah. It was my first experience of Aldirage.
Just then the manager pushed a button from inside, the shutter went up, and the latest gold rush commenced. The trolleys jangled with each other as people ran at full speed down the aisles to the back of the store where apparently the specials are piled up. It was like the great Okalahoma land rush with covered wagons racing across the prairie. I eventually got there without a trolley, which I had assumed, would be for the weekly groceries. Another hundred trolleys were coming behind me.
The trolleys were for the specials only. Normally I like to read the details of what I am buying, check out the guarantee, note the size, bearings and the like, but not in Aldi. People just grabbed boxes and piled them onto the trolleys. No time to read, no salesmen to explain. I had not realised there were refrigerators on special, clothes driers and washing machines, large televisions for less than one hundred dollars, a good line in step ladders and very cheap microwave ovens.
Boxes were just grabbed off the diminishing piles and dumped in trolleys while husbands called to their wives if they needed a new steam iron, just $9 dollars, or another DVD player. Some of the men could not lift the refrigerators or the washing machines onto the trolleys so another helped. Apparently the store does not provide staff to help. What happens in the car park then I do not know. At the checkout plastic was flashing everywhere, and by 9:20am tens of thousands of dollars had entered Aldi bank accounts. I had my concrete jackhammer and I never glimpsed the builder’s labourer again. I had survived my first visit to an Aldi Supermarket.
But it got me thinking. 1. The journalists who describe Parliament as “the bear pit” obviously haven’t been to Aldi. 2. Every item on sale was made in China. China has become the factory of the world. America is the supermarket. India has become the call-centre for air flights, insurance policies and details of your banking. India has become the IT department for the world. Australia no longer manufactures goods but as the resources boom indicates, we have become the quarry of the world with all our supplies of iron ore, bauxite, nickel and so on. 3. People do not care where a product is made, or how these goods ship our jobs overseas, they only care about the price.
Most of our jobs in manufacturing industries have now gone to China. All of our computer tasks are now done in India. Ford motorcar engines can no longer be made in Geelong – that work has gone to Mexico and the Philippines. The coming of the threshing machines caused the Tolpuddle martyrs to break them in a vain attempt to stop the agricultural revolution. For their trouble they were sent as convicts to Sydney. The Industrial revolution caused children and women to work in mines and factories until machines took their jobs. Today the issue is globalization – one world, one labour force, one manufacturer, one communication network and many points of sales.
Some Australian companies are doing well at this. BHP Billiton is digging quarries everywhere. Rio Tinto employs hundreds of thousands in a dozen countries. Manchester United won at Wembley in the new Multiplex stadium. Rupert Murdoch amuses the world on their TV’s and teaches them to read his newspapers. The Chinese Olympics are being run by Australian designers, architects, stage promoters and officials.
The nations of the world are becoming more economically inter-dependent, but their leaders are coming to Sydney to discuss it because we can do that best and most securely.
Most of us are not happy with our loss of jobs overseas, and our tables loaded with food grown and processed under uncertain hygiene. Some advocate putting up the shutters, fighting free trade with protective barriers and heavy duties. They are the modern day Tolpuddle martyrs. People want to buy better goods at a cheaper price regardless. I saw that at Aldi.
It doesn’t much matter that your tennis shoes are made overseas, because the rest of your wardrobes comes from there anyhow. You don’t know where your computer parts are made and your programs are written. But it wasn’t in Australia. You might think your credit card charges are entered in somewhere down the road, but it probably was in Mumbai. That is closer to your bank records than you are. Even your on-line tax preparer is somewhere else. You may think your surgeon is looking at your X-rays, but he is taking advice from a panel of experts in USA who have your internals on their computer screens.
Protectionism always backfires. Protecting old jobs is never as good as creating new ones. For the first time in human history world poverty is being beaten, not by gifts from wealthy countries, but because even the poorest of countries can do something for the global market. Trade always beats aid. The money we spend in India, China, Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines and so on is being multiplied there beyond all our aid.
What can we do about it? Make sure our education system is at world best practise. Train our youth to be creative. Encourage your grandchildren to take jobs that can’t be sent overseas like high-cost hair-dressers, (they can’t do that in Mumbai!) or home renovators, or in the arts, maths and science, or in the repair and installation industries, or human services, teaching, nursing, medicine, dentistry, hospitality, green engineering, and so on. Quality will always count.
Some Christians want to hold onto what it was like when we were very young. They do not like change and are fearful for our future. Their preferred gear is reverse. But the global revolution is all over us, and like it or not, we have already accepted its benefits. Now we must find our future by thinking creatively, and by looking to the future because that is where God is.