Editor’s note: Northwest Arkansas native Olivia Paschal teamed up with writer Bart Elmore and filmmaker Ethan Payne to produce this new documentary, which you can watch for free, embedded below.
When I first met award-winning writer and historian Bart Elmore, he was about to head off to Bentonville. His new book, Country Capitalism, focuses on five Southern companies — Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Bank of America, FedEx, and, of course, Walmart — that, Bart argues, remade the global economy and environment.
Northwest Arkansas is my home as well, and we compared our distinct critiques and discomforts about the world’s largest retailer and the role it played in shaping the worlds we live in. Bart’s writing on Walmart shows a company whose founder, Sam Walton, played up and played in the natural environment of the Ozarks, and used it to his business advantage, even as the company’s business practices helped create what we now think of as the “Amazon economy,” whose ethos of cheap at any cost contributes to climate change and ecological devastation around the world—including in the Ozarks.
A few months later, the Southern Foodways Alliance commissioned a short film based on his book, and Bart and filmmaker Ethan Payne asked if I’d tag along. The 8-minute film captures Bart’s research on the environmental consequences of Walmart’s business practices and my own work on how Walmart and the Walton family have shaped Northwest Arkansas in their image.
We viewed our documentary as part of a conversation that’s been taking place in the Ozarks, as Rogers, Bentonville and, increasingly, the region’s more rural places contend with what it means to have one of the world’s largest companies and the world’s richest families in our backyard. —Olivia Paschal
Olivia: What made you interested in Walmart as an object of historical inquiry?
Bart: When it came to environmental history, the South was always a place in which bad environmental things happened, but it happened in the Southland—timber companies coming in and devastating the longleaf pine forest or tobacco companies ravaging the lands in Virginia or sugarcane in Louisiana. And that’s definitely a true story about the South. But Southern businesses have designed these logistics systems that have these global, huge impacts. And we can’t understand how to unpack those environmental problems without understanding the ecosystem in which these businesses grew.
So I think that’s why Walmart, which is one of the largest corporations in the world, was an easy choice for this book, because it represented everything that I wanted to talk about: how the Ozarks can breed a corporation like this by providing the right natural, political, social ingredients to make this company what it is. But then to think about how those ingredients, like a lack of labor unions, could also have a bigger impact once you take this thing global.
Olivia: As relative newbies, what was your impression of Bentonville?
Bart: When I arrived, I loved Bentonville. I was like, they have built this for me. I’m a huge mountain biker, I had grown up going up to North Georgia. So the first thing I did in Bentonville was go get a bike, and meet the local shop owners who were so excited about it.
I was aware as I was doing this, having written about Walmart, that this was kind of messing with my mind. A lot of this seems good, you know? Conservation, helping ensure that nature is preserved in a way that creates connections with the community. But at every turn it’s like, who is this for? This is for someone like me who can fly down on a weekend and do this. I doubt this is for other people who might have had other visions.
Our experience together helped crystallize that for me — that people weren’t consulted about this. This was done because certain individuals in the Walton family love to do it. And talking with some of your friends was a really powerful moment for me, realizing that not everybody wants to go mountain biking. You could say the same thing about art, you know, for those who go there and see Crystal Bridges.
I think the thing I’m asking myself now is how does a community make sure that the community is deciding, you know, how to use them and the immense resources that a company like this brings into the town? That seems to be the critical kind of question that Bentonville should be asking.
Ethan: Crystal Bridges was described to me as exactly what it was, and it still blew my mind the first time we walked through the entire thing. We went there for a day, and I spent three more days there after that.
Olivia: What stands out to me about experiencing it with you and hearing y’all talk about it is the way in which all of that has been constructed for people exactly like the two of you — and me, if I wasn’t from there — people who have the ability and the privilege to travel around, to land there for a weekend, to rent those mountain bikes. That small town downtown is so constructed and so conceived in the same way as Walmart. It wants to project that it’s still this kind of down-home, folksy company—though I think at some point they figured out the racial politics of the folksy, the presumed whiteness, was maybe not actually what they wanted to go for from a marketing standpoint. But they still want to project some kind of familial, welcoming, small-scale thing that is friendly to consumers and friendly to people.
Historian and journalist Olivia Paschal stands in front of the original Walton’s store, currently wrapped in a printed tarp.
Ethan: On that five and dime facade, I was so disappointed that it was a facade and that I couldn’t photograph the real thing. [While undergoing renovations, the Waltons’ original storefront and Walmart Museum have been covered with a tarp made to look like the original.] But it now occurs to me that having the facade there is the perfect metaphor for the entirety of the story.
Bart: I had to regroup after being in Bentonville because I knew, as an environmental person, that we were seeing a very shiny and very environmentally beautiful space. And yet, I also knew about the gigatons of emissions that were associated with this business, the years and years of cheap plastics and cheap environmental products that were out there. I also knew that this is a company that’s trying to redesign themselves and commit themselves to become sustainable.
I know there’s good people in the company that want to try and make it better. And yet I also know there’s people inside the company who only care about the bottom line.
The thing that attracts me to stories like Walmart is that human element to it that is really frustrating, to be honest, as somebody who cares about trying to make businesses more sustainable. Sometimes having the shiny thing, or even the really good sustainability officer isn’t enough. You really have to interrogate the whole system that made this thing. And then what you start seeing are some of the things we talked about—child labor in Bangladesh in the 1990s, and paying people below minimum wage that even made this possible. That’s what makes it hard to be in that space sometimes, because then you simultaneously love this stuff. But at what cost? How is this all made? I think that’s what resonated in my head by the time we got to the end of our journey.
Olivia: Part of the reason they have been as successful as they have is because of that landscape — social, economic, the kind of political economy of a place that allows for companies to pay people badly, to treat them poorly, to run roughshod over the environment. There’s not necessarily economic alternatives, and they operate in a political environment of deregulation, of low political will to challenge business practices.
I want to get to this question about the visual side of shooting a film.
A video of Sam Walton sharing his business strategy greets visitors to the Walmart HQ.
Ethan: We walked into the [Walmart] headquarters, and I was just taken by that big glass bin full of those yellow smiley faces. I was like, can we shoot you in front of the smiley face bin? And you said, why are we doing this? Because it’s all of the workers that were taken advantage of. They’re all in this case, they’re all upside down smiley faces, like emojis all on top of each other in this thing. I just became obsessed with this bit of yellow smiley face heads.
That’s what’s fun about documentary filmmaking is that sometimes you go to a location you’ve never been, and you find something interesting to latch on to.
Bart: Ethan, one of things I was really keen on was topography. For me the story was, but for these hills, Sam Walton doesn’t get his pilot’s license so he can see the growth of retail. If the hills hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have been riding on these winding roads. The hills also kept him protected from his competitors.
Olivia: The Sam Walton shot that opens the film, virtual Sam Walton in the Walmart Heritage Lab in Bentonville, was the first shot we got. We were very frightened—what if they knew who we were? But then they didn’t care at all, and we went to a place I had never even conceived of going, the Walmart home office. I had always just imagined that you can’t go to the Walmart home office. It turns out you can, in fact, just walk in. And because we wanted to get a shot there, we went. I thought about that afterwards, after we left. I’ve lived here my whole life. I’ve reported on Walmart for years, and I just have never thought to walk in the front door. And that was such a different experience. It’s so bizarre in there.
Ethan: It’s almost like it was set up for a photo op.
Bart: I think transparency is the only way to ensure that the companies are doing the right thing. What does that tell us about our ability as regular citizens, whether we be Bentonville citizens or you know, customers or whatever they might be to influence the future of this company? What power do we have to make this company change?
I think we saw some of the limits of that maybe in the journey. Beautiful things, but not necessarily of our choosing.
Ethan: We were even talking about this with your friends who were like, we don’t care about mountain biking. We never asked for this. If someone came in and was like, I just love ball pits and I have $300 million and so this entire town is going to be one big ball pit, everyone there is going to be like, there’s nothing bad about ball pits, but I didn’t ask for those.
Olivia: I think it’s also not just about the way in which folks are not at the table or not included, but also about how the structures of Walmart as a business and the Walton family as a group with a lot of power over this place—who is actively kept out of those conversations? And who is this constructed place envisioned to be for? I’ve been in archives, the last several weeks, of poultry workers and poultry farmers, a lot of the rest of the folks who live in Northwest Arkansas. And I wonder, what would it actually look like to make the distribution of money, resources, and access not just more inclusive, but more just? More democratic?
Bart: We’re not pretending like this is a story only about nastiness. On the macro scale, it’s a story of how this massive logistics revolution that led to the Amazon economy that we have today has its roots in Bentonville. Once you understand the roots of our Amazon economy, that Jeff Bezos flew to Bentonville, that he hired his team from from Walmart to build out Amazon, that he read Sam Walton’s biography, he realized that if you’re going to understand this economy that we have right now you’re gonna have to go to the South. When you do that, you’re gonna have to wrestle with the same things that we wrestled with in this film, some of the beauty of the landscape and the beauty of some of the people and beauty of the art. Yet that beauty is tethered to a history that is dark and has its own problems. And boy, if we sit with that long enough, I think it makes us more vigilant for how we can make a better economy going forward. I think it allows us to be wary of the shiny outer facade, to always be trying to dig deeper and ask questions like, why is this here? Who has the power to make the choices and whose voices are not being heard in these discussions?
I walk away from this as someone who sees themselves in the story. I need to wrestle with my own perceptions. Remember, when I first visited, I thought this is great. And I didn’t even stop to question, well, wait a minute, what about the people who don’t give a shit about mountain biking? I think if we’re being good citizens, we’re thinking about how history should make us kind of question who’s not at the table here, who doesn’t have a voice there.
