Making Walmart in China: Labor Regimes, Consumption, and the Movement of Goods Along the Internal Supply Chain

Big retailers became drivers of the global economy by redirecting manufacturing to the southern hemisphere. In response to the new middle classes generated by export business, retailers moved their storefronts southward, organizing new forms of work and expanding consumption. Taking this trajectory, the U.S.-originated Walmart opened stores in the heartland of its biggest trading partner, China, generating low-wage, precarious service jobs. To capture the new forms of work and consumption created, this study extends the commodity circuit of value into the retail store. It follows commodities as they travel through the hands of retail workers, themselves commodified, and into the hands of consumers, most often women performing invisible, unremunerated labor for their household. The labor is arrayed on an “internal supply chain.” It is regulated by logistics technologies, managerial supervision and customer behavior. Each link on the internal chain of activities generates distinctive forms of labor and techniques of regulation, and presents opportunities to temper the relentless demands of work. I examine three types of labor and their corresponding regimes of regulation: 1) stocking, a masculinized, semi-panoptic despotic regime; 2) cashiering a gender-neutral regime driven by techno-despotism; 3) vendor-dispatched sales, a feminized entrepreneurial hegemonic regime. Unlike its U.S. stores, each store in China hosts hundreds of dispatched workers, to promote sales and manage merchandise. They figure centrally in adapting the retailers’ monolithic model to diverse local markets. The paper contributes a critical perspective to analyses of retail labor as it moves to the global south, expands both consumption and women’s invisible labor, unpacking the labor regimes at the heart of global retail. It also widens our frame of service labor, situating types of work (aesthetic, emotional, triadic, bodily, routinized) within the movement of goods in the circuit of capital.