Rhetorical Analysis Blog Post

For my Rhetorical Analysis I have chosen to write on the article “Wal-Martian Invasion” by Barbara Ehrenreich. The rhetorical purpose in this article is a little unclear to me, to be honest. She spends the whole time bashing on Wal-Mart for various reasons--low pay, high expansion rates, and even calling Wal-Mart a sweatshop-- but I’m still trying to figure out why. Upon my first reading of the article, I was of the thought that it was because she was writing to Wal-Mart executives because she wanted them to change their business practices. While this could still be true, I personally believe that she was just writing to the general public, but especially those who semi-begrudgingly shop at Wal-Mart, as her primary audience, with those Wal-Mart executives as her secondary audience, perhaps. Let me explain. Why would she do this?

I believe the answer is that she knows that she cannot change the practices of Wal-Mart as a company on a whole scale, but what she can do through writing this article is expose Wal-Mart’s weak points, which are points that the general public rarely see. What she accomplishes by doing this is she can convince some people of Wal-Marts bad spots, and there is enough competition in the supermarket business that prices are relatively comparative, and she is hoping that the people who read will go to another store instead of Wal-Mart. I think that the author understands this, and knows that this is the one way that she personally, through writing this article, can have an effect on Wal-Mart as a company: by convincing it’s “on the fence” shoppers to go elsewhere to shop. Less shoppers mean less revenue, effectively hurting Wal-Mart as a whole, which the author obviously has a bias against.

I think that as a whole, she did a good job at her intended audience. I loved her personal experience that she shared about when she worked at Wal-Mart. Although there wasn’t too much detail included in it, just the mere mention of “when I worked at Wal-Mart” showed me, as the reader, that she had a personal connection, and it immediately gave her authority. I felt like I could trust what she had to say. Also, throughout the whole article she used the metaphor of Wal-Mart stores being aliens, with a lot of sarcasm and tone, which made it that much more fun to read. However I didn’t feel like it was all that effective, at least for me anyways. I don’t feel any less inclined to shopping at Wal-Mart. I feel like she was over-exaggerating everything, and I personally don’t feel like Wal-Mart is all that bad of a company. So overall it wasn’t that effective, but the literary devices she used were top-notch.