Walmart promises a sort of protection from the forms of neoliberal precarious life it actually helps create. As investors are discovering, not even the state is as secure, as reliable and as benevolent as Walmart, with its sanitized ecologies and iconic smiley-faced brand icon. The cultural and spatial politics of the firm orbit around the mobilization of risk management to promise a shelter from the terror of financialized everyday life. The fact that, at present, a greater proportion of the American adult population shops at Walmart than votes (Sasseen 2008) illustrates the tendency towards a new cultural, economic and political dynamic in an age of securitization.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 303