Via Mistermix, do read this post by Kathleen Geier, “No, Walmart doesn’t create jobs.”
Guess what? Contrary to the happy talk, Walmart does not create jobs. Actually, it kills them.
Here’s why: first, at the local level, all Walmart does is put mom-and-pop stores out of business. The overwhelming body of evidence, including the most rigorous peer-reviewed studies, suggests that when Walmart enters a community, the most likely result is a net loss of jobs; at best, it’s a wash. In fact, the biggest, best scholarly study about the impact of Walmart on local employment was done by an economist at University of California at Irvine named David Neumark, who is not exactly a wild-eyed liberal. He’s the kind of economist, actually, who writes anti-minimum wage op-eds for the Wall Street Journal.
The devastating impact Walmart has had on jobs becomes most clear when you go macro, and look at its impact not just locally, but on the national economy. In its relentless quest for low prices, Walmart strong-arms its suppliers to cut labor costs to the bone. What this has meant in practice is that many suppliers have been forced to lay off workers and ship jobs to low-wage countries overseas. Because of Walmart, countless jobs in the U.S. have been lost, mostly in manufacturing.
Anyone of a certain age from just about any southern or midwestern small town can tell the story of how the old Main Street businesses died after the Walmart opened. The Walmart not only represented a net loss of jobs; it also changed the way money circulated in the community. It used to be that all the little stores and businesses were owned by local people who also shopped in the community, so the profits they made in their businesses went back into the local economy. The old home town seems poorer and shabbier now.
And, of course, to add insult to injury, taxpayers subsidize Walmart profits by providing government assistance to its employees, so they don’t starve on what Walmart pays them.
Walmart is to the U.S. economy what cancer is to a body.
And it looks like the study is just talking about the effect on local retail jobs. There’s another kind of ripple effect as well, because of course local retail establishments will use the services of local accountants, attorneys, ad agencies, printers, and so on and so forth. So when a mom-and-pop store closes, it’s not only Mom and Pop who are making less money.
Walmart is to the U.S. economy what cancer is to a body.
I’ve never heard it put that way but it sure is an apt description. Wal-Mart is the decline of this country, it’s business model accomplishes everything the teatards have been trying to pull for the last thirty years, offshoring, union-busting, anti-education, anti-regulation, anti-worker, anti-local, etc…… I have never been in a Wal-Mart and never will.
And don’t blame Ol’ Sam Walton – he prided himself for years, on the things he sold in his stores being made in the Good Ol’ USA!
It’s his sociopathic offspring, and their love of filthy lucre, who are to blame.
The Walton Family now has something like the same amount of this nation’s wealth, as the bottom 40%:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/07/17/534591/walmart-heirs-wealth-combined/
The Walton’s, are both a cancer, and a parasite!
So, all I can say is – “Good night – AND FECK YOU, JOHN-BOY!!! DIE, DIE, WITH LARGE FESTERING BOILS… DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
I never, ever shop at Wal-Mart.
Well said! Walmart kills the life blood of the community. And in addition to the damage already stated, they place additional burdens on the community by not paying their workers a living wage and not providing health care. We pay for walmart on every hospital bill when their workers become ill. Their workers end up in the “working poor “class with not enough to provide for themselves, let alone a family. When I hear people complain about the additional Americans getting food stamps I want to tell them it is because of walmart- which leaves employees unable to afford food and with low enough wages to qualify for food stamps and in a spot where they can’t survive without them. While my rant ends here, the reasons walmart are bad does not..we only scratched the surface here today. NEVER shop there…I beg you!
Meh, as someone who has the wonderful pleasure of living in exurban hell where they won’t let big box stores (except for the Safeway that greased the skids hint hint), allow me to say fuck these mythical “mom and pop” stores (which, of course, are rarely if ever unionized and often don’t even have federal labor laws applied to them because they’re not big enough).
You are not seeing the big picture. In the little town I grew up in (population about 5,000, as I remember, but it may have been less than that), there used to be a Main Street business area that had maybe 20 to 30 retail stores, including a Woolworths, a small department store, and a drug store that still sold malts and ice cream sodas and had a couple of pinball machines in the corner. Yeah, I’m that old.
A few of these, like the auto parts store my grandparents used to own, were true “Mom and Pop” stores that didn’t employ anybody but Mom and Pop. Although the auto parts store made my grandparents a good living, which is good because my grandpa was too ornery to work for anybody. But most had some employees who were paid at least well enough they didn’t go on public assistance to eat.
So let’s say there were 30 retail stores that employed ten people each, including the owners. That was in my town. There were a number of other small towns in the vicinity with a similar number of small businesses. So we’re talking about a few hundred small retails shops that employed at least a couple of thousand people all together. But when they built the Super Walmart out by the interstate, many of those businesses closed, and the ones that survived cut back. So what the study says is that the number of jobs a Walmart creates does not make up for the number of jobs it kills. And I believe that.
Further, back in the day, all those little businesses were owned locally, so the people who owned them spent the profits in the community. So all that money being spent in the stores stayed in circulation in the community. (I remember Mr. Foulon, who owned the drug store, bought his daughter the cheerleader — yes, she was a blond — a pink Mustang for her 16th birthday, so he must have been doing pretty well.) Now the profits from the Super Walmart do not stay in the community but are leached out to who knows where, which is strangling the local economy even more. I have seen the slow erosion of a quality of life with my own tired eyes.
Further, as the story says, Walmart suppliers are being squeezed to cut labor costs which is killing jobs all over the country. So don’t kid yourself that the Big Box stores don’t matter.
Well, I gotta confess…My haberdasher is Walmart.
Not for nothing…I bought a Canon scanner/ printer. with excellent image quality for $29.00 at Walmart. It is a product of Vietnam.. But it was $29.00. It blew my mind to try and figure out how they can make a product in Vietnam, ship it to the United States, then sell it for $29.00 and still make a profit. Crazy.
maybe in the long run it is against my best interests…But it’s hard to pass up a deal like that. Probably any electronic device is made overseas anyway so why pay over a hundred bucks for something that is marketed with an America sounding name but probably came from Asia anyway.
Cancer is a strong word. Using such a word certainly is prejudicial in understanding Walmart and its economic position in our community.
I am reluctant to label Walmart as evil or as a cancer on our society. Why you may ask, because it is providing full time employment for two of my neighbors and the cashier who rang up my purchases today told me that she is working full time for the Xerox Corporation and part-time at Walmart’s to earn money to get out of debt.
Walmart customers are generally at the lower economic rung of the ladder. These include single mothers, the unemployed, retirees, the under employed and families trying to get by on limited incomes. These people need the benefits of whatever savings they can get to fill their basic needs. Then there are many shoppers who certainly can afford to pay more but rather not. They too want to save money to invest in other things that they enjoy or are important to them. Most of them, not all, will travel far to get the lowest prices on everything such as automobiles, furniture, bedding, insurance, discount shopping clubs and etcetera.
Do these customers believe Walmart is a cancer on society? No, Walmart is giving what most shoppers want, the satisfaction of getting the “best deal” or the lowest price in town. It seems part of our human nature not to want to pay more than necessary in spite our desire to see the local small businessman succeed.
I do believe that Walmart employees as well as many other people working in the retail and restaurant trade are truly underpaid. An increase in their pay to the so called “living wage” seems not only fair but a basic human right. Of course the cost of the “living wage†would be born by all of us. Various studies done at the University of California at Berkley have shown that increasing the minimum wage at Walmart in California to $12 per hour would only increase store prices by 1.1%. This would be spread across a wide area and have a relatively small impact on our wallets. Also all of the community’s providers of goods and services would benefit my the employees ability to increase their spending. Ah! Some would cry that this is “socialism” and an erosion of our free capitalistic principles. No, if it takes a village to raise a child it also takes a village to take care of the sick, the hungry and the unemployed. We are after all our brother’s keeper. I’m not advocating socialism here, but I do not believe that we can let capitalism run wild or else the forces of greed will destroy our village. Capitalism must be regulated so that it acts with responsible behavior to the community from which is derives its profits
Not prejudicial; precise. The Walmart business model is killing the U.S. economy in the same way that cancer takes over healthy cells and destroys them. Step back and look at the bigger picture, dude.
About five year ago the LA Times ran a series on Walmart (the LA Times was under different ownership back then). Walmart, it seems regularly and deliberately violated labor laws to keep its stores labor costs under 1% of its sales. Among the violations, forced unpaid overtime (often as much as 25 hours of it per week from a single worker),. firing workers with any experience as a regular practice because they were paid more, and a hierarchy with one well paid worker per store (the store manager at $150 k), a handful of workers in the $50-66 K range (department managers scuffling for the one golden ring as STORE MANAGER) and everybody else around minimum wage.
Worker pay at Costco at the time was double that at Walmart and the prices werte similar, service was much better and there was no parasite class like the Walton family. At least much of the penny anti lies are completely not needed to keep prices low. I think they actually get off on the misery (hint, Sam Walton did not follow the same practices).
Walmart has the same effect on a community as an individual having a poor diet. Eat cheap poor quality food long term and it kills. Shopping at Walmart is a race to the bottom.
department managers scuffling for the one golden ring as STORE MANAGER
LOL 🙂 Only because it’s true. Pedro didn’t show up today and there’s a spill on aisle 3.
C u n d gulag,
Sam Walton hated labor; read his autobiography/memoir. He regarded everyone who worked for him as a necessary evil at best. Sam was no friend to the worker; it’s just that his ultimate goal was achieved during his children’s lifetimes, not his.
The same thing can be said of lumber yards.. When I was coming up every town had a lumber yard and a hardware store.. Now it’s all Home Depot and Lowes. The only positive aspect is that employees get to refer to themselves as “associates”. It doesn’t put bread on the table, but it’s a wonderful ego booster. ” I’m an associate”
The Walmart business model is successful because we as consumers let it be. The same applies to the other big box stores. The answer: stop your crying and stop shopping there. Take your business elsewhere.
Believe it or not, where I live there are no Walmarts. We do have a Target, which I’m told is nearly as bad
“These people need the benefits of whatever savings they can get to fill their basic needs”
People are poor in this country because of the business practices of Wal-Mart, it’s a circle jerk: we need wal-mart cause people is poor, we can’t pay more money cause people won’t be able to buy a cheeseburger. Are you really that fucking dim? It’s a race to the bottom and numbskulls like you are leading the charge.
Walmart is one of the tallest trees in a forest of problems. To focus on the evil of that one ugly tree neglects the ecology of evil, of which Walmart is a symptom, not a cause. Democrats and Republicans line up (generally) to support ‘free trade’. I’m disappointed that neither Clinton nor Carter (free of political ambitions) have opposed free trade policies which decimate the working class of this country but boost the profits of multinationals.
There’s been a lot more jobs lost in manufacturing than in retail over the last 30 or so years. Disbursing foreign-made goods to multiple retail mom’n’pop stores won’t restore our middle-class working economy. This sounds like I advocate protectionist legislation which would lay tariffs on all imports. Not true.
Look at our neighbor to the North. I would not advocate trade restrictions with Canada because they (generally) are responsible about environmental protection – they don’t oppose organized labor as national policy – they have free and fair elections and they enforce (generally) fair labor practices. China, by comparison, is a huge trade partner and they slaughter dissidents political (Tienanmen Square ring a bell?) and labor reformists. No matter how flagrant their offenses, nothing happens here to make them change. Not to pick on China exclusively, we had a textile factory collapse this year, killing a record number of employees. Have you heard of any trade sanctions by the US until safe labor laws are in place there. They were manufacturing for import to the US. The pollution that’s happening in 3rd world countries by phony shell corporations who are totally controlled by parent US companies is obvious. Examples are too numerous – they are all part of the overall ecology of evil. But there is a solution.
Here’s my point. Using Canada as an example of a responsible trade partner, why not set up a scoring system for other countries we would allow imports from. If they are politically oppressive without free elections… they lose points. If labor organizers disappear, they lose points. If there are no environmental protection systems and they would do manufacturing, especially toxic plastics and electronics (Apple, you listening?).. they lose points. Based on the score for that country, there would be trade tariffs which discourage any companies who want to sell in the US from setting up shop with the intent of exploiting the labor force or evading environmental safeguards.
Use the revenue from the tariffs to subsidize manufacturing start-ups in the US – companies that COULD compete with foreign competition IF they were competing on a level playing field. I said I’m not a protectionist and I’m not. The US can compete when the competition has to pay fair wages, have decent working conditions, protect the environment, and answer in those foreign countries to the people who live and work there. (That’s democracy.) The US Congress on BOTH sides of the aisle is whoring for Wall Street and has been for decades. That has to end before a job-economy for the US worker can be built.
So why do people shop at Wal-Mart if it’s so evil?
I lived in one of those small towns. The opening of Wal-Mart was the best thing that ever happened to us. Here is what we got:
1) Wal-Mart is open when we’re home. The little Main Street shops and stores were only open 7A-7P, when most of us were at work or driving to or from work.
2) Wal-Mart stocks inventory that people want to buy. The little Main Street shops and stores stocked whatever the proprietor wanted to buy, no matter how unfashionable or ugly.
3) If we buy something from Wal-Mart and it turns out that it doesn’t fit or doesn’t work the way we thought it did, Wal-Mart will cheerfully take it back. The little Main Street shops and stores will simply point at the sign on the wall that says “All Sales Are Final”.
4) Wal-Mart has a greeter at the door who says hello to you. The little shops and stores on Main Street had a grumpy proprietor whose attitude was “if you don’t like it, go shop somewhere else” — when there was nowhere else to shop in that small town for that particular thing.
The only main street store that survived Wal-Mart was the Ace Hardware. Good riddance to the rest of them. They got too inbred, too surly, too unwilling to compete based on service, too confident in the fact that they were monopolies so they didn’t have to provide good customer service or stock fashionable inventory, so when they had actual competition they collapsed like the Ottoman Empire.
So now you have the other half of the story — the half that explains why small town customers shop at Wal-Mart rather than at the former main street stores. It’s not all about low prices, it’s about the fact that Main Street had become corrupt, lazy, apathetic, and unwilling — and unable — to compete on service. With one or two exceptions, which are still in business.
Badtux — the Main Street I remember was nothing like the one you describe. I have fond memories of our little Main Street business district that is now much diminished. Although my town was so small everybody knew everybody, so nobody got too snotty. Yeah, the Walmart has lower prices and is more convenient, so you can buy all the different things under one roof, which is why everybody goes there. But instead of making the local economy healthier, it enables the local economy to cannibalize itself.
James Allan….Not exactly.. We didn’t let it be. Just like a disease, by the time we noticed the symptoms it had already grabbed our ass. Even if some of us had the foresight to see what was coming there’s not much that could be done to avoid the business model.. It’s not just Walmart, it’s all mega stores where labor is squeezed for every last ounce that can be extracted at minimal cost.
Here’s a story… This past September( or there about) one of America largest retailers announced it was hiring 50,000 new employees to do it’s part in helping America ( perhaps with a little incentive subsidy to shift the unemployment numbers and enhance their image).
The people who were hired were all at a point of desperation where employment in any capacity was their overall concern. The deal that this company offered was minimum wage plus commission on a part time basis. The concept of commission appeared attractive because it is a high end retailer with a potential for high volume sales.
The hook was as an employee you were responsible for $150 in sales an hour before your commission kicked in. The obligation for the hourly sales quota is accrued against you so that if you work 2 hours you have to meet $300. in sales before your commission kicks in. You don’t keep pace you don’t get a commission. Any dollar overage in your hourly quota is not credited toward your next hourly quota, although you do receive commission on those sales.
And nobody gets over 24 hours in a week..
I’m not sure what my point is. That can be seen as a company full of magnanimity offering those who have nothing a little something, or a company willing to exploit desperation for their own capitalist desires..I see it as the latter. I see it as cruel. The purveying of souls.
apocalipstick.
Thanks, if I ever knew that, I’d forgotten it.
But I did remember the part about being proud that all of the stuff his stores sold, were made in America.
And at my age, I’ll take that as a good sign! 🙂
OT – if you want to feel a little bit better about some of our fellow Americans, check this out:
http://www.upworthy.com/a-hidden-camera-show-goes-to-texas-it-did-not-expect-to-find-this
“You are not seeing the big picture. In the little town I grew up in (population about 5,000, as I remember, but it may have been less than that), there used to be a Main Street business area that had maybe 20 to 30 retail stores, including a Woolworths, a small department store, and a drug store that still sold malts and ice cream sodas and had a couple of pinball machines in the corner. Yeah, I’m that old.”
The problem with bringing this to now, though, is that there is no “Main Street.” Exurban hell/outer ring suburbs just aren’t developed in such a way as to have these sort of walkable town centers where you could have those sorts of small scale retail operations next to each other, so in practice keeping out big box stores is either impossible (our delightful slice of hell had to make an exception for K-Mart, which is so shitty it might as well just board up) or force everyone to drive to the nearest big box retailer, which of course disproportionately impacts poor people and is hardly environmentally friendly either.
And I still have no idea why I’m supposed to sweat the plight of small business owners, who are amongst the very most conservative, noxious, demographics in the country.
Brien Jackson — not everyone lives in “exurbs.” There still are actual small towns and actual Main Streets. Don’t tell me they don’t exist. I have seen them. These are not places created by urban sprawl but town that existed before anyone ever heard of urban sprawl. You might want to get out more, or at least travel more.
“And I still have no idea why I’m supposed to sweat the plight of small business owners, who are amongst the very most conservative, noxious, demographics in the country.” I already explained this to you. Bigoted, much? Yeah, let’s let Walmart suck the economy dry because small town business owners vote Republican.
Jeez louise, but you are stupid. Go away.
“So now you have the other half of the story — the half that explains why small town customers shop at Wal-Mart rather than at the former main street stores. It’s not all about low prices, it’s about the fact that Main Street had become corrupt, lazy, apathetic, and unwilling — and unable — to compete on service.”
Yeah, this. Retail shopping is a huge pain in the ass if you need a wide variety of stuff, and there’s huge consumer advantages in having things in one place, easily being able to return items, consolidated logistics, etc.
Of course Wal-Mart (and really the entire retail industry’s) labor practices are abysmal, but the answer to that is going after the laws that let them do it (and the tax code that lets them accumulate obscene sums of personal wealth), not trying to impose an aesthetic ideal that doesn’t reflect how most people live anymore on the economy.
It’s funny how I’ve always gotten a bad vibe feeling whenever I’ve walked into a Wal-Mart, and I try to avoid them. By contrast, nearly everyone I know, myself included, gets a good vibe feeling from CostCo. I have a number of relations (including a significant number of unconscious Republicans) who like WalMart, but among all of my acquaintances, the preference is overwhelmingly for CostCo. And I get how it’s a somewhat different demographic that shops at either place.
I’ve read elsewhere that Wal-Mart’s business model is failing (wish I could find the link). If you ever go into one, you’ll probably notice how messy the store is, or how empty the shelves are – it takes a lot of worker bees to keep a gigantic store like that in clean, refreshed condition, and this cuts into the bottom line. This is an intrinisic, ongoing problem in retail. Wal-Mart has basically maxed out where it can locate in America – they’ve snagged all the low cost rural locations, and bigger metropolitan areas pass laws that keep them out. There are few other reasons why WalMart has hit its “Limits To Growth”, but these are the ones I remember.
Obviously each of us approaches the question of Walmart’s evilness from the environment we grew up in whether that was urban, suburban or rural. These big box retailers are juggernauts that have changed the face of retail marketing in our nation. They are not going away as long as the majority of consumers find the consolidation of the variety, qualities and pricing of merchandise available in one location. If you want service and a knowledgeable sales staff who can offer friendly advice with your purchases then Walmart is not for you. Rant and rave all you want about the “evil†Walmart but I and millions of others each week will spend part of our disposable income there. Enough said!
James Allan — Did you read the post at all? Do you have no idea that Walmart and other companies adopting its business practices are strangling the U.S. economy? Why do you hate America?
small business owners… are amongst the very most conservative, noxious, demographics in the country
Wow, that is an ignorant generalization. Where are the stats to support it? Let me guess; in the same Area 51 Mystery Vault that contains all the data to prove that Mexicans are lazy, and women are bad drivers.
I and millions of others each week will spend part of our disposable income there.
Hey, if it’s easier than thinking….
Thanks to Bush crashing our economy I haven’t had deposable income since 2007.
It’s funny how I’ve always gotten a bad vibe feeling whenever I’ve walked into a Wal-Mart
I get a feeling like I’m in a Gahan Wilson cartoon or maybe I’m in the twilight zone. There’s a lot of weird people out there. One good thing about Walmart…It’s a good place to practice your Spanish.
If you want service and a knowledgeable sales staff who can offer friendly advice with your purchases then Walmart is not for you.
Or, surprisingly, most other places you can shop today, whether they are a big box store or a local retailer. I go into my local pho shop and the girl slaps a menu down on the table and glowers at me with her pencil poised over her order form. I tell her what I want, a while later she slaps the bowl down on my table as if angry at me. It’s not me, she does that to everyone. I walk into a locally owned sporting goods store and have to practically beg someone to get down a sleeping bag for me, and they know nothing about it, even though it’s one of their biggest sellers. It goes on and on and on, “Main Street” has become as customer-unfriendly as Wal-Mart, in the end.
There are exceptions. NAPA auto parts stores and ACE Hardware stores are two of the bigger exceptions, usually I can find someone there who knows what they’re talking about. But mostly it’s like people are just going through the motions nowadays. They know nothing, care about nothing, and their notion of customer service sometimes seems more akin to what a stallion does to a mare than anything that I remember from my childhood.
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/13/20010062-businesses-claim-obamacare-has-forced-them-to-cut-employee-hours?lite&ocid=msnhp&pos=1