Walmart is not my enemy
As this article describes, Walmart is not my enemy. Free competition is good, protection inefficient or price-gauging small shops is bad. Don't like Walmart? don't shop there. But I have little patience with the constant attempts to smear Walmart and other major companies in the (masked) interest of some special interest group or another, or to bend the rules to make opening a Walmart by my home all but impossible.
posted by Yaniv Pessach at
12:28 PM
6 Comments:
The only people "Walmart" benefits in the long run are its shareholders. Sure as a consumer, you save on the worst of the worst mass produced goods so your bill is lower but let's look at the problems:
- Wal-Mart pays wages that don't allow for someone to become a product member of society
- Wal-Mart does not provide health insurance for its employees meaning that (since it pays such a low wage) the U.S. taxpayers have to pay for the uninsured
- Wal-Mart destroys the idea of democracy and civic responsibility as it creates a huge disparity of wealth
- Wal-Mart does not allow unions that could help with raising wages and fighting for better standards of living
- Wal-Mart destroys small/local businesses and replaces them with a monolithic franchise global standard that serves to remove a sense of identity and pride from a community
- The majority of Wal-Mart's owners do not live in your town or mine (Check the Forbes 400 to see where the Walton's are on the list and if you think they put in money into your community)
Wal-Mart needs to be kept in check by a government concerned with public interest not encouraged to cut corners in the name of higher profits. Everyone has a choice where to shop but it is too bad that our state/local/federal governemnts are too corrupt and greedy that they allow the unfettered expansion of such a company without thinking about the long-term consequences.
I think a reasoned discussion on this is very good. Let me answer your points one by one
>> Sure as a consumer, you save on the worst of the worst mass produced goods
Walmart sells the same items as Target, Safeway, QFC, etc. Some items are low quality, some are good quality, and some are the right quality/price balance. On the whole, small stores sell the exact same items, just for more.
>> Walmart wages
Are the same as othr large chains. And are often, although not always, appropriate to the skill levels and difficulty of the tasks of the employees. Otherwise, these employees could get more skills and take better-paying jobs. I don't see why it is a downside - if I want someone to clean my house, I will want to pay the minimum I have to. If walmart does the same, good.
>> Wal-Mart destroys the idea of democracy
Democracy isn't about equal income for all. Democracy is about voting for leaders. I would not want to live in a society (e.g. socialism) where everyone has the same standard of living (and income) regardless of their skills and effort.
>> Wal-Mart destroys small/local businesses
Good. Ever since I had to pay $4 for half a gallon of milk (in a small grocery story in Iowa), I realised that a small store is not always a better thing for the consumers. The owners of the store have no 'inherent right' to make a profit... they do as long as they provide me with a better or cheaper service.
Also, Walmart has not gouged prices in small towns where they entered (I bought a t shirt in a small Indiana town for the same price, 7.99, that I paid in Seattle). Small business owner, however, have more of an incentive to raise prices, resist returns, etc.
>> The majority of Wal-Mart's owners do not live in your town
So?
>> Wal-Mart does not allow unions
If my car tire guy, my car mechanic, and my car body guys all decide that I am not allowed to get my tires cheaper in another town, they would find that they have none of my business, and an anti-trust suit to boot. This is exactly what Unions are.
True, unions played an important role in reducing hazardous work conditions and long, inhumane work weeks in the beginning of the 20th century, but these conditions do not exist anymore
What planet do you live on?
Small business owners cannot afford to purchase the enormous quantities of goods needed to in order to sell at very low prices, or to sell product at a loss for a year or two until the competition is bankrupt after laying off your neighbours who were probably making enough to pay the bills and still have a small vacation every year until the walmarts moved in.
You also show a clear lack of knowledge about the many successful forms of socially conscious government practiced throughout the world.
Corporations that fail to provide adequate training, incentives and incomes for their workers end up with the lowest common denominator. Do you think people really like to live in substandard housing? Like it that neither they nor their children can afford proper schooling? Like it that all they can afford to eat is cheap, unhealthy, mass-produced non-food-group crap?
Corporations that do not respect their workers deserve what they get in return: a lack of respect, high absenteeism due to poor health, theft, and a high turnover.
Democracy has very little to do with capitalism. One is almost the antithesis of the other.
1. Buy a share of Walmart and share in the profits. There is no rule saying only Forbes 400 people can buy the stock.
2. I would not call all Walmart employees the lowest common denominator. On the other hand some of the jobs there do not require a high degree of skill or training and hence should be paid accordingly. I would assume Walmart would raise wages if they couldn't get enough employees at the current pay rate.
3. Walmart also lowers costs in towns they enter, allowing the community to realize a higher standard of living (the same amount of money goes further).
4. Many jobs (not just some of them at Walmart) should not be considered for a primary household income. However, second income or temporary income to get one through school, gain experience, have hours opposite their partners to reduce daycare costs and many other reasons that one would take a job with lesser pay and benefits. Just like with the stock...no one is making anyone take a job.
5. There are some decent benefits. Their web site list some, doesn't look that bad to me. The Walmartstores web site has some of the benefits listed.
ok, post for post:
-Sure as a consumer, you save on the worst of the worst mass produced goods
Walmart, besides incorporating direct Chinese labor to make substandard and untested products to sell at standard prices. My personal experience: five out of six major purchases have had to be returned for almost immediate breakage upon removal from packaging. Walmart gets the questionable merchandise from it's suppliers as a result of the company's extortion tactic known as "roll-back" pricing. If the company doesn't meet Walmart's price, it doesn't get a vast chain of Walmart storefront to sell it's product, which is economic suicide for a business(an episode of Dirt pointed out this concept well, plus Courtney Cox is hot).
-Walmart does not provide health insurance...
Much of Walmart's labor strategy is based upon the concept of relying upon both subsidies and government programs in order to keep their labor costs down. While you are correct in stating that other stores do this, this does not make this practice fair or equitable for taxpayers, and is something that should be addressed by our representatives, who are too busy enjoying dinners with corporate lobbyists to know how much a gallon of milk costs, which most haven't got the vaguest idea.
-Walmart, Democracy, etc.
Walmart is a symptom of a problem, that problem being the ignorance of the average American, who doesn't understand that a democracy involves personal responsibility within your government, and not just pawning it off on elected representatives that are in our REPUBLIC. You want a democracy? Get to work at building it. Sorry, that's just the truth of the matter.
-Walmart, and no unions...
A very real concept, part of the aforementioned labor strategy. Then again, labor unions in this country are being dismantled by corporations every day, with guestworker programs, illegal labor, and human resources hiring programs dissolving what little power that union leaders originally had to work with. After all, why would a company pay a person ten dollars an hour to do a job he can get someone else to do for five. Then again, this was the basis for slavery as well, but I'm sure most don't remember that far back in our ADD/ADHD society. This is not to blame illegals, after all, who can begrudge someone coming from a blighted condition to try to survive? Corporate responsibility should be applied to those who would implement such labor tactics without regard to ethical treatment of human beings. Limited liability has created far too big of an umbrella.
-Small businesses being destroyed
Walmart does do this, and the money those businesses make stays within the community when the owners interact with their OWN neighbors for business, an economic hardship that is facing many of the communities in this country, and a basis for many localization projects. After all, we are in the end, a loose collection of communities strung together under a loose ideal of democracy. And most of all, when we pay a little extra for something up here in the woods, it's because we want to keep the area around us woods, and not shopping malls. You don't get as much personalized service at big box stores. For example, when they shut down a sportsman's shop because of their sporting goods section, a wealth of information is lost in that owner who followed his passion but couldn't match predatory pricing because he didn't have a guy in Hong Kong. You have to remember the human element.
-The Waltons thing speaks for itself.
If Sam Walton was alive, he would probably have dismantled the corporation by himself. He just wanted to take care of his family, hence the reason he divided his wealth among them instead of going for the richest man title. In that sense, out of those billionaires, he was the richest.
-If my car tire guy, my car mechanic, and my car body guys all decide that I am not allowed to get my tires cheaper in another town, they would find that they have none of my business, and an anti-trust suit to boot.
If I were you, I wouldn't get a flat in your town then...and you might want to keep a look-out for nails in the road when passing your neighbor the auto mechanic;)
At any rate, one thing I can agree with you upon is that Walmart isn't the enemy. It is merely a symptom of the problem that truly is our enemy as a people, that being ignorance and sheer laziness. We have grown fat in our homes and are failing to see how our arteries and souls are being clogged with gimmick after gimmick of nonsense that does nothing to improve our overall well-being. After all, did you really need half the things you bought when you last went out shopping, or did you buy half of them because of some uncontrollable nesting urge triggered by flashy packaging and mood lighting, all garnered by exhaustive market research, the same items which advertise for me to sign up to be a google blogger to respond to this forum?
I'm a business major, somewhat idealistic, been through economics, and I do see the social consequences of capitalism around me. Do I advocate a drastic change away from it? No. But I don't advocate sticking my head in the sand either. You can't solve a problem until you accept it's presence.
Btw, not for nothing, but I see a lot of people who hold jobs fabricated by our society to hold the appearance of a skilled job, who drive around in brand new cars, etc...and yet do literally nothing for it that is socially beneficial. And, of course, because they don't know how to perform the simple task of changing their own wiper blades, oil, fluids,etc...they will pay someone minimum wage to do grimy and dirty work that they simply do not want to do. While I will not detail which jobs I have seen fit this category, I'm sure you can all think of a few...there are plenty. Most people do not know the value of true semi-skilled labor. They do the jobs you don't want to for much less than you ever would. They are not immigrants(at least not first generation immigrants, most are third or fourth generation, coming from the dysfunctions that came with mass migrations of people in the 1800-1900's in America) but they are marginalized and fictionalized by a political process that seeks to denigrate their value for the benefit of a bottom line. They were once the middle class after the second world war, people who had finally settled into some semblance of relative(if you discount Korea and Vietnam) peace, just trying to settle down and have families. They are victims to inflation, corporatism, and the American Dream, an advertisement sent out to other countries originally in hopes of getting the best and the brightest, but now being used to support a guest worker program that imports people from another country who think that working here will improve their lives by allowing them to have enough money to feed their families. As a Dominican friend of mine once stated, "Everything is so expensive over here that I can't seem to make enough money to send home to my family.". Any student of economics who paid attention in class could have told him that, but in truth, in our society, not even the teachers are paying attention. They're just making a paycheck while dreaming of the things they wished they could do.
They (by they I mean we) are a country divided by racism, classism, and worst of all, commercialism. All they see is that the grass is greener on the other side. When they get there, they look down and find a bucket of green paint on the ground and a sign telling them to get to work.
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