Better than Another Stimulus: Walmart's Everyday Low Prices
In Bloomberg Businessweek, a story about how Walmart came -- finally -- to Chicago's South Side, after a long fight:
Since 2006 a single Wal-Mart has been homesteading in Austin, a mostly African American Chicago community with an unemployment rate of 40 percent, its alderman says. Now the company wants to put two dozen more stores in the city, including a 145,000-square-foot Supercenter on that 200-acre plot. In an area ravaged by poverty and desperate for the 400 jobs the Supercenter would provide, you'd think this would have been a slam dunk. It was not.
After the first Chicago Wal-Mart opened, unions and community organizations successfully lobbied the city council to pass an ordinance requiring Wal-Mart and other big box retailers to pay at least $10 an hour, with benefits. The legislation infuriated Wal-Mart and its chief advocate, Mayor Richard M. Daley. In response, Daley, the country's longest-tenured big-city mayor, exercised his first and only veto, then watched labor spend $3 million to elect a cadre of pro-union aldermen to the city council.
But now, after a lot of wrangling and negotiating, they have come to an agreement. Walmart has agreed to a wage package of about $0.50 more than the state minimum and they pointed out how desperate and underserved the neighborhood is. It's one of the tenets of the left and Big Unions that Walmart is an abomination, a destroyer of Main Streets everywhere. But, as the Bloomberg piece concludes:
While unions were reflexively arguing that big box retailers are exploitative, Wal-Mart didn't endure much suffering. The unemployed did. So did shoppers on a budget. On a Monday trek to Chicago's current Wal-Mart, the parking lot in front of the store was packed by 10:30 a.m. Van Gooden, 56, a community representative for a nonprofit group, happily showed off his purchase: a white, button-down polo shirt slashed to $3.29 from an initial $12. Asked about Wal-Mart's impact on the impoverished ward, he said: "It's all about jobs and price."
In the end, which institution is going to do more -- measurably, practically -- for the working American? Big unions, big government, or the world's biggest retailer?
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Jun '10
Re: Better than Another Stimulus: Walmart's Everyday Low Prices
Every time I read a story such as this there is an implicit assumption on the part of the union executive that they are in some way protecting the community from rapacious capitalists. The reality is that in order for a community to prosper its citizens must have jobs, something that rapacious capitalists such as Walmart provide. What the union has actually done, by holding up Walmat for a higher hourly wage rate is at the same time reduced the number of persons Walmart will hire and and increased the retail prices within those stores. Walmart's presence in any large urban market generally means billions of dollars in savings that remain with the consumers in the community. The question to ask is what is the multiplier that attaches to the money left so with consumers?
May '10
Re: Better than Another Stimulus: Walmart's Everyday Low Prices
Penn & Teller's "B.S." episode about Wal-Mart is quite good.
Jun '10
Re: Better than Another Stimulus: Walmart's Everyday Low Prices
What the Wal-Mart critics (i. e. unions executives, union thugs, and union-funded liberal politicians) are telling me (the consumer) is, I'm too dumb to evaluate Wal-Mart's relative benefits and costs to society, so they're going to choose for me. They'll choose where I can shop. Too dangerous to let me do it myself. And if they choose in a way that benefits big unions and bloated government, well that's just a "happy coincidence."
May '10
Re: Better than Another Stimulus: Walmart's Everyday Low Prices
George Will has said that Walmart is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised by mankind. I don't know if it should rank above the institution of marriage, but it's definitly up there.
May '10
Re: Better than Another Stimulus: Walmart's Everyday Low Prices
Wal-Mart exposes the unions' favorite lie: corporations will only make your life worse, but pay us dues and we'll watch out for you. Unions in 21st-century America are a racket, and their opposition to new jobs and shopping options for the poor suggests they don't care who knows it.