Walmart: Yay or Nay?

[Pocket Trips]

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Does government in a FREE CAPITALIST economy have an obligation to protect mom and pop companys that are not suave enough to compete in the modern marketplace?



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There are several examples of the government intervening to ensure fair competition and prevent monopolies. I'm not sure I would classify walmart as a monopoly but i do think it is a problem when one company can decide the fate of thousands of others just by deciding whether or not to carry thier products.

The difference between walmart's practices and the practices that led to the goverment interfering previously is that walmart does not price gouge their customers. Instead they blackmail their vendors to reduce hte production costs so much that other retailers can't compete with their prices.

This does not even go into how they mistreat their employees... they underpay compared to most other jobs in the area and charge nearly twice as much as most employers for health insurance

[Broken Glass Can]

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Walmart sucks because they are non union and killing all the middle class people who survived on parents working union jobs. My dad said " Ill go to Walmart and shoot all the managers." So I think he is anti Walmart also.

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Wal-Mart will eventually get unions, and when they do, they will go the way of Sears, JC Penney and KMart.

There is a cycle to stores, you see it with grocery stores too. They start out lean and mean, and become fat and slow (and unions are the key way of fattening 'em up).

The good news is that Wal-Mart is not the government. When it gets bloated unproductive from unionism, another chain will come along and whip them in the marketplace.

Wal-Mart isn't the problem, the unionism cycle is the problem. I am happy to shop there now. Twenty years from now, I won't shop there anymore, because they will be another overpriced chain.

[Cornell Fiji]

3) Wal-Mart forces its vendors to outsource.

Before I submitted this post I saw the following post about outsourcing by our friend from Davidson (shadow29)
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Because outsourcing forces the American economy to specialize. See David Ricardo and comparative advantage. Although the United States loses some jobs, those jobs represent a small share of the labor force. When a company opens in another country, with jobs outsourced from the United States, it subsequently buys goods from the United States. They buy computers from Dell, drinking water from Coca-Cola, and copy machines from Xerox. In this globalized society, outsourcing becomes inevitable as nation-state economies become intertwined with the larger, global economy.

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Fighting outsourcing is a losing battle being fought by losers. We have entered a global economy and to argue that a company needs to be nationalistic by paying more for something than a price that can be found elswhere in the globalmarket is simply irrational. Furthermore I embrace outsourcing. I want low paying factory jobs to leave our country so that they can be replaced eventually by better quality of life jobs.

When products are being made oversees for American companies then we have a system where the owners, sales reps, managers, corporate officers, and lawyers are American but the factory workers are foreigners. If this trend continues then a greater percentage of the American workforce will have higher level jobs which in the end will be better for our economy and better for the people of this great nation. Of course in the begining the loss of these jobs will cause a boost in unemployement. But eventually the American people will be forced to further their education so that they are able to manage the companies in the global marketplace. (For all of you who want to argue to protect the people who are not bright enough or capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps don't worry, there are many unskilled and semiskilled jobs that can't be outsourced...) Our American society is making progress when less people are working in the trades and more people are blue collar, that is hard to argue.

Fighting outsourcing is simply nearsighted. It is irrational to try to stop it because labor laws make it impossible for Americants to compete in the global workforce and we would be better off if we allowed our worst jobs to leave the country.

[Myrtle]

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I don't consider any violations significant enough to detract from the massive overall positive economic impact Wal-Mart has had on the U.S. and the world.

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I'm trying to see the overall picture.

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I hear the later statement, but I'm having a hard time taking it seriously after reading the former.........

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I don't see how you could not take it seriously. The employment violations WalMart has made are deplorable, but in the larger picture, the good that WalMart has done for both the US economy and the US consumer (alhtough the two are intrinsically linked) outweighs the violations. The violations, while bad, are still relatively minor in comparison to what WalMart has done in a positive regard for the economy.

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....and I'm having a more difficult time taking your post seriously.

History is full of such similar rationalizations......What REAL good comes of the depth, breadth and scope of these violations?

Are you in the business of being in business with a firm like this?

Do you have any first hand experience with the impact that any one company wielding and leveraging (legally OR illegally) that kind of power can have?

WHAT good has Walmart done for the US economy in general or specific?

Are you implying that the overall US economy is better off because there is more of a supply side chain being concentrated in such a large organiziation?

What kind of a REAL effect has Walmart had on consumer demand in the US?

Their many DOCUMENTED ILLEGAL business practices are both predatory and parasitic, and don't lead to enriching of any economy other than their own.....

....or to be more specific, the narrow pockets of their management and stockholders....

[Pocket Trips]

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Wal Mart blows and I try to avoid it at all costs.

I am also a big believer in strengthening local economies. I like supporting local businesses that will reinvest their profits back into the local economy.

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I also do the same. I try to avaid all chain stores as much as possible. 3 years ago I drove from NYC to Alabama to Texas and back. It was very depressing that every damn state looked exactly the same. America has become one big giant mall. Sure there were some differences especially between the north and south, but once you got into North Carolina there was no difference between that and south carolina or alabama or georgia

[spamuell]

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bla bla bla America bla bla bla

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I don't really care about what's best for America (or the UK, or any rich country which will be fine). What matters much more is how companies like Wal-mart (and, more importantly, the free market) have an impact on the global economy and on the people who they exploit.

[Broken Glass Can]

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bla bla bla America bla bla bla

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I don't really care about what's best for America (or the UK, or any rich country which will be fine). What matters much more is how companies like Wal-mart (and, more importantly, the free market) have an impact on the global economy and on the people who they exploit.

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Yeah, it is terrible how we provide jobs for people in Third World countries. We ruthlessly take away their free time and give them money to work and contribute to the world economy. How ruthless of us.

[spamuell]

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bla bla bla America bla bla bla

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I don't really care about what's best for America (or the UK, or any rich country which will be fine). What matters much more is how companies like Wal-mart (and, more importantly, the free market) have an impact on the global economy and on the people who they exploit.

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Yeah, it is terrible how we provide jobs for people in Third World countries. We ruthlessly take away their free time and give them money to work and contribute to the world economy. How ruthless of us.

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I'm not even going to go into detail about working conditions or absurdly low wages but you write that sentence as if they are provided with a fair wage and reasonable working hours when in fact they are exploited because they are desperate for work.

[Myrtle]

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Fighting outsourcing is a losing battle....

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Agreed

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Fighting outsourcing is simply nearsighted.

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again.....agreed, and I would add, protectionism at it's worst. You're preaching to the choir on this point.

However, the devil is in the detail, and for the sake of this string, we should not lose focus of the original question.

[contentless]

Too many extremes. Just because giving jobs to third world countries is a positive, doesn't mean that all the ways of accomplishing this are positive.

"Yeah, it is terrible how we provide jobs for people in Third World countries. We ruthlessly take away their free time and give them money to be prostitutes and contribute to the world economy. How ruthless of us."

There's certain degrees for everything. It's not enough to say that "we're awesome, we gave them jobs". Please justify these jobs in the face of the aforementioned labor violations. I'm not an expert on this, and I have learned from reading this thread, but it's has degenerated somewhat into one side repeating "Violations!" while the other talks about "Global economic efficiency!" If these two sides were somehow reconciled, perhaps there'd be a flow to the debtate.