Summary
Two studies reveal that Walmart’s entry into communities lowers household incomes by 6% over 10 years and increases poverty by 8%, even when accounting for cost savings.
Its practices, such as undercutting competitors, suppressing wages, and squeezing suppliers, harm local economies by reducing employment and forcing smaller businesses to close.
Walmart’s “monopsony power” enables it to pay lower wages and dominate suppliers, compounding these effects.
The findings challenge the idea that low prices alone benefit communities, emphasizing long-term economic harm.
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Hard to start a business when your competitor is Walmart.
Hard to make a living when the main employer is Walmart.
Hard to move when you don’t have any money.
No fucking shit.
This was news in like 1990.
Unfortunately dipshits will still argue about it to this day
Wastes vasts amounts of urban land on parking instead of housing or more businesses
Is often so deep in parking lots and strip malls its impossible to walk to
Cheap prices and cheap chinese manufacturing to help eliminate local competition
Massive corporation has more bulk buying power than local competition
Designed to be a one stop shop, fix your car, buy a tv and grab some food
Self checkouts pays robots instead of people in the community the store is in
The people who do work there are paid shit wages for life, often not even keeping up with inflation meaning they actually get paid less every year
Probably paying less taxes than they should be for the amount of space the business takes up and the amount of traffic generated
Helps promote car centric design which is a terribly ineffecient and expensive way to move people within an urban area.
All profits are exported out of the community, instead of staying/swirling about the community.
Walmart encourages their employees to apply for federal and state programs like food stamps because they don’t give their employees enough hours and give them weird shifts making it hard to even have another job.
And then they want them to use them at Walmart.
It’s disgusting.
Walmart is one of the largest welfare queens in the country. They profit off of poverty, and are actively incentivized to not only keep communities poor, but to make them poor.
It should be illegal to pay people wages that require them to take public assistance
If your employees have to use public assistance then you should be on the hook for the assistance and the administrative cost of that assistance.
And when that hits 10 percent or more of your workforce then the government forces a union.
We’ve let the corporations fuck around long enough.
Sounds like a national security threat. More directly threatening on a daily basis than many other things they claim are threats.
I was buying camping equipment from walmart. They were out of some of my supplies and a new tent I wanted. I ordered alternative items from a online store and they were so much higher quality than the ones at walmart. Walmart squeezes its suppliers so much you end up with items that are more cheaply made. I’ve tested this on several different items and have discovered that walmart sources many of their brands straight from china. You can buy the same cheap shit from temu.
Low prices AND low value. The cheap ass shit they sell is intended to break and be replaced as quickly as possible. E.g. cheap clothes that wear out quickly. Those who can’t afford better are thus trapped in a cycle of repeat buying.
The boot problem as written by Terry Pratchett. You can buy crappy boots every year for 25 dollars or boots for life for 100 dollars.
Where can I get these lifetime boots for $100?
You have to find the right mirror in a Ross that reflects a tiny door behind you, only big enough to crawl through, where a decrepit shoemaker has been waiting for you. $100 but you will have non-Euclidean nightmares.
Probably somewhere like Red Wing. Though they’re probably more than 100 now, you can get them resoled when the soles wear out.
So I’m gonna push back on this notion that quality boots that last a long time are even close to this price.
Red Wings are typically $180-270. I have a friend who does resoles and charges around $100-120. I’ve heard folks get their boots resoled every 2-3 years or so. Don’t know if that’s typical. So assuming a “lifetime” is 20 years and you resole 5 times in that period, you are looking at around $200+$500 minimum, not even accounting for inflation. Big difference.
I’ve never owned Red Wings - I will check them out but I note they do not make chelsea/chukka steel toe work boots in appropriate sizes. I wear Blundstone 990s because they are unisex, not too expensive and are pretty bomb proof.
They cannot be resoled but I find since I wear them for work I wear the sole and leather at about the same rate anyway and they typically will last me 3-4 years.
tl;dr I don’t think $100 “lifetime” boots exist, even behind magical mirrors.
The book they were referring to was written over 30 years ago. Of course they don’t exist anymore at that price, but I think the overall point still stands, if all you can afford is the lowest quality boots, you’ll end up paying more in the long run than if you could afford to buy better quality boots that can be repaired.
Indeed. And worse, wealthy get a discount on everything - an obvious example being that f you have lots of money you don’t need to get a car loan or even a mortgage. More likely you are the one, indirectly, making the loans and earning interest for the huge effort you expended being wealthy.
Another quality-of-life lowering thing caused by Walmart/Amazon that’s obvious but they didn’t go into, is that once Walmart and Amazon have eliminated so many local businesses, everyone is forced to shop at them. Even if we don’t want to, we have nowhere else to go–we can’t just boycott them and still get stuff we need.
Walmart decides what you will and won’t have access to buy. They’ve pared down the variety of brands and offer a subset of items by those brands minimum, for their efficiency of ordering and stocking items, including groceries. Then the brands stop making the items that Walmart decided not to stock, so they’re gone. There are still a few other grocery stores but most have them have merged into a few mega-grocery chains with the same issues as with Walmart.
So even if you’re OK with going to Walmart your choices are limited (those of us old enough to remember things we used to be able to buy that are long gone these days may notice this more). So what it’s come down to is you get what Walmart offers you, or you order it from Amazon or Temu. There are still a few places to get real things of good quality, but they’re harder to find, never local stores, so you have to order online sight unseen, and of course it’s an expensive and time-consuming process compared to being able to just go to the store and grab something.
I thoroughly enjoyed this article. It was full of cited information and even the sources led to interesting reads.
Their stores extract local spending dollars and transfer them to shareholders who live in gated communities.
If they paid more in wages than a store made in profits they would close the store.
Yes to the first part, but the second part is just how businesses work? If your gross income is lower than your expenses you’re operating at a loss and it’s not sustainable. Wages should absolutely be higher, though. Quick back-of-the-napkin math shows that last year Walmart made a net profit of over 11 billion dollars and employed just over 2 million people. They could boost every single employee’s pay by $5000 annually and still make a billion dollars in profit.
Yes it is exactly how corporations work. That is the root cause of the problem.
It should be no suprise that the corporations are sucking the country dry.
The need is for an economic implementation that does not lead to death by parasite to most of the land.
Walmart is bad for small town America. And the rest of America too.
Makes sense. Take 10 small businesses with a owner/manager and say 5 employees. 50 employees. Local convenience store, small grocer, whatever. Not all at min wage, the owner/manager are going to be making a bit more. WalMart rolls in, kills those businesses, now you have four overworked managers managing 40 overworked employees at bottom dollar wages. The other 16 had to go find something else or get welfare services or whatver.
A very simplified version, but I could see how this brings down wages.
I can see their sharp vampiric teeth in their big W.
Communities greatly adapt to these big stores, and when they leave, there’s only a vacuum left.
You can see articles about that dating back to at least 2014 (that’s from 2018): https://www.nprillinois.org/illinois-economy/2018-12-13/when-walmart-leaves-town
Okay for Walmart. Now, is it the same or worse with Amazon ?
