That calculus is far more complex than you make it out to be. It;s not like a mom and pop store makes the goods they sell. They in effect sell the exact same goods, but at a higher cost of sales. Mom and pop stores likely pay LESS, and certainly employ fewer people. How can a mom and pop store pay considerably more for goods because they buy in FAR lower quantity, AND afford to pay wages higher than 10.whatever bucks an hour to sales clerks and stay afloat?

Since they pay more for goods, their margin is lower. The margin sort of stays in town—to the extent mom and pop exclusively buy local gods themselves—but the bulk goes to their wholesaler anyway (likely out of town).

I'm not seeing the "keeps the money in the community" advantage vs many jobs.

That doesn't even consider that the money SAVED by the consumer is also staying "in the community."

You might be right, but I'd need to "see the math" to judge properly, it's by no means close to being self-evident.

The only real advantage was they bought more American products. But most retail stores these days will atleast make a small effort to sell local product.

To be perfectly honest tho. We don't really stand a chance in hell of making it manufacturing. The only real future for our economy is resource extraction in my opinion. We still have many trillions in gold, copper, iron, etc...

Sure wish I could have gotten a slice of Walmart stock back then. :damn:

In your area do they have a "Fleet Farm" store? That store had pretty much everything! :yeah:

About wal mart employees being well below the poverty line...

i have this to say:

hold on i have to get something out of the way first.

:har::haha::har::haha::har::haha::har::haha::har:

ok here goes:

Try being a regional airline pilot on a whole $18,500 per year :salute:

It aint just Wal Mart friends.

In my company, full time is also defined by when you receive full benefits. In my company full time is 38 hours. Anyone less than 38 is a part-timer and get reduced/no benefits.

That's a pretty low salary. :(

Yup, and while wal mart doesnt particularly take a high level of training and education... the pilot job does... yet the pay is about the same for that 20 something "kid" steering your connecting flight toward your destination at 300+ mph

nice thought eh? :nope:

The absurdly low pilot pay as well as the fact that the TSA goons that harrass you at the airport get paid more is one of the reasons I will always take the Bus or train.

While at the same time screwing over the American working class.

This would be funny if it were not true. I hate walmart, their as bad as CEO's outsourcing your job overseas. Everytime you go in there, it feels like your supporting the chinese economy because every god damn thing is made in china.

From what i heard, originally walmart would buy american when they could. When Walton kicked off and his two boys took over, they went all out for chinese made crap.

I remember when I was an Intermediate EMT considering going for my EMT-P. We discovered that an 18 year old telemarketer made more money than a paramedic after about 5 years of schoolin. We were in the wrong line of work!

We virtually never go in walmart, actually. Usually Target.

Target is less scummy, more milf, less morbid obesity :)

Well, not the food.

Nalley's Chili
Local grocery: $1.79
Wal-Mart: $0.88

Aspartame sweetener, 200-packet box.
LG: 4.49
WM: $2.14

5-pound ham
LG: $9.50
WM: $5.95

I just bought a pair of jeans for $8.00.

Oh, and I hope you don't own a PS3. If you do, look on the box. "May be made in Japan, Korea, Malaysia or China."

In fact every major brand-name 'American' electronic device is now made in China, including my Motorola cell phone.

@ tater: More 'milf'? :rotfl2:

You get that from my two brief posts in the thread :06:

I always find it amusing to go into what I call the anti-Wal Mart: the Barnes & Noble in Bethesda, MD. It's the major chain bookstore closest to the wealthiest area of the best-educated county in the United States. I always have this bet w/a friend when we go there: how many hot Asian chicks, wearing tee or sweatshirts from prestigious colleges and universities, will be inside studying on their laptops? It's not a matter of IF!!!

(Hmmm...I think I may have written a post very much like this at some point in the past.)

So...why do you guys seem to go to bat to defend the wealthy? Do you think they became that way by being nice? On balance, do you think they care about you?

Except, of course, Wal Mart makes a point of never making anyone full time if they can avoid it so they don't have to give them benefits.

Why not both, keep the jobs and the money in the community.

CostCo is also good.

I wish I had a tumor that netted me $14 billion annually and directly provided over 2 million jobs. In fact, I bet entire nations wish they had such a thing.

As a forewarning, I should tell all of you that I'm about to go on another long-winded economics rant so I encourage those of you who are tired of such things to just skip to the next post. I feel the need to post this rant because of a longstanding and as yet unresolved argument with my business ethics professor who, coincidentally, claimed that Wal-Mart was "evil" this morning.

I have personally worked for Wal-Mart as a night-shift stockboy. I did so because I was laid off from my railroad job and I needed the cash. The recession resulted in the longest and most comprehensive layoff in US railroad history since Chinese immigrants finished building the first trans-continental network.

Many claim that Wal-Mart is a "corporation without a conscience", or as my BE professor puts it, a "corporation". To him, they are one and the same. I didn't find that to be true at all during my employment. Wal-Mart graciously offered me $8.50 per hour (75 cents above the standard wage they pay) to put cans and boxes on shelves for them. They were most reasonable in the negotiation process (asked for $9.00/hr, originally) and very fair in the way they treated me during my tenure. My supervisors were generally quite agreeable, and employee morale was about as high as it could get when you've got a bunch of people working for around $8.00/hr. Plus, they have a reasonable health insurance program. It's expensive for someone on such a low wage, but it is fairly efficient. They also have a tuition program for employees so they can get a better education. Seeing as how nobody with a half-decent education is going to work for Wal-Mart unless they are desperate, does that sound like the actions of a heartless mega-corporation?

The most common complaint about Wal-Mart's domestic operations is that the jobs don't pay enough. Really? How much is any entry-level work done at Wal-Mart worth? How much is any common idiot who can stack cans worth? I posed the question to my BE professor, who adamantly defends the position that Wal-Mart should pay federal union wages. Of course, since most Wal-Mart stores operate at a fairly low profit margin, and their main expenditure is labor costs, that would require them to raise prices. As Neal pointed out, people shop at Wal-Mart to get low prices on goods they want and need. If prices were higher, nobody would shop there, and there would be 2 million less jobs and $404 billion less dollars worth of productivity in the US.

What's more is that Wal-Mart knows it provides crappy jobs to most employees, and it compensates for that to an acceptable degree. Stores with high turnover rates are not penalized by HQ. The employee training program is designed to be easy and simple so that new employees can enter easily, and more experienced employees are free to leave. One co-worker of mine who decided to quit was told "Just stay as long as you need to." They didn't even require two weeks' notice. He quit the next day for a better-paying job at Gamestop accross the street.

Personally, I was layed off by Wal-Mart just shortly before the closure of the Sam's Club stores. Corporate had determined that there was simply too little profit at my store to justify all the extra employees that had been hired. The store was getting dangerously close to costing the company money. I was one of thirteen that was cut, though that was my own fault. I told the representatives that I did not intend to stay with Wal-Mart if the railroad recaled me, and that I did not intend to pursue career advancement in management. After all, I have a union job with the railroad, and they pay me to not work while I'm layed off. When they hire me back, I'll easily be making five times what I made at Wal-Mart. The only reason I took the job was because it payed slightly more than railroad unemployment did. In essence, I told Wal-Mart that I had no intention to work for them for the rest of my life, so they cut me. I'm not offended or disgraced in any way. The entirety of my employment and my subsequent termination was the result of a mutually beneficial transaction. They paid me to do work for them at a wage I found acceptable until they needed to cut labor costs, at which point we had an honest discussion about my worth as an employee in the future. Since I was likely to quit, they gave my job to another employee who had longer-term aspirations within the company. That's it. How that makes Wal-Mart "evil" is unbeknownst to me.

My BE professor also maintains the argument that the wages Wal-Mart pays are ".....an insult to human dignity". He was actually much more verbose with the point, and made strong arguments for what is called "stakeholder theory"(non-governmental socialism) but that was the essence of it. I disagree completely. IMO, Wal-Mart has the ethical responsibility to remain profitable, refrain from fraud, coercion, and theft, and do whatever the hell it wants to beyond that. In short, it must maintain voluntary transactions at all times. My professor feels differently. He says that Wal-Mart has a duty to provide for its' workers (more than they already do) and encourage (fiscally, of course) domestic industries that produce the goods they sell. That all sounds completely wrong to me. What my professor is suggesting is that Wal-Mart and the people who make it are somehow more liable for the welfare of society than anyone else.

I have spent many days considering his argument and reading text on the subject. As an aside, required reading for the class is A Brief History Of Globalization by Alex McGillvaray, a historian and author who also has a Master's degree in environmental science and who wrote a book about the book Silent Spring. He's also a member of the New Economics Foundation and the Institue for Social and Ethical Accountability. He's also a fierce proponent of stakeholder theory.

The argument for stakeholder theory is that all corporations must be responsible for the welfare of everyone they affect. IMO, this is complete nonsense, and it is also impossible. Corporations must, indeed, be responsible for any costs incurred upon others, including pollution-related costs, and they must adhere to mutually beneficial business transactions, but making them liable for the welfare of others is ridiculous, and again, impossible. If corporations in the US adopted this silly model, they'd be as bankrupt as our government within a year. In fact, they'd be even more bankrupt because they can't print money and they can't lean on firms that actually produce viable income.

What people like my BE proffesor see in Wal-Mart and similar firms, apparently, is a rich organization that has means to help the poor and disadvantaged, but does not do so because it is greedy and irresponsible. What I see is a so-called "educator" who has no knowledge, experience in , or appreciation of economics, bashing on a perfectly legitimate firm that billions of people approve of on a daily basis.

The other main argument againt Wal-Mart is that it exports jobs and maltreats foreign workers. It is true that Wal-Mart exports crappy jobs that have absolutely no business being in this world-leading nation, unless you consult a narrow-minded worker or union boss that has a professed interest in making their uncompetitive and therefore worthless industry viable through political action, but it is not true that Wal-Mart maltreats foreign workers. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

There was a time in the US when factory workers, especially in the textile industry, were treated to horrible working conditions and low wages. A simple reading of muckracking journalists' findings provides ample evidence of ths fact. One can even make a case for foreign workers performing outsourced jobs in the modern era as an indictment against capitalism. Workers in China's SEZ's (Special Economic Zones) make a tiny fraction of what US workers employed in the most menial jobs make.

What people like my BE professor forget, however, is that people working in these industries are a hell of a lot better off than they were when they were resorting to labor-intensive economic or subsistence agriculture. China's factory laborers may be living a crappy life by our stanards, but to them the employment is a golden chance for opportunity for themselves and their children. The same was true in the US at one time. Eventually, as their economy grows, Chinese in the SEZ's will rival or even surpass the standard of living in the US, barring more destructive influence from the Chinese Communist Party.

My BE professor is entirely ignorant of the fact that economic prosperity is a gradual process that takes generations to realize. He believes that some kind of redistribution of wealth will somehow revolutionize the welfare of humanity. In his own words; "If wealth were distributed evenly,everyone on the planet would have a $20,000 income per year. That may be true, but it completely ignores everything that generates that income. He has little appreciation for market dynamics, and even less for capitalist theory. He fails to realize that the reason the disparity of wealth in the world exists is due more to states than to companies, and that the disparity in capitalist sytems is not nearly as concerning because the standard of living is higher.

What I really see in the opinions of people like this is the opinion of a bunch of lazy, unproductive, manipulative, worthless asses who want productive people to give them stuff for free. Those people are so prevalent in the academia that it makes me want to vomit every time I write some pandering, horse$hit paper to satisfy the class requirements.

Getting back to Wal-Mart, the outrage against it is completely unjustified. Wal-Mart provides exceptional goods and service for the prices they ask. They do so by the voluntary efforts employes and their own fiscal prudence. The conditions which foreign workers experience may not be good by US standards, but it beats the hell out of life on the farm, which is precisely why there are so many of them and why they work so cheaply. Just as with domestic jobs, Wal-mart gives people a rung on the economic ladder which they can use to climb higher. It isn't a high rung, but it's better than none.

It is not Wal-Mart's responsibility to improve America's or any other country's economic lot, or pay high wages, or take a stake in the welfare of the world (though they do this to some degree anyway through charitable contributions and normal transactions.) Wal-Mart's responsibility is to remain profitable, and sell products and provide wages that are agreeable enough for people to buy their products and work in their stores, respectively. That's it, and that's all we should ever ask them to do.

Wal-Mart is not a piggy bank for socialists to raid to further their agendas. It's a legitimate business that provides a valuable framework for hundreds of millions of consumers, over 2 million employees, and thousands of international companies to operate and generate wealth within. I offer the same advice to those who bash Wal-Mart that I do to people who want federalized health care: If you're so intelligent and magnanimous, go start your own morally responsible and charitable firm; hopefully I'll at least get some good deals during your "Going Out of Business" sale.