Behold!! The cancerous growth of Wal Mart!!!

[August]

Originally Posted by Torvald Von Mansee

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.

Yeah so? Sounds like good business sense to me. Again, stock boy isn't intended to be a career.

[Aramike]

Originally Posted by August

Yeah so? Sounds like good business sense to me. Again, stock boy isn't intended to be a career.

Careful, August. You're making too much sense.

I guess it would make more sense to a liberal to say that Walmart should give everyone benefits, and therefore drive up costs, and therefore cease to exist as the Walmart as we know it, and therefore not provide any jobs for liberals to bitch about in the first place.

[tater]

The mom and pop stores, BTW, are not likely to provide benefits for anyone but mom and pop.

Just as a reality check.

[August]

Originally Posted by tater

The mom and pop stores, BTW, are not likely to provide benefits for anyone but mom and pop.

Just as a reality check.

Yep and by law no less. Having only a few employees exempts a business from having to provide health care.

[tater]

Originally Posted by August

Yep and by law no less. Having only a few employees exempts a business from having to provide health care.

Or for OSHA to cut in.

[UnderseaLcpl]

Originally Posted by Ducimus

I stopped reading there. Not gonna read a 2 page essay on why we should be thankful for the results of Sam Walton's scumbag progeny.

I totally agree. Why read some essay on the benefits of Wal-Mart or develop some semblance of economic education when bashing a legitimate organization for being successful is so much easier?

In fact, I encourage you to maintain your perspective because it makes things so much easier for all us greedy capitalist investors. There's nothing better than an anti-capitalist ideology when it comes to predicting and gaining from market trends. It makes it so easy to take advantage of all the non-prosperity.

I was going to go on with the sarcastic crap, but I realized I was just being an ass, and I am sorry for that.

You do make a good point about Wal-Mart costing jobs, Ducimus, but it is not as cut-and-dried as you may think. Wal-Mart drives many small companies out of business, but it also creates a lot of jobs, and not just by employing people in its retail stores. Wal-Mart's low prices create demand where none would normally exist in the absolute best place to create demand, the US. The huge market that Wal-Mart has tapped has created millions of jobs around the world; jobs that will eventually enable people to attain a higher standard of living, if conditions are right and the government doesn't steal all their wealth.

At the beginning of this post, I was being sarcastic, but I am being quite serious now. Rejection of free-market economics will cost you in the long run. Societies that are poor are at the mercy of societies that are rich. I'm amazed that the UK hasn't completely learned this lesson yet. There was a time when Britain ruled most of the known world, and the sun never set upon the British Empire. Now, because of interventionist foreign policies and decades of socialist policy, the British Empire no longer exists. It took less than a century for Britain to go from master of the globe to sidelined second-rate power. The world economy, for better or worse, now belongs to the US, and it will soon belong to other nations if we continue to restrict the market. It is economic freedom that determines the wealth of nations, not the well-intentioned wishes of those who seek to control and/or re-distribute that wealth without creating it themselves.

Wal-Mart may seem harmful to you, but it remains a global entity that creates wealth rather than destroying it. There is no disputing this fact, as the company is profitable. You might disagree with the way the company operates, but that does nothing to change the reality that billions of people agree with how Wal-Mart operates and willingly engage in business transactions with it every day.

Of course, you have a right to protest Wal-Mart's practices. Your objections are actually a good thing, to some extent. Socially-concious people like yourself influence the business models of large corporations, as those same corporations have a vested interest in avoiding negative publicity and satisfying consumer demands. What does not follow, however, are the attempts of many to control market dynamics. It simply cannot be done. There is no person on this planet who has such a comprehensive knowledge of economics that they can truthfully determine the validity of the existence or non-existence of any industry or company, whatever their motivation.

Business cannot be stopped, and the progress of commercial development cannot be reversed or controlled. There is simply no way to effectively dictate the market decisions of 6 billion individuals through any socio-political structure. By trying to do so, you are only harming yourself and those around you. What you are essentially doing is trying to force your beliefs upon others and damaging the market in the process. Praise be to God that you're not a politician, lest the effects of such beliefs become more profound.

[Skybird]

a compoany is not only successful when maximising its profits,. It is embedded in a communal and social context which in parts even assist it financially and with infrastructure, a pool of school-qualified employees, etc. So, success also is defined by what a company gives back to society. Low wages and part time jobs are part of the busines spattern today, and this spells longterm desaster for the social structure of society, becasue the less people earn, the less they can save for their own age and future when they cannot work anymore. In Germany, discounters and low-wage companies like to point out that they create jobs. But job must be understood as the opportunity for the employee to work a reasonable ammount of hours and get a fair wage for that that allows him to support his family without aid from the state and to secure his fiances for the time when he stopped working at higher age.

And this simply is not the case.

The social balance and stability in the long run get seroded that way. Business success accieved today this way - is the reason for civil unrest and revolution in the future.

what I also know from German example is that the increase in mini-jobs (jobs with low payment and reduced number of hours), destroy regularjobs by the hundreds of thousands. Becasue by insane Germ,an legislation two such minijobs have become cheaper than getting their work doine with one regular employee. The regular employee is able to invest into his future financial security, and to help the economy by coinsumming. Two mini-jobbers cannot do neither the one, nor the other. Go figure.

the extreme we have is the one-euro-job. That are unemployed people who do not get a job, get social wellfare (do not consider that to be much money - it has been massively reduced in recent years) and are allowed to work a certain number of hours in jobs where they get only one Euro per hour. This is paradise for entrepreneurs: you have a pool of employees that will worfik for you, and their wages almost completely get payed by the state/the community. You must not even pay taxes and healthcare for them!

The financial security basis of the community gets eroded that way. But who cares, let's do not spoil a successful businessmodel by picking out unimportant details. and the statistics say that the number of unemployed went down, so everyone could be happy, right?