Here's a tidbit from Alan Tonelson, a fellow at the United States Business and Industry Council:
"Wal-Mart certainly does lower the cost of living for American consumers by offering low prices, but it also lowers the standard of living, because as jobs leave the U.S., the country's wage level gets lowered, too. And so we're no better off than we were before."
Thought it was worth mentioning.
4 Comments:
Walmart is trying to enter India as well. I hope better sense prevails here and people don't get carried away by the brand alone. This article, for example, says:
"In the U.S., a number of small towns did not like Wal-Mart for a couple of different reasons," says Bell. "One is purely aesthetic - these big boxes look pretty ugly - and the practice of having huge buying power can be detrimental to the local economy - people who try and compete on price. Thirdly, they are criticized for their employment practices, such as their benefits, and ethnic and gender discrimination in hiring."
I think I'm missing something ... Wal-Mart = jobs leaving the U.S.? And wouldn't it only lower the "wage level" if that's determined by dividing total salary by population? Wouldn't wage level be mean or median salary? If that's the case, wouldn't the departure of these jobs raise the wage level? (I suppose the jobs in question could be above the median salary, but my impression was that he was talking about retail jobs. But maybe those are above the median?)
I assume what he's trying to say is that Wal-Mart encourages manufacturing jobs to leave the U.S. Perhaps one may also assume that manufacturing jobs earn less than the mean (or median) salary. If so, then assuming that the people who lose their manufacturing jobs get new jobs, then perhaps that would raise the "wage level", how ever it's defined.
However, if the unemployed cannot get new jobs, or, perhaps more likely, they enter a lower bracket, wage-wise, of the service economy, then wouldn't that support the author's hypothesis?
Walmart definitely lowers the standard of living in communities as the mom & pop hardware, clothing, auto, sports, etc. stores go broke and close. How many of those have we seen.
Personally, I don't go to Walmart unless I "need" cheap plastic crap, which has become hard to find elsewhere. Perhaps, that may amount to two visits per year. Otherwise, I shop small.
Tom
P.S. Colin & Susan need to update the blog!
By 
tom_schneiter, at
6:25 AM
