Typical leftwing babble.......

Evil Walmart.

They come to your neighborhood and set up shop against everybody's will. Force themselves to buy huge pieces of property that no one else has any use for. Hires 300 -500 people no one else will hire providing careers that no one else can offer. Provide insurance that no one else will provide including left-wing dogooders. Pay millions in local, state and Fed taxes that no one else can pay. Force lower prices for your food and Chinese trinkets you can't live without anymore and letting you pay  less money for it.

Evil Walmart enslaving people to work and shop with them. Forcing governments to take their millions of taxes.

Why not outlaw them so we can draw unemployment benefits, work and shop for other companies for less wages, have no insurance, and pay more for necessities.

Sound like a plan?


oftwominds: Wal-Mart and the Plantation Economy

A Wal-Mart store quickly bulldozes the complex economic ecology of local businesses. Small business is both the engine of job creation and a highly employment-rich ecology. Wal-Mart crushes this ecology and replaces it with a low-job, low-pay, highly efficient plantation economy in which the townpeople's only choice is to work for Wal-Mart or scrape out a living feeding the Wal-Mart workers, doing their laundry, etc.--exactly as on a classic plantation.


On a classic plantation, the wages are low and the "company store" offers easy credit, binding the workers to the corporation not just for wages but for credit and goods.


Those few who manage to save up enough capital to start small service businesses-- laundry, cafes, etc.--must do so in the shadow of the Company, which can always drive them out of business should they irritate their corporate overlords.


A once-diverse landscape is reduced to a monoculture wasteland dependent on subsidies, either implicit or explicit. Wal-Mart's low wages leave many of its workers' families on state aid or food stamps to survive, and so it prospers on the backs of taxpayers who subsidize its low wages.


A relative handful of local workers run the plantation, while the economy the plantation bulldozed offered more jobs and a wider range of jobs.


Here is an example from real life. We shop for groceries in Chinatown or "Mexican" markets (in quotes because we do not know the national origins of the workers or owners) because we find the produce to be fresher and cheaper than supermarket chain stores.


A typical full-service market in Chinatown (not the tourist Chinatown, the real one) is small by U.S. standards--perhaps 4,000 square feet compared to 40,000 square feet for an old supermarket and 120,000 square feet for a "superstore."

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