So, this is what I get for giving in to Davey and actually posting something on economics. Oh well.
Five good things that Wal-Mart does:
1) It employs handicapped and elderly people who probably couldn’t get a job anywhere else.
2) Its hours permit customers (like myself) to pick up emergency household items at a time when other stores have already closed.
3) It allows countless manufacturers/producers to introduce themselves and their products to a considerable amount of people.I
4) It offers lower income families the chance to clothe their kids in decent, new clothes for less money.
5) It’s a national name that you can trust: need something but not sure where to find it? Wal-Mart is generally nearby.
If you think this is an out-and-out commendation of Wal-Mart, think again. I hate shopping there (as does nearly everyone else I know).
Are there negative sides to some of these good points? Without a doubt. But such is life! Which is what I meant by asking you to “embrace the grey.” I’ve been inspired by Austin to try and search out the positives, and I know there are many to be found with Wal-Mart. (Davey’s admission that he shops there almost every other week also suggests that he evidently finds some positives in Wal-Mart too, even if he doesn’t want to list them.)
Well said, Frank! I completely agree.
@F – I am still trying to formulate a list. It’s hard. I hope this fact in itself is telling; among my personality traits are both the propensity to BS and the ability to consider almost any position defensible.
You and Davey have already pointed out, I think, why it is difficult. Wal-Mart is a two-edged sword. That is at least partly because money is a finite resource. When you get money, somebody else doesn’t. Even when the Fed decides to print money, blurring the definition of “finite,” they give it somebody when they print it, and that means somebody else doesn’t get it.
When Wal-Mart comes in, it necessarily competes against businesses that I personally find more desirable. This is of course something inherent in economics, which studies how people allocate scarce resources. One of Mankiw’s basic principles of economics is “People face tradeoffs,” and it’s true. Wal-Mart has grown because people have traded some things for others, and have valued Wal-Mart’s offerings above other offerings. I can accept that.
So, in one sense, making this list should be easy. People have chosen Wal-Mart for a whole host of reasons. It’s success was no accident.
But in a very important other sense, I think those choices are unwise. Every reason represents a tradeoff, and while the short-run low-cost benefit has driven Wal-Mart sales ever upward, there are costs that are not considered that I believe ultimately makes these choices unwise. To wit:
1. I agree with you here, mostly. Just for the sake of nit-picking, I offer the following. While Wal-Mart does employ the elderly and handicapped, there are other people who do it too; and while Wal-Mart employs the elderly and handicapped as greeters who do very little more than adorn the entryway of Wal-Mart with a reminder of Wal-Mart’s dedication to community service (wearing, of course, a Wal-Mart shirt with a big benevolent smiley face on it), other employers hire the disabled and elderly as checkers and into other positions that have a little more dignity.
I realize that I’m being borderline offensive here, and this is a delicate point to make. But I have a friend back home who had a severe fever when he was very little, and now his brain is frozen at about 3 years old. He’s 22 or 23 now. And while I would be glad for the opportunity for this friend to work at Wal-Mart, I would be even more glad for him to work (as he does) in a job that challenges him, in a job that makes him happy and lets him help people, and where he knows his bosses and his bosses know his limits and because of that he’s allowed to do much more.
Wal-Mart does employ the elderly and handicapped, but they do so outside of the rich community atmosphere in which the true joy and value of those persons can be realized. At Wal-Mart, I’m ashamed to say that I usually avoid the greeters.
2. I don’t know about this point. Here in Moscow, Wal-Mart closes early with the rest of the town. Back home, they’re open, but so are a lot of other places. And while Wal-Mart is awfully convenient, we trade that convenience for a graveyard shift culture that never sees the sun, for slummy parking lots where (if the documentaries are to be believed) crime regularly occurs, and for resource-hogging lighting and ventilation systems to go chugging on through the night when we don’t really need them.
Perhaps you have more household emergencies than I do, but I’ve never needed a humidifier at 1:30 in the morning. I’ve often wondered what happens when folks live out in the country, an hour away from the nearest store, and they run out of toilet paper. It turns out they use napkins, and it turns out that they often shop comprehensively, regularly, in bulk, so that type of thing almost never happens anyways.
Which, I might add, is more economical and saves tons of money over the life of a family. Convenience costs more.
3. Wal-Mart excludes countless other manufacturers who refuse to produce their products in foreign countries, paying slave wages, and using inferior products. If you’re not slashing costs, overproducing, and making up the difference through planned obsolescence, you’re not selling anything at Wal-Mart. If you’re a manufacturer making good-quality products that last a long time (ultimately saving the consumer money) and paying fair wages and benefits to employees (ultimately giving your employees, also the consumer, more money with which to buy your products and others), you’re likely not going to be introduced by Wal-Mart to anybody. In fact, you’re more likely to be put out of business by their manufacturing cartel.
4. The clothes are cheap, fall apart quickly, and are produced in what some consider to be immoral ways under reprehensible conditions. This question – of whether poor countries are actually better off because of sweat shops – is too big to discuss in my already tedious comment. But needless to say, every dollar “saved” is a dollar that could have gone to some poor Chinese person that is likely working harder than most in America. And one has to wonder why Wal-Mart is getting so rich when their manufacturers remain so poor. Cheap clothing has a cost. It’s just in another country where we don’t have to think about it.
5. “You can trust” is loaded. Sure, Wal-Mart will have it. It will also be a piece of crap that will fall apart in less than two years. The products are designed that way. And we trade our trust in the ubiquitousness of Wal-Mart for our more profound trust in the local business owner, who is accountable to his community and can be looked square in the eye.
I don’t trust Wal-Mart. You shouldn’t either.
So yeah, it’s a difficult question to answer, and that is because of the tradeoffs. We all of course value our neighbors above our budgets, our health above our bottom lines, our continued happiness over our immediate gratification. I have begun to suspect more and more that Wal-Mart, while seemingly benign and even a noble and thrifty choice, is causing us to trade away what is truly important for what is economically expedient.
I have to chime in here. I agree with the “5 Good Things About WalMart” and want to add a couple more:
Most of them have a low-cost walk-clinic for those without health insurance (and yes, Walmart DOES offer health insurance to their employees, my son worked there and he had it), and they were the FIRST pharmacy to offer $4 prescriptions for ANYONE, whether they have a prescription plan or not. The final “Good Thing” I’d like to add is that if all those WalMarts were gone, there would be thousands and thousands more unemployed people – more people on welfare and more people on unemployment.
This is, after all, America – home of “free enterprise” and the right to make a profit. If given a choice between shopping at WalMart and shopping at Fred Meyer (who have the same products/ammenities but at most times twice the price as WalMart), I’ll choose WalMart every time. And, I disagree with “piece of crap that will fall apart in less than two years” because I shop there regularly and have not experienced anything of the kind. I still have lots of stuff that I bought there before I retired 7 years ago and all of it has been well used but still in great shape. Anything that was defective was returned for either a refund or replacement – no problem.