Their stores extract local spending dollars and transfer them to shareholders who live in gated communities.
If they paid more in wages than a store made in profits they would close the store.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2024
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Okay for Walmart. Now, is it the same or worse with Amazon ?
Walmart encourages their employees to apply for federal and state programs like food stamps because they don't give their employees enough hours and give them weird shifts making it hard to even have another job.
And then they want them to use them at Walmart.
It's disgusting.
Walmart is one of the largest welfare queens in the country. They profit off of poverty, and are actively incentivized to not only keep communities poor, but to make them poor.
You get a 10% employee discount!*
*Limited items, only available for employees who work 40+ hours/week (which is almost nobody). All grocery items are ineligible.
This was proven decades ago.
I wonder what an ideal structure is that does the opposite. I know the obvious "small business" etc, but like as policy what structure would make a populace more wealthy?
Walmart is bad for small town America. And the rest of America too.
I was buying camping equipment from walmart. They were out of some of my supplies and a new tent I wanted. I ordered alternative items from a online store and they were so much higher quality than the ones at walmart. Walmart squeezes its suppliers so much you end up with items that are more cheaply made. I've tested this on several different items and have discovered that walmart sources many of their brands straight from china. You can buy the same cheap shit from temu.
Theres literally documentaries from 2010 about manufacturers who make a "Walmart version" because Walmart demands these factories make them at a specific price.
Like in one documentary, the same toaster from Target and Walmart, the Walmart one had different cheaper parts inside. TVs, furniture, lamps. Even the plastic storage containers like totes and Tupperware had "Walmart" versions that were real flimsy.
They also do this with Black Friday electronics now too.
Snapper Mowers actually pulled from Walmart in 2006 because they wanted to focus high quality products rather then moving quantity.
Selling Snapper lawn mowers at Wal-Mart wasn’t just incompatible with Snapper’s future – Wier thought it was hazardous to Snapper’s health. Snapper is known in the outdoor-equipment business not for huge volume but for quality, reliability, durability. A well-maintained Snapper lawn mower will last decades; many customers buy the mowers as adults because their fathers used them when they were kids. But Snapper lawn mowers are not cheap, any more than a Viking range is cheap. The value isn’t in the price, it’s in the performance and the longevity.
Later in 2013, Briggs & Stratton decided to start selling Snapper in Walmarts again. 2014, Briggs & Stratton closed a Snapper plant. They then had to restructure and other corporate BS, so fuck around and find out. Publicly traded company garbage.
That's why you operate multiple brands. You've got your Walmart brand and your decent brand and your overpriced luxury brand all pumped out of the same overseas factory
Isn't that the logic behind what happened to Breyers Ice Cream. It started as a high end ice cream, but got bought Unilever, which then reduced the cream to the point that it can no longer be called Ice Cream.
Hard to start a business when your competitor is Walmart.
Hard to make a living when the main employer is Walmart.
Hard to move when you don't have any money.
Hard to start a business when your competitor is Walmart.
It's also hard to maintain an existing business when your competitor is WalMart.
They can afford to undercut you until you go out of business, then they can charge whatever the market will bear.
Which is a lot on inelastic goods like food.
Edit- to use the correct term
*inelastic
I always fuck that up. Every time.
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Low prices AND low value. The cheap ass shit they sell is intended to break and be replaced as quickly as possible. E.g. cheap clothes that wear out quickly. Those who can't afford better are thus trapped in a cycle of repeat buying.
The boot problem as written by Terry Pratchett. You can buy crappy boots every year for 25 dollars or boots for life for 100 dollars.
Where can I get these lifetime boots for $100?
You have to find the right mirror in a Ross that reflects a tiny door behind you, only big enough to crawl through, where a decrepit shoemaker has been waiting for you. $100 but you will have non-Euclidean nightmares.
Indeed. And worse, wealthy get a discount on everything - an obvious example being that f you have lots of money you don't need to get a car loan or even a mortgage. More likely you are the one, indirectly, making the loans and earning interest for the huge effort you expended being wealthy.
Isn't this obvious?
If an outside Corp comes in displacing local business, the profits that would cycle back into that community now get taken out. It doesn't matter what the prices are, when the community as a whole has less money with each transaction.
So tariff math might be a thing
Thank you for pointing this out. When you shop small locally-owned businesses, the money is often directly reinjected into local economies. The money you spend at locally businesses puts a girl through ballet lessons instead of putting dollars towards a new yacht. And the ballet company is owned by your neighbor.
If people really want to fight income inequality, stop giving your money to billionaires everywhere you can.
I'm not sure it has been empirically proven.
Hypotheses that make sense at face value are dime a dozen in economics. Some of Milton Friedman's hypotheses on inflation made sense but were proven wrong. Nevertheless they were used for decades to drive policy with horrible impact on the working class. Lots of people still believe they're true, because they make sense at face value.
It's trade balance and it's very well proven. If the money coming into a community is less than the money going out then that's going to affect everything from road repair to groceries bought.
This is why at the international level there are balance payments in trade deals.
The “velocity of money” has been very much proven. You take money out of a community, you deny it to that community. That’s why the existence of the wealthy is the presence of a parasite.
It should be illegal to pay people wages that require them to take public assistance
If your employees have to use public assistance then you should be on the hook for the assistance and the administrative cost of that assistance.
And when that hits 10 percent or more of your workforce then the government forces a union.
We've let the corporations fuck around long enough.
Don't worry, they will fix the issue by eliminating piblic assistance
No fucking shit.
This was news in like 1990.
Ya, I remember it being mentioned when I worked for them about 25 years ago. Unfortunately I cannot find any articles. All local news at the time, probably. Towns that had citizens who banded together and successfully combatted Walmart moving in, etc.
Unfortunately dipshits will still argue about it to this day
Wastes vasts amounts of urban land on parking instead of housing or more businesses
Is often so deep in parking lots and strip malls its impossible to walk to
Cheap prices and cheap chinese manufacturing to help eliminate local competition
Massive corporation has more bulk buying power than local competition
Designed to be a one stop shop, fix your car, buy a tv and grab some food
Self checkouts pays robots instead of people in the community the store is in
The people who do work there are paid shit wages for life, often not even keeping up with inflation meaning they actually get paid less every year
Probably paying less taxes than they should be for the amount of space the business takes up and the amount of traffic generated
Helps promote car centric design which is a terribly ineffecient and expensive way to move people within an urban area.
More than half of Walmart's employees are on food stamps or some other form of government assistance. So along with everything else, our tax money goes to pay their employees because they won't.
I call that a tax break, paying shit wages, AND ruining the local area by making everybody more poor all rolled into one because Walmart employees often shop at Walmart for their employee discount (because they can't afford to shop elsewhere on their poor wages), meaning that their wages go right back into the company's coffers right alongside our tax dollars.
All profits are exported out of the community, instead of staying/swirling about the community.
I agree with all points. I just wonder how much the robots get paid.
I guess technically they pay the company that designed the self checkouts then pay their upkeep in electricity and maintaince. But just you wait for the AI self check outs. It will become self aware and start taking a cut for itself to buy memecoins.
Makes sense. Take 10 small businesses with a owner/manager and say 5 employees. 50 employees. Local convenience store, small grocer, whatever. Not all at min wage, the owner/manager are going to be making a bit more. WalMart rolls in, kills those businesses, now you have four overworked managers managing 40 overworked employees at bottom dollar wages. The other 16 had to go find something else or get welfare services or whatver.
A very simplified version, but I could see how this brings down wages.
Sounds like a national security threat. More directly threatening on a daily basis than many other things they claim are threats.
More threatening than Luigi?
Companies failing to properly protect the foodchain have killed hundreds. But you don't see any CEOs in chains.
If the majority of Walmart shoppers and employees are MAGAts, then carry on shopping there and I hope they stay loyal while Mango Mussolini drives prices through the ceiling fan with shit spraying all over the place.
I can see their sharp vampiric teeth in their big W.
Communities greatly adapt to these big stores, and when they leave, there's only a vacuum left.
You can see articles about that dating back to at least 2014 (that's from 2018): https://www.nprillinois.org/illinois-economy/2018-12-13/when-walmart-leaves-town