dropzone - I’m not presenting myself as the anti-Walmart’s advocate. I’m just listing the common arguments against Walmart.
The fact is, Walmart represents a fundamental change in how the retail business works. And people often don’t like change.
That doesn’t sound like it sweetens the deal!
Honestly, I can see why some people might not like that. But while people complain about suburban sprawl and say they miss the sleepy towns of yesteryear, it is really freakin boring living in a community with no restaurants, no movie theater, and no places to shop.
You seem to have a beef with those who invent a better mousetrap because the world beats a path to their door at the expense of others. What’s the alternative? Forcing shoppers to buy a mousetrap at Store A, which you like, instead of Store B, which they do?
This is just my experience and so is just an anecdote and probably doesn’t mean squat…but I experienced the big box takeover of a community twice in my life.
The first time was when I was a very young adult. Big boxes burst into our area. Did this help the workers?
Yes, yes it did…for certain definitions of workers.
The true worker made more money in a big box store and actually had a limited, but still there, level of growth/upward mobility. They actually even received some honest-to-God benefits like health care. Not much…but more than what they had before which was nothing.
The true losers in this were the mom&pop store owners and their kids. THEY did ok before the big box invasion. They were paid far higher than their level of work dictated and received nice benfits as well because, well, they were the owners or the owners kids.
When the Big Box invasion came, they found themselves in a quandry. They lost their best workers because they were unwilling to pay above minimum wage and provide even minimal benefits. Therefore the Big Box stores had the talent in the community. The prices Mon&Pop stores charged was also much more than the Big Boxes did (I still remember the calculator for $34 in a mom and pop store being sold for $7.77 in a Big Box). This meant that the ‘wages’ the mon&pop owners were giving themselves and their kids could not be sustained.
They died like flies.
So, Big Box stores, in my opinion, actually do help the local workers. However, the ability to open and suceed with your own Mom&Pop/small store was the price to paid for this. You can do it but not like you could before without the competition of Big Boxes.
So, overall do Big Box stores help if you include possible Mom&Pop owners as part of the workers? Don’t know. But if you exclude them, workers come out better under the Big Box dictatorship than the Mom&Pop dictatorship. Consumers come out better as well as prices are lower.
Do you think there’s any value in retail not being concentrated solely, or mainly, in national chains, either to individual shoppers or to communities? Is it something that should be deliberately cultivated? Is anything of value lost if such efforts don’t happen?
