So the Walmart family is richer than the poorest 100 million Americans?

[divideandconquer]

And to think they did it all by destroying thousands of downtowns and exporting million of jobs overseas. Isn't American style capitalism wonderful?

<http://www.examiner.com/x-3629-Philadelphia-Progressive-Examiner~y2009m10d24-Middle-Class-America-United-We-Stand-Divided-were-broke>

[madrchsod]

1. yes it is...

where else are the poor going to shop? i noticed that walmart has an even cheaper house brand of substandard food item. my wife found out that their cheap meat is a sure way to have explosive diarrhea for several days....

[TommyO]

3. I've looked at the meat at a Walmart Super Center

I went right across the street to Wegmans and bought some real meat, more expensive, but far better than the select stuff Wally World sells. Even their choice meats, which they were touting as being great stuff, were inferior to the cheapest cuts at Wegmans.

[snagglepuss]

2. That is quite a statistic. Thanks for posting.

[Nikki Stone1]

4. I wish we had more stats like that.

Thanks.

[elias7]

5. Walmart exports millions of jobs overseas?

You'll need to explain that one to me.

[glitch]

7. The Walmart products made with slave labor offshore used to be made in America by Americans.

Walmart used their purchasing power to drive down their producers prices, to the point where they had to offshore their labor to even get a Walmart contract.

[Overseas]

9. Shifting production to China to make goods cheaper for people whose jobs

were eliminated by production being shifted to China.

1.
frontline: is wal-mart good for america? | PBS
Nov 16, 2004 ... Wal-Mart. For Wal-Mart, China has become the cheapest, most reliable production platform in the world, the source of up to $25 billion in ...
Watch online - Secrets - Tapes & transcripts - Join the discussion
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/ - Cached - Similar -
2.
Wal-Mart Sweatshop Toys Made in China
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
By subcontracting out their production to factories such as Lungcheong in China (Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world, does not own a single factory) ...
www.chinalaborwatch.org/upload/Wal-MartLungcheongReport.pdf - Similar -

And for other costs to the USA to support Wal-Mart's efforts to keep retail wages and product prices low, please see "Wal-Mart-- The High Cost of Low Price"

http://www.walmartmovie.com/about.php

$86 MILLION a Year to California Taxpayers

* In 2004, a study released the UC Berkeley Labor Center found that "reliance by Wal-Mart workers on public assistance programs in California comes at a cost to taxpayers of an estimated $86 million annually; this is comprised of $32 million in health related expenses and $54 million in other assistance."
* Source: Ken Jacobs and Arindrajit Dube, "Hidden Costs of Wal-Mart Jobs" , UC Berkeley Labor Center, August 2, 2004.

* Wal-Mart dismisses the findings of the UC Berkeley study, "Hidden Costs of Wal-Mart Jobs," as a "union hit piece." However, text from Wal-Mart's own internal memo substantially corroborates their findings.

An excerpt from the memo states:

"We also have a significant number of Associates and their children who receive health insurance through public-assistance programs. Five percent of our Associates are on Medicaid compared to an average for national employers of 4 percent. Twenty-seven percent of Associates' children are on such programs, compared to a national average of 22 percent (Exhibit 5). In total, 46 percent of Associates' children are either on Medicaid or are uninsured."

Source: Wal-Mart Internal Memo , via New York Times

[1776Forever]

11. Try this post out from DU Eric J from 2005 for some insight.....

Eric J in MN (1000+ posts) Sat Oct-15-05 10:09 AM
Original message

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5067915

.......Update

A visitor to The Daily Kos named jlynne asks, "Is anyone else old enough to remember when Sam Walton first started WalMart and its claim to fame was that everything they sold was made in America?"

I wasn't aware Wal-Mart originally used Made-in-America as a selling point.

..............

As stated when the old man, Sam Walton, started this concept he was touting that everything Wal-Mart sold was made in America (or almost everything). Now you can say that Wal-Mart does not foster this concept and has also ruined many businesses that were established for years in small towns in the US.

[niyad]

25. oh yeah, I remember that one (made in USA) went into one of their stores many years

ago, picked up items at random--NOT ONE made here.

[lostnfound]

12. Links

Arundhati Roy describes globalization as a field of locusts swarming through a field, stripping it bare, and moving on to the next field. The moves aren't stable or permanent -- the drive to produce shirts for 99 cents may move them to Mexico, and next year to Vietnam, and the next year to Cambodia. Left in its wake are peasant communities stripped bare of its traditional economy and a race to the bottom. The "price efficiency" takes advantage of externalizing costs wherever possible (hence the next destination for this labor are places with fewer and fewer worker protections AND no environmental protections) and expands a worldwide pool of desparate labor with no job security.

*****************

In the past, antitrust policy assumed that more companies meant more competition, which was good for consumers. The Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 ? sometimes called the anti-chain store act ? was passed partly to protect small local retailers from the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, the Wal-Mart of its time. It prohibited price discrimination, or discounts, to different purchasers when the effect was to lessen competition. At the time, the drift of antitrust policy was to restrain big business and protect mom-and-pop stores.

The populist tinge to antitrust continued for decades. In ordering the break-up of the Aluminum Company of America in 1945, Judge Learned Hand of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote that the purpose of antitrust was to "perpetuate and preserve, for its own sake and in spite of possible cost, an organization of industry in small units which can effectively compete against each other."

In 1966, the Supreme Court sided with the Federal Trade Commission in challenging a merger in the Los Angeles grocery market, Von's Grocery and Shopping Bag Food Stores, which together had only 7.5 percent of the local market.

But the intellectual tide shifted by the 1980's, especially under the growing influence of the so-called Chicago school of economics, which emphasized prices as the fundamental gauge of consumer welfare. Market concentration and company size meant little. If big companies raised prices, they were bad. But if, like Wal-Mart, they achieved greater efficiency from economies of scale and passed the benefits onto consumers as lower prices, they were praised.

....To keep cutting costs, Wal-Mart is tough on its suppliers. Selling to Wal-Mart, by all accounts, is a brutal meritocracy. Manufacturers have been forced to lay off workers after Wal-Mart canceled orders when another vendor cut its price a few cents more. Other suppliers have shifted to low-cost operations in China and elsewhere when squeezed by Wal-Mart to cut costs further.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/weekinreview/07LOHR.html?pagewanted=2

Etch-a-sketches are cheaper but there goes 100 jobs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/national/07OHIO.html

[Hannah Bell]

16. walmart sets price targets for their suppliers. if you don't meet the targets, you lose the contrac

& they "suggest" suppliers offshore to reduce costs.

the vlasic pickle story is educational.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html

[riverdeep]

6. The quote:

The Walton family of Wal-Mart fame is richer than the bottom 100 million Americans put together. The wealthiest 1% of the population as we speak, garners 67% of all the income in this entire nation.

I'm sure they deserve every penny.


Since humans started organizing into large groups and inequity of resources occurred, those at the top have always given reasons for why they deserve the most. First it was sheer brute strength: Og was the most powerful man and will crush anyone who questions why he gets the best caves, most furs, etc. But not even Og could stand against a bunch of dissatisfied followers. Then it was religion. The priest or shaman or pope deserves all those nice things because he is God's chosen one. Then came the Enlightenment and their power has waned. Then, and simultaneous to religion, came the blood line defense. I am of royal stock, and that's why I deserve all these nice things while you starve in my fields. The American experiment put the stake in that idea.

But it started another one- that enormous inequality is perfectly acceptable, that a few exceptional individuals deserve nice things even while others starve, because the system of capitalism is rational and must be obeyed. This is where we are now, worshipers of the market.

[glitch]

8. Capitalism's only it's latest manifestation, but it's not good enough. They really want Feudalism nt

[theHandpuppet]

22. Yeppers

And it's so ironic that so many supposedly fled to this country to escape this system only to waste no time establishing their own version to benefit themselves.

[girl gone mad]

18. Not only do they deserve it,

but we should learn to "tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all".

Or so says the vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/oct/21/executive-pay-bonuses-goldmansachs

We should eat our imaginary cake and enjoy it.

[Ikonoklast]

10. They worked really hard for it.

Ask them, they'll tell you that.

[Greyhound]

13. Further, they'll tell you that they are entitled to it all.

:kick:

[xchrom]

14. kick

[dixiegrrrrl]

15. To add insult to injury, towns PAY Wal-Mart to build.

So not only does the low wages mean the state subsidizes health care and other necessary services,
states pay businesses to enter an area, by reducing the business tax rate, and/or building service roads, lights, sewers, other infrastructure.
In fact, I read just recently that a chain hardware store was in a bidding war with 3 towns in our area.
It would move into the town that made the best financial offer, and the damn towns were bidding their heads off to get the chain store. Everybody happy except the local hardware store owners who have been here for 3-4 generations.

[Hannah Bell]

17. top .01% (1/100th of 1%) takes 6%.

[ipaint]

19. They also want the wealth to stay in the family.

They are behind the push to eliminate the estate tax.

[defendandprotect]

20. And, unfortunately, the poor turn to stores like these . . . we need to break t hem up --

[grace0418]

21. And yet so many of the people they exploit are big fans of the store.

Makes no sense to me.

[marshall]

23. I'd like to know what percentage of the overall taxes they pay

Both the family themselves and the corporation.

[niyad]

24. "The High Cost of Low Price" a documentary by robert greenwald

I urge everyone to see this-- when it was shown here, the venue was packed. I went with a group of friends, all of whom, like me, have been boycotting the evil empire for years because of their lousy practices--but even we were stunned by some of what we learned.

the local supermarkets are about to go on strike--wally world is licking its chops thinking it will be getting all the customers. guess what-- I have told management at the markets I will be supporting the strikers, will honour the picket lines--and thank goodness for the local natural foods markets.