I just came across this article on theblaze and this Pete Suderman guy came up with the same logical conclusions I did, especially points 6,7,8 & 9. So you don't blow it off I'm just going to paste the whole article. And I'm also going to follow up by posting the articles from the links on points 14 & 17. All these articles really do wonders to render your arguments invalid.
http://www.theblaze....talking-points/
It’s no secret that many on the left (and even some on the right) really, truly dislike Walmart and its business practices. Indeed, just yesterday the union-backed OUR Walmart tried to disrupt the big box retailer’s Black Friday sales by staging a nationwide protest. Luckily for Walmart, the protest did little damage and the much-touted employee walkout never materialized.
But let’s talk about the long-standing and persistent hatred against the company. Let’s face it, ever since Walmart became an economic powerhouse, they’ve been attacked, maligned, smeared, and, in some cases, blocked by certain communities from even opening stores.
We all know the arguments against the retailer: Walmart puts mom-and-pop stores out of work; Walmart doesn’t pay its employees enough; Walmart doesn’t offer the healthcare benefits its employees deserve; Walmart operates on “greed.”
But there has to be another side to this argument. Is there anything to be said that might explain the retailer’s massive and continued success? Perhaps.
Peter Suderman, senior editor for Reason.com, on Saturday used Twitter to lay out his observations on the big box giant. Luckily for us, a tweet from The Heritage Foundation’s excellent Lachlan Markay notified us as to what was happening on Suderman’s timeline and we were able to follow along.
Below are Suderman’s thoughts on Walmart, its employee pay, and what would happen if unions get their way [author's note: We've put Suderman's tweets into list format because it’s much easier to read that way]:
Really enjoyed talking Walmart and Black Friday on @upwithchris [MSNBC’s Chris Hayes] this morning. I’m going to add a few stray observations on twitter.
1. Walmart’s customer base is heavily concentrated in the bottom income quintile, which spends heavily on food.
2.The bottom income quintile spends about 25 percent of income on food compared to just 3.5 percent for the top quintile.
3. So the benefits of Walmart’s substantially lower prices to the lowest earning cohort are huge, especially on food.
4. Obama adviser Jason Furman has estimated the welfare boost of Walmart’s low food prices alone is about $50b a year.
5. Walmart’s wages are about average for retail. Not amazing. But not the worst either.
6. Paying Walmart’s workers more would mean the money has to come from somewhere. But where?
7. Erase the Walmart CEO’s entire salary, and you can raise average hourly wages by just a penny or so.
8. Erase the entire Walton family fortune and you get an average $1/hour boost to Walmart workers.
9. Raise prices to pay for increased wages and you cut into the store’s huge low-price benefits for the poor. It’s regressive.
10. But what about Costco? They pay more, right? Yes, but it’s a different, smaller market.
11. Walmart’s average customer earns roughly $35k. Costco’s average customer earns about $75k.
12. Costco only has about half as many employees as Walmart. What would happen if Walmart adopted a Costco model and shrank to Costco size?
13. Not at all clear that the remaining half of Walmart workers would be better off. Many would almost certainly be worse off. Unemployed.
14. Obama econ adviser Jason Furman did a lot of the work on Walmart’s progressive benefits. His case:
http://www.slate.com..._good_news.html
15. Finally, as someone who’s actually been a regular, small-town Walmart shopper, I’d like to argue for its community benefits.
16. Yes, some small stores close when Walmart opens. But in small towns, Walmart can become real community hubs – more so, because of size.
17. As for Walmart workers getting health benefits thru Medicaid, that’s due in part to a policy liberals argued for: wapo.st/axXXNE
We’re not sure which is more impressive: The all-encompassing nature of Suderman’s observations or the fact that he was able to do it in 140-character bursts.
From #14
http://www.slate.com..._good_news.html
Is Wal-Mart Good for the American Working Class?
Although we've never met, I'm tempted to call you "Barb," the name you were given in your weeks as a Wal-Mart employee. I myself have never worked at Wal-Mart, and I can only remember shopping there once. In fact, I instinctively recoil at the big-box shopping centers spreading their uniformity across the American landscape. But I try hard not to let my personal and somewhat elitist shopping inclinations get in the way of an appraisal of Wal-Mart's positive role in America's economy and society. (For my full appraisal, see this paper I did for a panel at the Center for American Progress.
Are you as surprised as I am by how quickly Wal-Mart's critics move past the issue of low prices? You will hear comments like, "Yes, Wal-Mart may have somewhat low prices, but let's talk about its impact on workers, the environment, trade with China, etc." But given just how important these low prices are to the hundreds of millions of Americans that shop there, I hope I can beg your indulgence to linger on them for a few moments.
A range of studies has found that Wal-Mart's prices are 8 percent to 39 percent below the prices of its competitors. The single most careful economic study, co-authored by the well-respected MIT economist Jerry Hausman, found that grocery sales by Wal-Mart and other big-box stores made consumers better off to the tune of 25 percent of food consumption. That doesn't mean much for those of us in the top fifth of the income distribution—we spend only about 3.5 percent of our income on food at home and, at least in my case, most of that shopping is done at high-priced supermarkets like Whole Foods. But that's a huge savings for households in the bottom quintile, which, on average, spend 26 percent of their income on food. In fact, it is equivalent to a 6.5 percent boost in household income—unless the family lives in New York City or one of the other places that have successfully kept Wal-Mart and its ilk away.
Where do these low prices come from? Paul Krugman, writing back in 1993, provides an answer: "The most significant American business success story of the late 20th century may well be Wal-Mart, which has applied extensive computerization and a home-grown version of Japan's 'just in time' inventory methods to revolutionize retailing." Many economists didn't expect the service sector to contribute much to productivity. Many non-economists still have a hard time believing it has. But Harvard economist Ken Rogoff has the numbers, and they are mind boggling:
[T]ogether with a few sister "big box" stores (Target, Best Buy, and Home Depot), Wal-Mart accounts for roughly 50% of America's much vaunted productivity growth edge over Europe during the last decade. Fifty percent! Similar advances in wholesaling supply chains account for another 25%! The notion that Americans have gotten better at everything while other rich countries have stood still is thus wildly misleading. The US productivity miracle and the emergence of Wal-Mart-style retailing are virtually synonymous.
OK, enough indulging. Maybe you're ready to grant my point that Wal-Mart's low prices are great for the 298 million Americans who don't work there. But what about the 1.3 million Americans who do work for Wal-Mart? Here the evidence is murkier, in part because Wal-Mart refuses to release the data on its wages and benefits that could clear up a number of questions. What we do know is that its wages and benefits are about average for the retail sector—which is to say, not so great. It is harder to quantify other aspects of the job, like the quality of the work, the number of breaks, the prospects for advancement. You should let me know how you think it compares.
Studies have reached conflicting conclusions about the impact of Wal-Mart on local labor markets, with some finding that it creates more jobs than it displaces and others finding that it reduces jobs and nominal wages. Personally, I don't put a huge amount of stock in any of these findings because I believe that Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve decide the total number of jobs nationwide. If anything, the greater competition and productivity growth associated with the growth of Wal-Mart may have played a role in allowing the Federal Reserve to tolerate the high level of job creation in the 1990s.
But I understand why progressives are so upset about low wages and inadequate benefits. I am also upset by the rise of inequality and the relatively slow economic progress that the bottom 80 percent of Americans have made over the last several decades. I just think Wal-Mart is the wrong place to put the blame or to expect the solution. But I'll postpone that discussion for another day.
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Ryinrea, on 25 November 2012 - 04:17 PM, said:
