I don’t hate Wal-Mart and neither does Jack Lewis. Jack Lewis thinks that the New York Times hates Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart, in my humble opinion, protects the majority of Americans from having to live in the real world.
The cost of living in America without Wal-Mart would be much higher. Wal-Mart subsidizes the lower middle class so as to make them believe they’re a healthy middle class.
We Americans could not live as comfortably and “successfully” without the subsidies provided by the McDonalds Dollar Menu, Taco Bell, the fast food joints, and chains like Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Target (and their third-world resourcing).
Without them, all dress shoes would start at $200, all sports shoes would start at a Benjamin, and all polo shirts would start at $75.
- A full 76 percent of Wal-Mart store management started as hourly associates.
- The average pay for hourly associates is $10.11 an hour
- All Wal-Mart hourly associates are eligible for benefits
- Wal-Mart provides affordable health insurance to more than one million people, offering a choice of 18 different plans for as little as $23 a month
- In 2006, Wal-Mart will spend roughly $4.7 billion on benefits for their associates.
- Last year, Wal-Mart created more than 125,000 job opportunities for workers across America.
- In some parts of America, more than 30 percent of Wal-Mart associates had been unemployed the previous year.
- Thousands of applicants apply for the 300-400 new jobs created by each new store.
- Recently, a record 25,000 Chicagoans applied for just 325 jobs at the Wal-Mart store in Evergreen Park, Ill
- More than 11,000 job-seekers applied for 400 openings at a new Wal-Mart store in Oakland, Calif.
- Wal-Mart will build, over the next few years, more than 50 stores in neighborhoods with high crime or unemployment rates, bringing between 15,000 and 25,000 jobs and generating more than $100 million in tax revenue for these areas.
- Wal-Mart creates hundreds of thousands of jobs for American suppliers. Small businesses across the country compete to sell their products at Wal-Mart.
- Families that shop at Wal-Mart can save more than $2,329 a year, including upwards of 20 percent on groceries, because of the existence of a Wal-Mart in their community, according to recent independent studies.
- Wal-Mart is the largest corporate cash contributor to charities in the United States, contributing over $200 million just last year to more than 100,000 charities, most of which occur at the local level.
Comment (1)
There’s a problem with your logic, however. You’re comparing WalMart against nothing. You’re saying, “with WalMart present, 125,000 jobs are created.” That’s 125,000 jobs compared to a baseline of zero.
A better question is: how many jobs does WalMart create over and above what the alternatives would create?
I see this error all the time when people are discussing how much Microsoft has done for the computer industry. In their mind, they’re comparing Microsoft’s solutions with nothing at all.
In fact, there were a lot of great things out there before Microsoft, many of which were killed by Microsoft through marketing, strategy, and practices that had everything to do with strategy and nothing to do with price, quality, or suitability of product.
So the better comparison is to ask: what would have grown in its place, had Microsoft not taken over the garden?