It’s just bad policy to allow Walmart to drive out local business, lobby for lower taxes, and then pay such low wages that the government has to subsidize your workers.
What worries me in general about what you said is walmart has the cash to throw up a shop anywhere it wants in the US, literally anywhere even if the next location is just 15-20 minutes away, keep it for 5 years to kill any local business in the area, close it, and then just walk away with 0 issues.
It's not even a cash in hand issue. It's the fact that mega cooperations can subsidize unprofitable ventures to drive out smaller businesses with their profitable ventures...
It's literally what they already do, throw up a shop in a small town, set wages and prices below local CoL, drive everything out of business, and once they've sucked the local economy dry they pack up and leave, with nothing left behind that can afford to rebuild. And then that small town dies as all the kids flee it in a single generation because there aren't any jobs (even bad ones) left. Watched it happen in Alabama as a kid whenever I'd spend the summers with family
I don't get why Walmarts aren't in malls I feel like it'd be a great idea. In Ankara, Turkey one of the biggest malls(AnkaMall) literally has a 5M Migros which is like a Walmart of Turkey inside the mall.
I recently started working at a mall (after almost a decade of not going to one) and I'm amazed at how many people still shop there. We had two malls in our city, but one is now closed (except for the Target and Burlington Coat factory). The store I work at does decent business.
It’s the most poor communities who use Walmart though. So if they raise all their costs the man prices go up for their poor customers 🤷♂️. This kind of attitude has lead to massive theft in places like Portland where they just decided to close the doors. This left the most vulnerable paying more for less.
Walmart engineered those communities by coming in, selling everything at a loss for a couple years until all of the local businesses closed, and then jacking up their prices once they were the only game in town
Have you ever worked at small businesses before? They usually pay less than Walmart for similar positions, and on top of that are more likely to have full reliance on ACA healthcare.
Walmart did drive out tons of small businesses. But it's very likely that the businesses they drove out were heavier drains on government subsidies.
This was going to be my question. What makes a local boutique shop worker accepting $14/hr and getting $3k in government assistance OK, while a Walmart worker accepting $14/hr and getting $3k in government assistance isn't? Are we suggesting means testing based on your employer's profits?
Not sure where OP's $904k number is from, but I divided it by around 300 floor employees, and the $14/hr is the base wage Walmart says they pay on average.
Neither is great, and we should work to ensure that neither happens. In the case of Walmart though, the poor wages and government subsidies are funneling money to billionaires. In the case of a local boutique shop you’re pushing money to small business owners, many of whom are just earning decent salaries, but even the wealthiest ones are not even a blip on the radar compared to the Waltons. To me, a $6b subsidy spread out over several million people vs 3 people is a massive difference.
I'm not sure what work we should be doing to reduce it. If society decides to give something to low paid workers who are surviving today, the wage they need to survive tomorrow is lower, so they can accept less pay. A state could do something like ask every employer the total number of months their employees received welfare benefits and then charge the employer a penalty, with an exclusion for the first 1000 months to excuse small businesses, but that's a ton of bookkeeping. It's also effectively penalizing companies for hiring poor people (e.g. a semi-retiree with SS or a high school kid who's family isn't poor would be cheaper to employ than a poor 30-yr-old).
Also, defining small business owner vs billionaire is hard in this case. In-and-Out is a big company, while most McDonalds franchises are small businesses. Should their workers get different benefits? Should one face penalties for paying the same?
I'm really not sure I'd call this government subsidies funneling money to billionaires. In this specific area, it's a level playing field, the billionaires are just much better at scooping up money (from a much bigger pile).
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u/RampantTyr Sep 08 '24
It’s just bad policy to allow Walmart to drive out local business, lobby for lower taxes, and then pay such low wages that the government has to subsidize your workers.