There's a lot less crime in general in the rural/suburban areas that Walmart was primarily serving 10-20 years ago. And a lot of even those areas have more poverty and petty crime than they did 10-20 years ago, with the local industries and economy taking a huge punch in the face, and meth and opiate abuse spiraling.
You could blame Walmart for some of the economic woes, but they aren't the ones shuttering the auto plant, or the steel mill, or the shoe shop, or automating the old labor-intensive, natural-resource sectors so they require vastly fewer, more highly skilled people.
"Walmart comes to rural areas, extracts massive amount of money"
They "extract massive amounts of money" by providing goods that people in the area want to buy.
"and doesn't replace all the workers that were displaced."
Typical rural areas didn't have any jobs to begin with. Now they do. Granted, a Walmart job isn't the greatest one in the world, but it sure beats no job at all.
The Rust Belt lost most of its jobs prior to 1990, so I’m not sure how that’s relevant data.
I find it a bit hard to understand how someone could suggest that having access to garbage cheap Walmart goods would make up for the utter destruction of a region’s economy. A good place to observe this is southwestern Pennsylvania: there are hundreds of former industrial towns which are now almost completely empty. Drug use is also rampant in these areas and indeed it’s easy to make a direct connection between offshoring jobs and the opioid epidemic.
Your argument would be more persuasive if you talked about wages. Which is likely the thing that sealed the deal given the low margin business Walmart operates, far more than typical retail operations. Here in Canada my nephew is being paid $20/hr at a big box because they are desperate for workers. Obviously (to a much smaller degree) it was also in combination with the significant increase in shoplifting and security risks for shoppers/workers that typically creates, and the pressure on hiring, which the typical violence in American Walmart stores was bad enough as it was.
But the wage growth + consequences of the "summer of love" when people realized there are no consequences for mass low level property theft happened in 2020... Same with wage growth around the same time with COVID so that doesn't sound like the whole story either.
Your personal anecdotes about local competition in the city and stuff about instacart ignores the massive price/supply advangage that Walmart has, and aren't very persuasive. Typically you'd also see those trends in other urban areas... Why are these 4 stores in Chicago unique? And why 5yrs ago? Are you saying small stores you love + mid tier competitors all suddenly started opening in 2018?
Because otherwise I'd agree that delivery (see: amazon) growth was what killed it but the doubling of losses started happening in 2018. Before COVID.
And there's tons of stats about Walmart's delivery business was booming during COVID.
There has to be some more stuff that happened around then, in combination with these multiple factors.
I understand your point, but don't think the Walmart/Meth comparison is fair. Walmart is full of hardworking people doing honorable work that provides for their families and contributes to their communities.
One thing I took from that episode is how so many people yearn for the mom-and-pops to come back, even though their prices were awful, selection poor, service subpar, working for them had less protections, and on and on.
WalMart is actually a pretty good employer compared to many other low-wage industries and the benefits in terms of price and selection for rural areas should not be underestimated.
I am no fan of Walmart but you can't pin this on just them by the time they were pushing suppliers the damage had already been done.
It wasn't always this way. Walmart used to proudly display banners with 'Made in America' on them.
But as companies left the county, the poor and then the middle class downsized as well.
Companies left looking to lower costs, the public was wooed with lower prices and the idea that you could get more now and the politicians made promises that the affected sectors would be retrained, first we would have a service economy then it became knowledge workers.
It turns out that the service economy is fickle and doesn't pay well for the most part. Not everyone can be a knowledge worker and that is not outsource proof either.
Now we are in a trap where companies can not return because they would have to raise their prices and reduce profits and the people who used to work for them can't afford to buy their products now.
I agree that it helps Walmart more than it hurts them at this point. That's a large shift from ~20 years ago when the fear was very widespread that Walmart would destroy all the small towns and wipe out local employers. Now that Walmart is entrenched nearly everywhere locally, politicians want to keep those local jobs.
Walmart has contributed to the decline of small businesses in rural areas[0] and they compensate their employees so little that they officially encourage their employees to take advantage of the social safety net[1] despite ever increasing annual net income[2] captured largely by the non-productive latter-generation Waltons.
I wonder how much Walmart adjusts working conditions to the local job market. Things like high turnover have significant real costs and adjusting the the local job market could save them massive amounts of money. There also seems to be significant differences in the quality of the store depending on the local economy.
EX: I walked though a Wallmart in Arlington VA that seemed to be struggling where the Wallmart in Charles Town WV was thriving. I expect they lose out on the "high end" items like HDTV's and high quality items when people have more options and cash.
Have you ever worked retail? Retail is just kind of a bad industry that sucks to work in. It’s generally unskilled with high turnover. So while Walmart sucks compared to desk jobs, it’s pretty good for retail.
I think they are great for communities. I lived in a rural community as a kid for many years without Walmart. We had no book store, no music store. Small under 1k people and one stoplight. They literally had only one science fiction book in the library (broken lands from empire of the east by saberhagen, super awesome book. Weird that that was the one)
Walmart opened close-by and all of a sudden I could buy books. They had so many more options. We didn’t have to drive 40 minutes for groceries. About 1/3 of the Main Street stores closed but they really sucked. Interestingly their employees had zero benefits and zero sexual harassment protections.
It was a small town where if you worked for the dime store you got no vacation, no benefits, got paid 50% if you were black. Lots of lame stuff. At least wal mart paid you some benefits.
Walmart isn’t some all positive entity, there are negatives. But they aren’t horrible and are a huge positive force for the poor by lowering prices.
It’s very frustrating to hear a rich person complain about Walmart when they haven’t had to need their groceries being 20% cheaper than Kroger or 50% less than Whole Foods.
Great article. I wish they supported their thesis that shopping at Walmart is a self harming cycle that exports jobs. Maybe by focusing on small towns.
I think Walmart has damaged the economy a lot. Maybe smaller companies are less efficient but Walmart has destroyed a lot of small business that provided fairly stable jobs to middle class people.
There is a Walmart in my metro area that is responsible for like 80% of all police calls within their municipality. This is the same Walmart that leeches off society in other ways like paying sub-living wages so that employees need to rely on social safety nets to survive. I'm not sure if they have to hire private security, but this is a prime example of a business that should be securing itself or changing location.
While I was caught up in the anti-Walmart meme [and I'm using "meme" dismissively] for many years, today Walmart provides jobs in my community and those jobs appear to be stable with regular shifts because I often see the same cashiers at the same times one year to the next. I'll add that Walmart also generates local sales and income tax revenue [and sometimes property tax] that helps make schools and roads and fire trucks possible.
That's not to say either Amazon or Walmart is moral. It's more that because Walmart has a greater dependency on the commons around me and I believe its interests and mine are less orthogonal.
When a Walmart opens, it knocks out about half the jobs in a small town. It doesn't replace that number. It also pays so low many of its employees are on welfare. Companies like WalMart are subsidized by the taxpayer. Repeat that across thousands of stores to get enormous impact on economy.
Add downsizing, consolidation, price gouging (i.e. Koch's, oil), and offshoring to get an even bigger one across the board. The Recession was a given with buying power always going down while costs always go up.
I'm not sure that's true. I've lived long enough to see Wal-Mart move into my home town (rural NC, population 5K) and see it obliterate local businesses, in part because it paid it's workers low wages compared to incumbent family businesses that paid employees well.
Don't think of the correlation as between WalMart's low pay and the current wave of shoplifting as being direct, think of as karma.
For decades WalMart has pioneered low prices and below-sustenance wages. For much of America WalMart is the face of devastated small towns and the complete loss of local economies.
It's probably not employees of WalMart stealing steaks and single pairs of underwear. It's probably everyone else who no longer has a local job opportunity, has lower wages because their family business folded to WalMart, or has trouble feeding their kids because the closest job now only pays $12/hr because _all they have to compete with locally is WalMart_.
You cannot artificially depress the wages and economy of an area and then complain that everyone around you is doing poor people things (stealing to stay alive or pay rent). No sympathy for WalMart from me.
You could blame Walmart for some of the economic woes, but they aren't the ones shuttering the auto plant, or the steel mill, or the shoe shop, or automating the old labor-intensive, natural-resource sectors so they require vastly fewer, more highly skilled people.
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