Walmart

Studies sponsored by unions and special interest retail sales groups that offer no plausible logical mechanisms for how offering goods at lower prices hurts communities in general, rather than just their competition, do not impress me.

Why don't you explain logically how offering goods at lower prices hurts communities?

WalMart is in retail sales, although they do offer a few services as well, photographic developing, pharmacy, optometric, and some automotive services (like tire replacement) generally. They usually also have a small fast food cafe. So in general WalMart actually produces almost nothing. So aside from photographic developing, pharmacy, optometric, and some automotive services, and a handful of fast food jobs, all of which clearly represent a small fraction of the services offered in any community, the only jobs that WalMart can displace are also retail sales jobs, and possibly a small number of local manufacturing or crafts jobs that are outcompeted by imported goods. Now, I don't care how you slice it, a retail sales job does not produce wealth; it only facilitates the distribution of goods. In other words, none of the retail sales jobs in a community can actually contribute to the wealth of the community except by adding value through distribution. But WalMart clearly adds more value through distribution, because you can get similar products for lower prices, which leaves more money left over to spend elsewhere. This increases the money available to spend at all of the other businesses in town, of which there are many. How do I know there are many? Because someone has to be producing the wealth that is being spent on the retail stores. If a small community is made entirely up of retail stores and local service providers this community will rapidly go broke. Where is the money coming from to shop at the retail stores and pay for the services? Money must leak out of the community as people buy cars and goods that are not manufactured there. In other words, the community damn well better be producing something of value or it is doomed anyway. Citing a bunch of studies that say that some fraction of communities do poorly after a WalMart or other big box retailer comes to town is preposterous. The big box retailers can only make communities wealthier. If some fraction of communities becomes poorer after a big box retailer comes to town, that is probably because the economy of that town is becoming obsolete, regardless of the makeup up their retial sales sector.

In fact, because the economy is always changing you will always be able to find communities whose economies are on the wane, and some fraction of these will always have a WalMart! In fact, you can easily see a correlation between WalMarts and economic downswings in communities by recognizing that economies on the downswing are the economies most in need of inexpensive retail goods, meaning that the positive impact is largest where the economy is hurting, and hence the positive increase in the lifestyle and standard of living of consumers will be largest in these communities, hence their market capture will likely be largest there. By targeting communities in economic distress, WalMart could ensure their low prices do the most good! Unfortunately that would also create a correlation between the presence of a WalMart in a community and an economic downturn that can be exploited by the disingenuous spin engines of unions and coalitions of disgruntled competitors.

All of the jobs lost due to competition are, of course, real hardships in the short run for those people. But as always, the loss of jobs due to competition frees up labor for more valuable uses. The United States has lost 300 million jobs in the last 14 years. There are only 300 million men, women, and children in the entire country! Is the country all unemployed? No. Because 320 million jobs have been created in the same time (the population has risen by about 20 million people in that time).

40% of the population used to be employed in agriculture. Now it's less than 2%. Do we have 38% unemployment? No.

We've lost an enormous number of manufacturing jobs. But so what? Manufacturing jobs generally suck. They are usually sweaty, repetitive, dangerous, and boring. They were replaced with safer jobs, more interesting jobs, better jobs, more valuable jobs.

I reiterate, WalMart and the other big box retailers, although they can be faulted for taking government handouts and sometimes using local government to steal people's land, cannot be faulted for offering consumers lower prices which makes them wealthier, and freeing up valuable labor and capital for more productive uses.

So until you can come up with a plausible logical mechanism for how less expensive goods can possibly be harmful to a community in general, all the handwaving and spin machine studies will remain unconvincing.