America absolutely loves Wal-Mart. 100 million customers visit Wal-Mart
every single week in this country. But is Wal-Mart good for America?
That is a question that most people never stop and ask. Most of us love
shopping in big, clean stores that are packed with super cheap
merchandise, but the truth is that Wal-Mart is destroying America in a
lot of ways. As you will see below, Wal-Mart has destroyed tens of
thousands of small businesses and countless manufacturing jobs over the
past couple of decades. Wal-Mart has become a gigantic retail behemoth
that sells five times more stuff than any other retailer in the United
States.
Unfortunately, about 85 percent of all the stuff sold at Wal-Mart is
made overseas. What that is costing the U.S. economy in terms of lost
jobs and lost revenue is incalculable. But Wal-Mart is a perfect
example of where our economic system is headed. Our economy is becoming
completely and totally dominated by highly centralized monolithic
predator corporations that ruthlessly crush all competition and that
will stoop to just about anything in order to cut costs.

In the future, will we all be working for gigantic communal entities
that funnel all of the wealth and economic rewards to a very tiny elite?
That sounds very much like how communist China works, and red-blooded
Americans should want no part of that. America is supposed to be about
free enterprise and competition and working together to build up this
country, and Wal-Mart is destroying all of that.
--
Barbara J Llorente, 71 Cerritos Ave San Francisco, CA 94127.

Frogger/forger

> X-Complaints-To:


--

sf

On Fri, 23 Oct 2015 19:52:06 -1000, sf > wrote:
...
The United Statesians are really stupid!!

Look what we did:

Frontline expose:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl.../walmart/view/

Music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw64hRgLBqM

Lyrics:
http://www.lyricsvip.com/The-Reveren...re-Lyrics.html


Results: Data from
http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html

U.S. Trade Imbalance with China (millions of dollars, to China)

Year Amount
1985 6
1986 1664
1987 2796
1988 3489
1989 6234
1990 10431
1991 12591
1992 18309
1993 22777
1994 29505
1995 33789
1996 39520
1997 47695
1998 56927
1999 68677
2000 83833
2001 83096
2002 103064
2003 124068
2004 161938
2005 201544
2006 232548
2007 258506
2008 268040
2009 208688
2010 273063
2011 295422
2012 315053
2013 318417
2014 342632

John Kuthe...

John Kuthe wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Oct 2015 19:52:06 -1000, sf > wrote:
> ..
> The United Statesians are really stupid!!
>
> Look what we did:

Shaddup, you ****ant hater of the poor.

Why don't you ever go after Dollar General or K Mart?

You ****wit!


https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publi...al-communities

The Wal-Mart effect: Poison or antidote for local communities?

Wal-Mart even scares businesses that aren't direct competitors, at least
not yet. Banks, for instance, lobbied Congress hard to keep Wal-Mart
from becoming an industrial loan corporation, which, in effect, would
have allowed it to offer banking services.

But some argue that the company can be, and often is, a force for good.
Wal-Mart's low prices are hard to dispute, and the biggest benefactors
are low-income shoppers. Wal-Mart has been widely lauded for its $4
pharmacy program, which has rippled through drug and pharmacy industries
to the delight of consumer advocates.

The company has received considerable attention for various
environmental initiatives. It has widely replaced store lighting with
energy-saving bulbs and given the bulbs prominent space on store
shelves. The company announced in November that it has increased the
energy efficiency of its buildings and truck fleets by 15 percent since
2005, and has committed to using solar energy at 22 sites. It also
promised to cut solid waste from its U.S. stores by 25 percent by next
October. Earlier in the year, the company announced a pilot program with
a small number of suppliers (among its 60,000 worldwide) who will start
measuring, and hopefully reducing, their carbon footprint.

So the fedgazette decided to take a closer look at the matter,
attempting to answer a seemingly straightforward question: What economic
effect does Wal-Mart have on local communities in the Ninth District?
Conventional wisdom suggests that Wal-Mart's economic influence is
significant and obvious. If that's indeed the case, then we should see
palpable change in measures commonly used as proxies for community
health—things like jobs, firms, income, population and poverty.

So the fedgazette looked at 40 small counties in the district that saw
Wal-Mart come to town between 1986 and 2003 and compared them with 49
similarly sized non-Wal-Mart counties in the district (see methodology).
The fedgazette then looked at these familiar benchmarks—jobs, firms,
population, income and poverty—from 1985 to 2005 to see if Wal-Mart
counties performed differently than non-Wal-Mart counties.

Readers should understand that all results come with a host of caveats
(again, see methodology for examples). The point of this research is not
to offer the last word on whether Wal-Mart is helpful or harmful—it is
clearly both, though which it is depends on the circumstances. In fact,
in this matter Wal-Mart is no different from any new business—large or
small—coming to town and competing with incumbent businesses for finite
spending in a community. Wal-Mart just competes for a larger share of
it, and within a bigger geographic area. As a result, the hope of this
research is to better frame the friend-or-foe debate over Wal-Mart.

Given the terror that Wal-Mart is purported to inflict on communities,
the fedgazette's findings of the firm's economic influence are almost
mundane. Despite its kill-them-all reputation, Wal-Mart is not the
threat that many fear, at least in terms of economic benchmarks commonly
associated with healthy, growing communities.

For example, Wal-Mart is widely believed to destroy local firms and jobs
and to have a dampening effect on wages. But fedgazette findings suggest
the opposite: Firm growth, employment and total earnings were somewhat
stronger in Wal-Mart counties and, in some cases, even in the retail
sector. The research does suggest that retail earnings per job fell in
virtually all counties studied. But they actually fell by less in
Wal-Mart counties.