Two great pieces on Wal-Mart this week. The first, from John Tierney, is hidden behind the New York Times’ pay-to-play wall. But here are a few excerpts:

The film, ”Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price,” focuses on H & H Hardware, a family-owned business in this small town in northeastern Ohio. Its anguished owner explains that he needs a loan to survive, but complains that the bank has refused him because Wal-Mart’s pending arrival has depressed the value of his property.

He shows a rack of booklets being distributed by an Amish customer: ”How Wal-Mart Is Destroying America.” But there is no stopping the giant. The film shows a headline, ”Wal-Mart Descends On Middlefield!,” followed by bulldozers in action.

Accompanied by the mournful twangs of a guitar, H & H slowly goes out of business. An Amish horse and buggy is shown passing the moribund store, followed by images of empty shelves and the lights being turned off.

It’s a sad story. But it’s not exactly the one you hear if you talk to the Amish customers now shopping at Middlefield Hardware, the new store in the same building where H & H operated. They will tell you the new store is a big improvement over the old one.

The store was opened last month by Jay Negin, a local resident who bought the building despite the new Wal-Mart. He told me that the building’s appraised value, rather than being hurt by Wal-Mart’s opening in May, is higher now than it was last year.

He scoffed at the notion that Wal-Mart put his predecessor out of business, as did some former employees and customers of the old store. They told me that the business had been floundering for years because of management mistakes. It actually closed three months before Wal-Mart opened, a fact not made clear in the documentary.

[...]

There still may be Amish activists passing out booklets against Wal-Mart, but they seemed to be vastly outnumbered by the Amish who tie their horses to the posts outside the new Wal-Mart.

”I wasn’t too happy about Wal-Mart coming,” said Ada Schlabach, who was browsing through the plain-colored fabrics that the store stocks for Amish customers. ”I didn’t know what it would do to the community — would it make it more citylike? But I was surprised. It’s kind of nice now. I like shopping here.”

Ben Yoder, an Amish carpenter who is 24, was there with two of his four children. ”We get all our diapers and wipes here because it’s cheaper than anywhere else,” he said. He and most of the Amish shoppers said the Wal-Mart was especially welcomed because they could reach it by horse, unlike the one more than 20 miles away.

”Wal-Mart isn’t really a big issue with our people,” said Eli Miller, who runs a sawmill. ”At first some were upset because they were scared by something new. But now they like being able to get everything here — your name brand, your off brand, all in one place. I think of it as simple shopping.”

The second is from Sebastian Mallaby in the Washington Post, and does a stellar job of explaining how Wal-Mart is good for low-income people:

As Jason Furman of New York University puts it, Wal-Mart is “a progressive success story.” Furman advised John “Benedict Arnold” Kerry in the 2004 campaign and has never received any payment from Wal-Mart; he is no corporate apologist. But he points out that Wal-Mart’s discounting on food alone boosts the welfare of American shoppers by at least $50 billion a year. The savings are possibly five times that much if you count all of Wal-Mart’s products.

These gains are especially important to poor and moderate-income families. The average Wal-Mart customer earns $35,000 a year, compared with $50,000 at Target and $74,000 at Costco. Moreover, Wal-Mart’s “every day low prices” make the biggest difference to the poor, since they spend a higher proportion of income on food and other basics. As a force for poverty relief, Wal-Mart’s $200 billion-plus assistance to consumers may rival many federal programs. Those programs are better targeted at the needy, but they are dramatically smaller. Food stamps were worth $33 billion in 2005, and the earned-income tax credit was worth $40 billion.

Set against these savings for consumers, Wal-Mart’s alleged suppression of wages appears trivial.

[...]

Wal-Mart’s critics also paint the company as a parasite on taxpayers, because 5 percent of its workers are on Medicaid. Actually that’s a typical level for large retail firms, and the national average for all firms is 4 percent. Moreover, it’s ironic that Wal-Mart’s enemies, who are mainly progressives, should even raise this issue. In the 1990s progressives argued loudly for the reform that allowed poor Americans to keep Medicaid benefits even if they had a job. Now that this policy is helping workers at Wal-Mart, progressives shouldn’t blame the company. Besides, many progressives favor a national health system. In other words, they attack Wal-Mart for having 5 percent of its workers receive health care courtesy of taxpayers when the policy that they support would increase that share to 100 percent.

[...]

If critics prevent the firm from opening new branches, they will prevent ordinary families from sharing in those gains. Poor Americans will be chief among the casualties.

I’ve been saying for months now that if public health activists are really serious about getting fresh, low-cost produce to the inner cities, they ought to be fighting in favor of letting Wal-Marts bloom in urban areas, not against them.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2005 at 5:03 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.