I am not from US but currently studying here and haven't thought much about this topic. Walmart, Walgreen and Amazon feel too convenient. I would love to learn more on the topic before it becomes a habit.
> Critics, as well as the United States Internal Revenue Service, charge that the company was trying to profit from the deaths of its employees, and take advantage of the tax law which allowed it to deduct the premiums.
- Extremely aggressive about interrupting unionization attempts.
- Relatively low pay, particularly for the bottom 1/2 of employees.
- They squeeze suppliers to restrain prices to the benefit of consumers. This essentially adds another aggrieved voice in the crowd.
- Then there's a very broad, vague, low value argument about the soul of communities being destroyed by their presence. This premise was particularly common ~15 years ago. It has turned out to be almost entirely bunk, so it's an argument rarely used against them today. Today, the focus is overwhelmingly on pay, specifically that their low wages force tax payers to subsidize said wages.
Most of these arguments collapse upon rational inspection. For example, they universally pay better than mom & pop local stores and employ far more people in small & mid size towns / communities. Then the argument gets flipped: it then gets said that they intentionally pay higher than local competitors, and advocate in favor of higher minimum wage laws, to crush local competition (ie damned if they do, damned if they don't).
The same people that dislike Walmart, you'll find, will frequently lodge 'for the common good' arguments economically. Walmart acts for the good of the many, as they squeeze supplier margins to hold prices down. Somehow saving 200 million people money is turned against them as a negative.
Their low pay is an interesting issue unto itself. Their margins are hyper low, at 2.5% net income margins; their sales have been flat and profits have been falling for years. If they pay each employee just another $4,000 to $5,000 per year, they'd go bankrupt (particularly as they begin the long hard war with Amazon). They're often contrasted with Costco, which pays meaningfully higher wages; however Costco manages that by employing far fewer people per dollar of sales. To match Costco on that, Walmart would have to fire at least half a million people, most of whom have few skills to do any other higher paying jobs.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the low pay / tax payer subsidy issue, is who the tax payers are that are doing the subsidizing: mostly the rich. The top 1/3 in America pay almost all the income taxes that go toward subsidizing Walmart's bottom 1/2 of employees who earn low wages. This almost never gets discussed when the topic comes up, in fact it's aggressively dodged. The people doing the arguing, are overwhelmingly in favor of the rich subsidizing the poor, but for some reason it's not ok when it comes to this (ie they're actually arguing it's bad that the rich tax payers subsidize Walmart's poorest employees, it's comical). This is just a baseless attack on Walmart, because of what they are. The only alternative to having the top 1/3 subsidize Walmart's poorest employees, is to have those employees lose their jobs and then the subsidy goes to 100% instead of being partial as it is today.