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Comment by chromaton | Hacker News Reader

Sam Walton points out in his autobiography that big cities are changing all the time, yet somehow people expect that small towns will not.

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Small towns should be able to change and adapt, but Walmart being the corporate small town core is another version of enshitification (Walmart being your IRL ecomm platform), with your town's core dictated and governed by Bentonville, Arkansas.

Build strong, local communities and economies instead: https://ilsr.org/ | https://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/how-small-towns-and-cities-c...

(it will not be extremely economically efficient, but you are trading efficiency for resiliency and local governance and control)

You might consider it enshittification because it's not as cute as "Main Street" but in rural and impoverished areas Walmart brought affordable necessities -- like much cheaper groceries -- and real quality of life increases for people who otherwise would have simply had to do with much less. The lower prices that Walmart is able to offer actually do matter and have a material impact on people who are not rich.

While you're not wrong, you also can't really ignore the knock-on negative effects of a major national chain moving in, undercutting local commerce, and piping a community's money away to a massive conglomerate. Local chains or independent shops are going to be reinvesting a higher percentage of their revenue in the local community.

There's also the fact that Walmart is infamous for its vampiric strategy of stringing workers along on part-time schedules that guarantee poverty-level income to avoid benefit overhead costs, relying on local and national social safety net programs to keep their workers afloat. This sort of workforce and benefits management strategy isn't nearly as prevalent among independent and small-chain businesses.

> “At a time when huge corporations like Walmart and McDonald’s are making billions in profits and giving their CEOs tens of millions of dollars a year, they’re relying on corporate welfare from the federal government by paying their workers starvation wages. That is morally obscene. U.S. taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America. It is time for the owners of Walmart, McDonald’s and other large corporations to get off of welfare and pay their workers a living wage,” said Sanders. “No one in this country should live in poverty. No one should go hungry. No one should be unable to get the medical care they need. It is long past time to increase the federal minimum wage from a starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to $15, and guarantee health care to all Americans as a human right.”

> Bernie Sanders

> "Taxpayers Subsidize Poverty Wages at Walmart, McDonald’s, Other Large Corporations, GAO Finds" - November 18, 2020

> https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/taxpayers-subs...

GAO = Governmental Accounting Office.

This 'enshittification' isn't some random internet goober decrying it. Enshittification and self-enrichment has been beaten to death on political trails, news, ted talks, social media, etc.

You can believe whatever pie-in-the-sky bullshit you want. The dangers are real. You're covering up the rotten and stinking corpse of reality with scented semi-transparent tissue paper, with all that implied scenario would accomplish.

Please tone down the rhetoric ("You can believe whatever pie-in-the-sky bullshit you want"). We all come to HN for discourse, not a bar fight.

As for what Bernie Sanders says, I'm sure that GP would agree with him that it is indeed wrong for the taxpayer to subsidize big companies. But consider that there are other ways for the taxpayer to stop this kind of subsidy, besides Sanders' "ponies for all" approach. We will benefit from rationally debating what the best way forward is, instead of shouting at those we disagree with.

Eh, those prices largely stayed low long enough to kill off local businesses, and then crept back up again. A Walmart also, on average, kills 3 local jobs for every 2 it creates. There's only so much every day low prices will help you when you're unemployed.

Exactly. Just because a guy who's gigantic paycheck depends on hollowing out small towns says small towns should change, doesn't mean that they need to change the way wants them to. After reading (most of) the article it's a little mind blowing. Walmart took the map of a town, made it car-free, and people flocked to it. Towns can take that same model, apply it to down town, and people will love it.

I also love your point that what we're talking about here trades economic efficiency for resilience and local governance. Always pushing for growth is eventually going to hit a wall when either there's no more room to grow and no more good land to grow food on.

> Build strong, local communities and economies instead

In my view, a necessary part of this is decreasing central control, both at federal and state levels. A good example is the response to Covid; state laws in places like Michigan forced small flower shops to close, leaving them to watch as people bought flowers from the Home Depot garden center instead. And more broadly, the whole pandemic was a gigantic gift to Amazon's bottom line, at the expense of every small store owner.

I agree that as a society we've trended too far in the direction of efficiency at the cost of resiliency. In restoring the balance, we must also shift the locus of control more to the people and the localities they live in.

He's completely missing the point, but I suspect he knows that

From my understanding Sam Walton was a pretty quality leader, the company went to shit went he died and his kids took over.

Being good at making money with Walmart has nothing to do with whether Walmart destroys small towns. Number of small businesses destroyed is probably a positive metric for Walmart.

What I mean is that he cared about things beyond making money. Early Walmarts were good places to work for and shop at. They were genuinely good for the communities they came to. And they didn't have enough power yet to dictate insane terms to their suppliers either. Back then, they were way better than the alternatives like Kmart and JCPenny's.

I say this as someone who grew up in rural Minnesota (a town of less than 10k), and when Walmart came to my town it mattered a lot to the whole town.

But this stopped being true by the mid-90s (about ten years after he died).

that is very interesting, sort of collides with the notion of soft bigotry of low expectations applied to cities. It's almost as if there's this implicit thinking and perception of the small town in terms of imagining them as these static, non-dynamic, unchanging homogenous entities which they are not. Kudos to Sam for challenging how we are to think of the small town and break out of these odd assumptions that have collected and are obviously out of date.

It's like anything with life, cities are comprised of people, people don't just stand still, being contemporaries in any generation you must necessarily survive and do what it takes to progress. There is no formula in any generation that you turn the crank and things just work, life takes work, and its non-formulaic and full of surprises.

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