Comment by gtowey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gtowey | Hacker News Reader

This article is pure corporate propaganda.

Walmart isn't good for small towns no matter how you look at it because they turn entire small town economies into a line item on a gigantic global multi national's ledger. And once done, there is no going back.

They build a new store and then sell at a loss to bankrupt the competition. They can do this because they have billions of dollars in reserve and are subsidized by other stores. How can local businesses compete? Once they all go out of business and there are no choices left Walmart is free to raise prices and recoup their losses and more.

Then there are the jobs. Low wage, dead end. They create the new working poor where you can't survive even with a job so you go on government assistance as well. Subsidized serfdom.

And to top it all off, if they aren't profitable, they won't hesitate to close up shop and leave a smoking crater in the economy of that same small town that is near impossible to recover from. There are no more small business and it's near impossible to start them again because local employees have been subsisting on starvation wages.

Sure, if you ignore all the horrible realities of the Walmart lifecycle, it sure is nice that they provide a convenient way to buy lots of cheap garbage!

Walmart won't run an unprofitable store, as you mentioned. From my time working there[0] their strategy was mostly to put stores as far out as possible from a warehouse hub and work backward. To be honest, Walmart isn't known for closing alot of stores, they tend be very good at figuring this stuff out, at least.

Which is to say, I know they don't take a loss on stores, even news ones. They may have loss leaders, but they make a small (and I mean small) profit on most things sold in the store. Its all about volume.

Their labor practices are quite abhorrent. Not to mention they employ enough people to make a small city (2 Million+ last I checked). I don't know if they been good on balance or not, I do know they are the epitome of Corporate Exploitative Practices[1]

They also have an entire division that exists just to extract tax favor-ability for building in places. They've gotten really good at pitting towns against each other for their business.

That said, all of this is true for Target too. All of it. It just doesn't have the same poor brand reputation and it being the smaller of the two it gets less media attention for its poor practices.

[0]: I really resent them after working there though. I haven't stepped foot in an WalMart since that time period. It worked for that time in my life and I had one of the "better" jobs for sure, but it was rough to see what they did to associates and being part of that machine.

[1]: Its well studied that they have an enormous amount of their workforce on government subsidies / benefits. To the point that they have handouts to help people get on assistance that work there, rather than pay them a living wage. Its nuts when you really think about it.

I'm fairly sure the author agrees with you. "Walmart is evil" is a core thesis of American intellectuals and can be taken a base assumption for any reader of a magazine such as the Discourse. So repeating that thesis doesn't add to the conversation.

But given that base assumption, this is a discussion of a novel explanation one of the reasons why Walmart got successful, and a suggestion for how downtowns could replicate that factor. Many have mentioned that one of the reasons that Walmart is successful is because they're easier to get to for the average car-driving American. But once there, they're convenient because you don't have to dodge traffic while navigating between departments.

Wouldn't downtowns be a lot nicer if, like Walmart, they were easy to drive to, but impossible to drive through? What if getting from the boutique to the restaurant to the theatre was easy as crossing the aisle to a different department in Walmart?

I think you’ve reinvented the mall.

Seems the difference is a mall requires checkout at each “department”, Walmart only once. (Also can be cheaper because of economies of scale, though this can adversely effect convenience—you don’t have to man every department at all times a WalMart is open.)

You've now re-invented the mall killer.

TBH loitering killed malls more than a centralized checkout. They became one of the few places for teens to hangout and teens don't have much money. No coincidence that the remaining malls tend to be in high income areas.

But I digress. The removal of hangout spots in the country (especially post pandemic) can be its own topic.

Except that doesn’t make sense. Malls were teen hangouts for 2 decades and thrived. What killed our mall was that all the anchor stores were getting killed by Walmart and target.

The areas that were "high-income" (cheap for white commuters aspiring to the upper-middle-class) a generation before got more and more developed, and at some point in trying to attain big-city convenience, gained the big-city problems they were trying to avoid.

Our mall lost 2 major department stores when we got a Walmart and target. They lost 2 more after Amazon got big. The target and Costco a few blocks away are thriving with the affluent families. The mall isn’t economically competitive anymore.

There are malls that are competitive...one near me survived by anchoring itself to a Nordstrom's and then aiming higher. But that isn't "the mall".

You’ve missed mentioning another effect on the area: siphoning cash out.

No matter how big their local profit is, the only money reliably returned to the local area is a portion of those minimum-wage incomes.

And of those, a not-insignificant amount comes right back in to Walmart as the employees shop for basics. The rest of the money gets pulled out for corporate capital expenditures never to be seen by the local area again.

Walmart basically runs like a giant cash-vacuum.

> sell at a loss

They don't even necessarily need to sell at a loss. They can also just get economies of scale that don't work for tiny local businesses.

Still has the same effect in the end.

Or they sell "the same" (looks the same but it's lower quality) product as other stores but at a lower price, as a Walmart -exclusive.

Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercatus_Center

Brought to you by the same folks who denied global warming for years like Cato to shill for corporate interests at the expense of our survival and that of all life.

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