Whatever, I love Wal-Mart, it’s one of my favorite stores, I can find anything there. Cheap.
If people didn’t want Walmart they wouldn’t shop there. Since they shop at Walmart, they want it.
Unions that use the state are as immoral as the state. If people didn’t want to work in those conditions, they wouldn’t. If they want better conditions, they should accumulate capital. Just as the west has done.
Then clearly the minimum wage is too high for those jobs, right?
China is a different country so “below min. wage” means nothing in this context. What are terrible conditions, who says they are terrible, and terrible compared to what?
Sorry for double post: but listen to the claim being made: Walmart has huge profits but doesn’t share them with the workers.
Well, what this tells you (if it is true), is that you can go into business and very easily beat walmart if you have enough startup capital; They are currently making high profits so you can take a lower cut and either A) Pay your employees more and bid them away from walmart or B) Lower the price on your products and put walmart out of business.
They’re basically saying that there is free money out there to be had if you can compete with wal-mart. The issue is can you get the startup capital. I think it would take a lot, but I also think you could get it since its a sure-thing. If you just had enough resources to get the economy of scale going, you can beat them.
So I am highly, highly suspicious of walmarts free market status. There is competition in other high-startup cost industries… and particularly if you look at electricty/telecom companies in periods of low regulation, there is plenty of competition in the markets. I don’t see why we wouldn’t expect to see the same thing in a free market for groceries.
I mean, its milk and cheese… how much more basic a commodity can you get?
In my locality, an asian supermarket has recently taken the place of where the old walmart store used to be.
Minimum wage creates unemployment; I don’t think that there has to be any argument that prices kept above market prices will create a surplus. Who determines “underpaid”? This is arbitrary and useless for an economic discussion. Big bad WalMart sells consumer goods at cheap prices. Guess who shops at WalMart? Many people that are average and below average income earners, because they can afford to get more goods for their relatively lesser amounts of money. So you’re saying that the government should - (a) punish efficiency (b) subsidize inefficiency (c) cause unemployment (d) make people, many of whom don’t have a lot of money to begin with, pay higher prices than they otherwise should. Wow, you should apply for a job at the US Treasury Department.
It’s not corrupt. It’s a great company that services the needs of many.
Right. But if walmart paid low and sold low there would be no problem… the issue we’re having is that walmart pays low, sells low-ish, and gains a huge profit off that.
Walmart fulfilled its Kirznerian entrepreneurial function, given the existence of low marginal revenue product workers and higher prices from other sellers for similar goods: no more no less.
Buy low sell high is possible when there is, in fact, possibilities for exchange that are not taken due to ignorance of buyers and/or sellers.
I recommend reading Israel Kirzner’s Competition and Entrepreneurship. He gives a situation exactly like this:
Unless a company used government issued monopoly to become the monopolist, then it must have become a monopolist due to better reaction on its part to market information. This is a good thing, since otherwise less mutually beneficial exchange occurs than with the intermediary of the entrepreneur, because then higher-than-justified-by-the-resources prices would continue in the market.
[I repeat this, because people have argued: why not buy low and sell low; but that is an error.]
That is a total crock. Another leftist myth endlessly, breathlessly repeated .
When I was younger I worked at Wal-Mart for a few months for spending money. They paid about a $1.50 above the min wage and I was well treated. I actually enjoyed my time there. I cannot speak about what every Wal Mart in the world does, but that is how it worked out for me. Wal-Mart isnt perfect, and I wont defend everything they do. But most anti-Wal Mart types make wrongheaded complaints about them.
And on Wal-Mart’s anti-union tactics? Cry me a river. What website do you think you’ve been posting at for the last several months?
We’re livin’ in the age of globalization, baby; ignore foreign governments at your own peril. Consider China:
-
Currency peg specifically intended to make Chinese goods comparatively cheaper internationally and thus more appealing for importation by other countries. Also with the happy consequence of pricing those goods out of the range of your average Chinese.
-
Bank policy that lends almost exclusively to China’s bloated manufacturing sector (at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party), pretty much ignoring small business which typically provides the bulk of employment opportunities in most economies.
-
Heavy subsidies on necessary input commodities for manufacturing.
Government intervention that systematically undermines international competition, check. Government intervention that systematically ensures a surplus of labour, check. Government intervention that lowers costs to very specific sectors of the economy, check.
We all know that a huge bulk of Wal-Mart’s inventory reads “Made in China”, and this fact should not surprise us in the least. Chinese goods are dirt cheap and clearly people are willing to buy them. Wal-Mart has the ability to achieve economies of scale of biblical proportions and the CCP is more than willing to cater to this business model. From a business perspective what’s there not to like? I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if there are some domestic regulations that gives Wal-Mart a further leg up but I think it’s pretty obvious where they get their ability to offer piss-poor wages and undercut competitors. If you’re going to be distributing blame blame the corrupt Chinese officials who make a career accepting kickbacks and exploiting the peons over whom they rule. I won’t defend Wal-Mart for being asshole employers but you could even blame the American consumer for being cheap (but do they really have a choice?) and spending their money at Wal-Mart.
They pay min-to below min wage, because they can, and since they are the biggest competitors in whatever area they station in, therefore driving out all the other companies. When someone needs to find work, they end up having to work at Wal-Mart, and get paid below minimum.
What has stopped Wal-Mart from taking over the world? I hate to say it, but regulation. If Wal-Mart was the world’s single dominant producer, we would be chattel-slaves to the burgeousie’s.
I hate to say it, but both those paragraphs show that someone has not been doing their homework, meaning educating themselves from the variety of resources on this site.
Even i know what’s wrong with those paragraphs, but am too lazy to say at the moment.
Are you saying that I wouldn’t have been a better person had I been born in Rothbardia? Although impossible to say for sure, I reckon I would have had a much lower time preference than I do now.
If walmart could theoretically provide to the whole world as they do in the US we could cure world hunger and possibly bump up several 3rd world countries to 2nd 1st world status. Sounds like a good plan.
I don’t know what people have against lowering the cost of living and further economizing goods. I find it hypocritical that people who are against Walmart claim they are sympathetic with the poor.
filc:
I totally agree. I was quoting the OP. just saying
Woops I see now. Use the quote feature! I fixed my post.
I love Walter Block. He’s very estute and fun… And he looks funny 
He’s like the fun uncle of the Austrian school… I wonder what that conversation would turn into if Block told them that he was an anarchist after arguing that for a little bit longer.
Wal-Mart isn’t charity. They are out there to make a profit. To make a profit in the present world you have to be ready to deal with the State, be it by taking the risk and not pay as much taxes as they would like (still possible for the small business, impossible for the big one), selling overpriced military/medical hardware or exploiting existent legislation to its limit. We cannot know how would Wal-Mart behave in a free market because there isn’t a free market. Perhaps they’d be out of business, perhaps they’d have a monopoly, perhaps workers would simply walk out, we just cannot know.