To answer whomever it was who said: "Isn't a low-paying Wal-Mart job better than no job?"
The insidious effect on a community of having many, many low-paying jobs (instead of fewer, higher-paying and benefitted jobs) is that when the community is blanketed with low-paying jobs, the community then has less to spend, thus locking itself into a downward spiral of wages and purchasing power that has ripple effects of stagnating the community's growth and alienating all but the most essential and stripped-down businesses. The low-wage-earners become dependent on Wal-Mart for everything in their life; they no longer have choices of where to shop, because they get paid so little, but have to take their Wal-Mart paycheck right back to Wal-Mart (genius!). Also, where before you could have one wage-earner providing for a family, including family health plans that would cover wife AND kids, now you need both parents to work at Wal-Mart in order to provide for their kids, who are now latch-key kids, and have no health insurance at ALL.
Meanwhile, all the money they fork over to Wal-Mart for their cheap goods goes into the remote coffers of stockholders who then spend it (or don't, even) in other parts of the country. When Joe Grandpappy's store still stood on the corner, and you bought your sodie pop from him, he then, perhaps, decided to repair his roof with that money later, and called your uncle the roofer, who then used HIS pay to get his tooth fixed by your dentist neighbor, who... see, it's a circle of positive reinforcement for the community, and keeps it alive and stable, as opposed to Wal-Mart, which is basically like a giant succubus.
quixotica, you wouldn't happen to be talking about a bank that starts with a C but is not Chase or Citibank? If so I live a block from that site with the "the last thing this corner needs is another bank" message. (Its also possible, though probably unlikely that there is a "TLTTCNIAB" movement.) If we are talking about the same site there is a back story to that which includes the residents of the block fighting and eventually stopping the inclusion of a drive-thru at the bank. The neighborhood (its in Brooklyn) is dense urban residential and a drive through would have led to traffic jams and cars idling in line on a residential street full of families with kids playing nearby. The bank also claims to have considered the context while designing the branch (primarily three or four story brick and brownstone) which is something else the neighbors fought for. They are half-way through exterior construction so that is yet to be seen. The real implication of this story is that the neighborhood in question is full of brownstones and brick row houses that start at a million and a half dollars and go up from there. People who live in that sort of real estate have the ear of the local government as well as the clout to threaten the bank with boycott in a meaningful way. On the other hand, Ikea is going in half a mile away, right near Home Depot and Lowes. I guess Ikea is not the last thing needed.
I am reminded of a piece that Joel Garreau wrote a few years after he published Edge City. It's called Edgier Cities, and it imagines what the world of suburbia might look like in 30 years. He uses Kmart as an example, but we could substitute Wal-Mart for the purposes of this discussion.
It's surprising that the article is still "alive" on the web, 10 years after publication. Enjoy.
NSJ, i would, in fact be talking about that certain bank. Thats actually a really interesting story and one, unfortunatly, i never heard, considering the owner of the firm is married to the CEO of said bank, they tend to keep the propaganda machine rolling at full steam all day long.
Also, i went and saw the movie again last night. Different type of crowd this time. Sundays crowd was a unitarian church, mostly older but many of them still clinging to their youthful days when they fought the good fight. Long grey hair in ponytails even when the top of their head is bald, etc. Last nights crowd was the urban 20something lets complain about a lot of stuff but not actually do anything about it crowd. It was interesting to see how riled up the first crowd got after viewing the film. (i think they had to physically restrain one guy from going out to firebomb the closest Wal-mart) whereas the 20something crowd seemed to be more analytical of the movie itself, talking more about the directing style and the choice of not having an onscreen narrator. Both crowds were obviously very moved by the film but i feel like the second crowd probably went home afterwards, told some friends they saw the film (thereby making them look like an activist) and that will be it, whereas im highly frightened by what that first crowd was capable of.
formotion: are you benefiting from the sales of those dvd's or something? walmart's transgressions have been pretty well publicized in independent media and even to some extent in the mainstream media. i haven't seen the film myself, but from what i've read it doesn't sound like it will tell me or most of the people who posted here much we don't already know.
I dont like Wal * Mart either but its America, and its a free capitalist society. It seems the biggest topic here is that they dont pay their employees health insurance. Why should they? Why should any of us? Why is it that we need health insurance just to go to the doctor?
I applaud Wal * Mart for standing up to the Big Insurance Lobby. You guys dis them now, but those corporate hillbillies may save our ass one day. Unfortunatly their employees are on the front lines of a deeper battle ahead for our country.
if they paid these same employees MORE to compensate for not helping with insurance, i'd believe your argument that they are 'standing up to the Big Insurance Lobby'. instead they're keeping them part-time, paying as little as possible, and making sure that none of their prospective employees have pre-existing health conditions.
i think you've strapped on blinders so you only see one issue in a larger landscape. helping with insurance premiums is not only enabling big insurance - it's just as much part of compensation as the $6.99/hour they pay. it would be easy for them to position themselves as against insurance extortion because it's also convenient and accomplishes their own stingy goals.
i had a sarcastic remark in my holster but then i realized: . is right, we will be thanking wal-mart one day. for indeed, wal-mart will prove to everyone that there is market failure in the field of health insurance and that it's time for the government to take over. because private insurance costs more and does less than single-payer socialized insurance! and it's so expensive that large companies don't want to pay for it if they don't have to! and they don't have to!
why DO we need health insurance just to go to the doctor? because a doctor's visit has an actual cost of $200 - $300. because the doctor has to hire 3-4 people just to handle insurance. because there are thousands of insurance plans out there
it's a recursive trap that benefits only two groups of people:
1.) private insurance companies -- man, they NEVER go under, they just merge and lay off people
2.) fly-by-night technical schools that train incompetent "allied health professionals" who work for $20K - $25K per year to fill out 1,000 different health insurance forms per year
i'd rather wait 3 months to get a checkup in the UK or sweden than risk paying $200,000 in the US if i get cancer
so, coming back round to wal-mart, thanks "." -- the dawn will come after the dark, just wait and see
Aren't target, walmart, kmart, ikea, costco, sams club, ect. ALL big box stores?
i see the only differentiater being the products & marketing position.
just because target sells designer items alongside incredible marketing expertise, doesn't excuse the fact that it replaces the mainstreet. walmart is quite simply taking the heat because it positioned itself as the " new family center/main street ", as it wiped out " old family centers/main streets ". A very simple contridiction in marketing has screwed this retail giant . At the same time - all these other stores have been wiping out most of new america's only history.
my family's store in mich. was put out of business after over 100 years of business because of walmart.
"." I agree with your insurance post in a sense. It is the employer's decision to cover their employees health insurance. I proudly call myself a free market fan. I don't agree with socalist government run health care...and that's why I have problems with Wal-Mart providing inadequate health care for their employees. Wal-Mart actually tells their low income employees how to sign up for the trough of government freebies for low income people. While I'm not against the state & federal government providing health care and other assistance for the less fortunate, supposed full time employees should be able to cover themselves. Low wages = cheap prices on consumer goods for the rest of us, but at what cost. I wonder how much Wal-Mart truly costs us. And yes, it's companies like Wal-Mart that will put pressure on congress to get a national health care. I think it's hilarious irony that those who want it tend to hate the big businesses that want it. It won't be so-called progressives or liberals that get national health care in the USA. If it happens it will be companies like Wal-Mart, GM, big Oil, etc. etc. How's that for irony?
RED: although i can't argue that the emergence of big box retailers was the final nail in the coffin for a lot of small "main street" retailers, i don't agree that they deserve all or even most of the blame for that happening. the arrival of the automobile, suburbanization, "globalization", and demographic changes in urban and rural areas, in my opinion, are both the root cause of the downfall of main street AND the reason why big boxes are taking over.
A - Free markets drive towards comoditization of many products and services - but it is understood that once things become institutionalized they are no longer subject to market forces. Look at Ma-Bell in the 1960's. You rented your phone. Your phone just worked. You didnt have to pay out the ass for some technology that isnt getting better but actually worse since they opened it up to competition. And now Ma-Bell is being put back together in the form of a renamed SBC as ATT but now headquartered in Texas.
I think healthcare for eyes, ears nose and throat ( general practiotioner) has become commoditized. It is not the advanced medical realm we turn to for the serious stuff - just front line defense most RN's could do. That folks is what you pay $250 for - 1 minute of say ahh. Save the health care money for the big stuff, the cutting edge stuff.
That actually is one of the only points in the movie that i was dissapointed with. Absolutly no comparison to the other big box stores. I know that there is only so much time and a discussion like that might have led to another 90 minutes or so but the movie is portrayed in a vacuum almost, with not even a mention of the other big box retailers. While wal-mart is probably the worst offenders of these stores, and therefor taking the brunt of this attack, a comparison would have been nice, hell it might even have strenghtened the case against wal-mart if some of the better practices of costco, ikea, etc. that were brought up on this board were used to show how bad Wal-Mart truly is.
Big businesses don't want government healthcare. They want healthy, cheap employees, young and with no pre-existing conditions so they won't get sick and miss work time, no matter who pays for it. If if that young, healthy person does get sick and miss a protracted amount of work, Big Business doesn't "want" the government to take care of that person and return him to work, later; there are hundreds of other people ready to take the sick worker's place right away. Big Business is not concerned with the sick, at all. It doesn't matter who takes care of them. I doubt we will ever see a Wal-Mart-led initiative to socialize health care. Wal-Mart will simply continue to hire healthy people and cycle through them with an amazing turnover rate. It's not like they invest a ton of training in teaching someone how to wave at the front door.
to be fair, you could go to almost any major construction site in the US and arrest 100 illegal immigrants
i remember visiting a high-end residential job site near austin. we were talking with the contractor when a car that looked like a police car pulled up. all of a sudden someone shouted "migra" and you could hear the sudden clang and clamor of all manner of expensive power tools being dropped on concrete floors
people started running for the forest that surrounded the house
it was code enforcement -- and they didn't even have jurisdiction; we were in an unincorporated area where the only code that applied was the code of silence
once again, let's be fair to wal-mart -- this is a more widespread phenomenon than just one company
(although the controls on immigration coupled with a steady demand for immigrants to come to the US equals slave labor and no benefits, something that benefits wal-mart perhaps more than any other company in the US)
I had a Thanksgiving holiday showing for family after we ate our gluttons meal.
My complaint is that those of us that are already predisposed to hate everything Wal-Mart seem to enjoy the film, but those that like their "everyday low prices" shrug it off and find it boring.
The film which I find very credible because it's not narrated with an editoralist slant, like Michael Moore's films, leaves it slow and convuluted. The viewer doesn't get emotionally attached.
So, the reaction was odd but predictable. Some family members said they'd still shop there. Citing excuses as "but they're cheaper" and "all clothing comes from Chinese sweatshops."
One family member who is a small business owner loved it. Granted, he already hated Wal-Mart. Interesting because he's a very conservative, free market type.
I know this thread is really old, but I am sitting in my family room watching the Wal Mart movie with my parents right now. I have seen it, but they haven't.
Just caught it as well, thought it was really heavy-handed. The Enron movie, Smartest Guys in the Room, was much better and a lot scarier/anger-inducing.
Wal-Mart Movie
i've never been in a wal-mart.
To answer whomever it was who said: "Isn't a low-paying Wal-Mart job better than no job?"
The insidious effect on a community of having many, many low-paying jobs (instead of fewer, higher-paying and benefitted jobs) is that when the community is blanketed with low-paying jobs, the community then has less to spend, thus locking itself into a downward spiral of wages and purchasing power that has ripple effects of stagnating the community's growth and alienating all but the most essential and stripped-down businesses. The low-wage-earners become dependent on Wal-Mart for everything in their life; they no longer have choices of where to shop, because they get paid so little, but have to take their Wal-Mart paycheck right back to Wal-Mart (genius!). Also, where before you could have one wage-earner providing for a family, including family health plans that would cover wife AND kids, now you need both parents to work at Wal-Mart in order to provide for their kids, who are now latch-key kids, and have no health insurance at ALL.
Meanwhile, all the money they fork over to Wal-Mart for their cheap goods goes into the remote coffers of stockholders who then spend it (or don't, even) in other parts of the country. When Joe Grandpappy's store still stood on the corner, and you bought your sodie pop from him, he then, perhaps, decided to repair his roof with that money later, and called your uncle the roofer, who then used HIS pay to get his tooth fixed by your dentist neighbor, who... see, it's a circle of positive reinforcement for the community, and keeps it alive and stable, as opposed to Wal-Mart, which is basically like a giant succubus.
the end
its a cliché after cliché. I know you people haven't been in Wal*Marts and want to prove that. Good. the point here is how to correct and educate others that think it is the only way. I grew up with Wal*Mart, but have since neglected it. Lets all watch the film and realize that it is only one of the few stepping stones into fighting this monster. It won't take down Wal*Mart, but we can all communicate with others inside and outside of this community to not visit Wal*Mart based on reasoning, some of which is in the film. Its only $12 on his site if you don't have a screening near you.
quixotica, you wouldn't happen to be talking about a bank that starts with a C but is not Chase or Citibank? If so I live a block from that site with the "the last thing this corner needs is another bank" message. (Its also possible, though probably unlikely that there is a "TLTTCNIAB" movement.) If we are talking about the same site there is a back story to that which includes the residents of the block fighting and eventually stopping the inclusion of a drive-thru at the bank. The neighborhood (its in Brooklyn) is dense urban residential and a drive through would have led to traffic jams and cars idling in line on a residential street full of families with kids playing nearby. The bank also claims to have considered the context while designing the branch (primarily three or four story brick and brownstone) which is something else the neighbors fought for. They are half-way through exterior construction so that is yet to be seen. The real implication of this story is that the neighborhood in question is full of brownstones and brick row houses that start at a million and a half dollars and go up from there. People who live in that sort of real estate have the ear of the local government as well as the clout to threaten the bank with boycott in a meaningful way. On the other hand, Ikea is going in half a mile away, right near Home Depot and Lowes. I guess Ikea is not the last thing needed.
I am reminded of a piece that Joel Garreau wrote a few years after he published Edge City. It's called Edgier Cities, and it imagines what the world of suburbia might look like in 30 years. He uses Kmart as an example, but we could substitute Wal-Mart for the purposes of this discussion.
It's surprising that the article is still "alive" on the web, 10 years after publication. Enjoy.
link
NSJ, i would, in fact be talking about that certain bank. Thats actually a really interesting story and one, unfortunatly, i never heard, considering the owner of the firm is married to the CEO of said bank, they tend to keep the propaganda machine rolling at full steam all day long.
Also, i went and saw the movie again last night. Different type of crowd this time. Sundays crowd was a unitarian church, mostly older but many of them still clinging to their youthful days when they fought the good fight. Long grey hair in ponytails even when the top of their head is bald, etc. Last nights crowd was the urban 20something lets complain about a lot of stuff but not actually do anything about it crowd. It was interesting to see how riled up the first crowd got after viewing the film. (i think they had to physically restrain one guy from going out to firebomb the closest Wal-mart) whereas the 20something crowd seemed to be more analytical of the movie itself, talking more about the directing style and the choice of not having an onscreen narrator. Both crowds were obviously very moved by the film but i feel like the second crowd probably went home afterwards, told some friends they saw the film (thereby making them look like an activist) and that will be it, whereas im highly frightened by what that first crowd was capable of.
formotion: are you benefiting from the sales of those dvd's or something? walmart's transgressions have been pretty well publicized in independent media and even to some extent in the mainstream media. i haven't seen the film myself, but from what i've read it doesn't sound like it will tell me or most of the people who posted here much we don't already know.
I dont like Wal * Mart either but its America, and its a free capitalist society. It seems the biggest topic here is that they dont pay their employees health insurance. Why should they? Why should any of us? Why is it that we need health insurance just to go to the doctor?
I applaud Wal * Mart for standing up to the Big Insurance Lobby. You guys dis them now, but those corporate hillbillies may save our ass one day. Unfortunatly their employees are on the front lines of a deeper battle ahead for our country.
dot -
if they paid these same employees MORE to compensate for not helping with insurance, i'd believe your argument that they are 'standing up to the Big Insurance Lobby'. instead they're keeping them part-time, paying as little as possible, and making sure that none of their prospective employees have pre-existing health conditions.
i think you've strapped on blinders so you only see one issue in a larger landscape. helping with insurance premiums is not only enabling big insurance - it's just as much part of compensation as the $6.99/hour they pay. it would be easy for them to position themselves as against insurance extortion because it's also convenient and accomplishes their own stingy goals.
i had a sarcastic remark in my holster but then i realized: . is right, we will be thanking wal-mart one day. for indeed, wal-mart will prove to everyone that there is market failure in the field of health insurance and that it's time for the government to take over. because private insurance costs more and does less than single-payer socialized insurance! and it's so expensive that large companies don't want to pay for it if they don't have to! and they don't have to!
why DO we need health insurance just to go to the doctor? because a doctor's visit has an actual cost of $200 - $300. because the doctor has to hire 3-4 people just to handle insurance. because there are thousands of insurance plans out there
it's a recursive trap that benefits only two groups of people:
1.) private insurance companies -- man, they NEVER go under, they just merge and lay off people
2.) fly-by-night technical schools that train incompetent "allied health professionals" who work for $20K - $25K per year to fill out 1,000 different health insurance forms per year
i'd rather wait 3 months to get a checkup in the UK or sweden than risk paying $200,000 in the US if i get cancer
so, coming back round to wal-mart, thanks "." -- the dawn will come after the dark, just wait and see
Aren't target, walmart, kmart, ikea, costco, sams club, ect. ALL big box stores?
i see the only differentiater being the products & marketing position.
just because target sells designer items alongside incredible marketing expertise, doesn't excuse the fact that it replaces the mainstreet. walmart is quite simply taking the heat because it positioned itself as the " new family center/main street ", as it wiped out " old family centers/main streets ". A very simple contridiction in marketing has screwed this retail giant . At the same time - all these other stores have been wiping out most of new america's only history.
my family's store in mich. was put out of business after over 100 years of business because of walmart.
"." I agree with your insurance post in a sense. It is the employer's decision to cover their employees health insurance. I proudly call myself a free market fan. I don't agree with socalist government run health care...and that's why I have problems with Wal-Mart providing inadequate health care for their employees. Wal-Mart actually tells their low income employees how to sign up for the trough of government freebies for low income people. While I'm not against the state & federal government providing health care and other assistance for the less fortunate, supposed full time employees should be able to cover themselves. Low wages = cheap prices on consumer goods for the rest of us, but at what cost. I wonder how much Wal-Mart truly costs us. And yes, it's companies like Wal-Mart that will put pressure on congress to get a national health care. I think it's hilarious irony that those who want it tend to hate the big businesses that want it. It won't be so-called progressives or liberals that get national health care in the USA. If it happens it will be companies like Wal-Mart, GM, big Oil, etc. etc. How's that for irony?
RED: although i can't argue that the emergence of big box retailers was the final nail in the coffin for a lot of small "main street" retailers, i don't agree that they deserve all or even most of the blame for that happening. the arrival of the automobile, suburbanization, "globalization", and demographic changes in urban and rural areas, in my opinion, are both the root cause of the downfall of main street AND the reason why big boxes are taking over.
A - Free markets drive towards comoditization of many products and services - but it is understood that once things become institutionalized they are no longer subject to market forces. Look at Ma-Bell in the 1960's. You rented your phone. Your phone just worked. You didnt have to pay out the ass for some technology that isnt getting better but actually worse since they opened it up to competition. And now Ma-Bell is being put back together in the form of a renamed SBC as ATT but now headquartered in Texas.
I think healthcare for eyes, ears nose and throat ( general practiotioner) has become commoditized. It is not the advanced medical realm we turn to for the serious stuff - just front line defense most RN's could do. That folks is what you pay $250 for - 1 minute of say ahh. Save the health care money for the big stuff, the cutting edge stuff.
That actually is one of the only points in the movie that i was dissapointed with. Absolutly no comparison to the other big box stores. I know that there is only so much time and a discussion like that might have led to another 90 minutes or so but the movie is portrayed in a vacuum almost, with not even a mention of the other big box retailers. While wal-mart is probably the worst offenders of these stores, and therefor taking the brunt of this attack, a comparison would have been nice, hell it might even have strenghtened the case against wal-mart if some of the better practices of costco, ikea, etc. that were brought up on this board were used to show how bad Wal-Mart truly is.
Big businesses don't want government healthcare. They want healthy, cheap employees, young and with no pre-existing conditions so they won't get sick and miss work time, no matter who pays for it. If if that young, healthy person does get sick and miss a protracted amount of work, Big Business doesn't "want" the government to take care of that person and return him to work, later; there are hundreds of other people ready to take the sick worker's place right away. Big Business is not concerned with the sick, at all. It doesn't matter who takes care of them. I doubt we will ever see a Wal-Mart-led initiative to socialize health care. Wal-Mart will simply continue to hire healthy people and cycle through them with an amazing turnover rate. It's not like they invest a ton of training in teaching someone how to wave at the front door.
newsflash. walmart IS the new mainstreet.
"This movie is a MUST SEE." -Me
to be fair, you could go to almost any major construction site in the US and arrest 100 illegal immigrants
i remember visiting a high-end residential job site near austin. we were talking with the contractor when a car that looked like a police car pulled up. all of a sudden someone shouted "migra" and you could hear the sudden clang and clamor of all manner of expensive power tools being dropped on concrete floors
people started running for the forest that surrounded the house
it was code enforcement -- and they didn't even have jurisdiction; we were in an unincorporated area where the only code that applied was the code of silence
once again, let's be fair to wal-mart -- this is a more widespread phenomenon than just one company
(although the controls on immigration coupled with a steady demand for immigrants to come to the US equals slave labor and no benefits, something that benefits wal-mart perhaps more than any other company in the US)
I had a Thanksgiving holiday showing for family after we ate our gluttons meal.
My complaint is that those of us that are already predisposed to hate everything Wal-Mart seem to enjoy the film, but those that like their "everyday low prices" shrug it off and find it boring.
The film which I find very credible because it's not narrated with an editoralist slant, like Michael Moore's films, leaves it slow and convuluted. The viewer doesn't get emotionally attached.
So, the reaction was odd but predictable. Some family members said they'd still shop there. Citing excuses as "but they're cheaper" and "all clothing comes from Chinese sweatshops."
One family member who is a small business owner loved it. Granted, he already hated Wal-Mart. Interesting because he's a very conservative, free market type.
So, I loved the film but I've gotta be critical.
I know this thread is really old, but I am sitting in my family room watching the Wal Mart movie with my parents right now. I have seen it, but they haven't.
WOO HOO!!!
I hope it works...
Just caught it as well, thought it was really heavy-handed. The Enron movie, Smartest Guys in the Room, was much better and a lot scarier/anger-inducing.
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