Saturday, August 08, 2009

Wal-Mart Again


The standard denunciation of Wal-Mart is class warfare against the poor. Wal-Mart is where people with crappy jobs can afford to buy shoes, shirts, and steam irons, without saving up for weeks. "But it's so un-hip" the braindead whinny. Being poor is un-hip too.

For tens of millions of people in the United States and Canada, the choices available for ordinary consumer goods are buy it at Wal-Mart or don't buy it at all.

On the other side it is an outlet for industrial goods made by poor people in China and India. People with crappy factory jobs that provide standards of living vastly better than their only alternative - staying on small over-crowded farms if they're lucky, being landless agricultural laborers if they're not. Wanting to work in a factory is way un-hip. Poverty to the verge of starvation for tens of millions of people is even more un-hip.

Those, rather than which coffee beans are more politically correct, are the actual issues faced by hundreds of millions of people in the US and abroad.

3 comments:

  1. Christy3:26 PM

    The problem with Wal Mart is that it leads to the deepening of the American economic timebomb, which will tick over into oblivion in a decade or so. The middle class is continually getting poorer and the working class, when they actually have work, are 'working poor', barely above the poverty line. The American social system is the laughing stock of the civilised world. The costs are clearly seen in the healthcare system but it is evident in the class system as well, and its only getting worse.

    Walmart effectively force small and mid sized stores to shut up shop because they are incapable of competing in price. This has led to the destruction of the Main St. in small town America and a bitter circle of poverty, as people in these relatively middling paid jobs loose their employment. Sooner or later, the small town revolves around the local WalMart and the retail economy is almost totally reliant on this all encompassing monopoly. Corporate monopolies are not positive developments, every economy should be as diversified as possible in order to weather the various economic storms which take hold periodically in any economy, advanced or developing. America is increasingly dominated by increasingly powerful corporations and while it is good for the class of super rich who are primary share holders in these groups, it leads to the worsening of the economic situation of the middle and lower classes.

    So thats why I think Walmart are cunts.

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  2. Anonymous8:45 PM

    Christy,
    Your argument had me until your closing sentence! Too bad we can't have the inexpensive goods without the big corporate monopoly.

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  3. Anonymous11:49 PM

    Ah Christy, lad, you neglected to say what Walmart does to a community after it has sold them everything they can (and after they have shut down ALL the other stores in a community) -- they simply pull out, leaving another large empty building in that dead small town, and leaving the former middle and lower classes as 'the new poor.' While one might add, the lovely Walmart heiresses, up there in the top 1% of the wealthy, are building themselves new museums to house the crappy artwork they must be acquiring at great cost. Big eyed children or dreamy, light-filled cottages I suppose.

    And I would that you would call Walmart (founded by MEN) what they really are: bastards.

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