Slipping in almost after the Top 10 deadline and almost under the radar, it’s … (chirpy/gagging adjective of your choice) … Wal-Mart.
In a nation full of loathsome business practices, Wal-Mart has become symbolic of the slimiest of the slime. Pay lousy wages? Check. Offer miserly benefits? Check. Rely on oppressive overseas labor practices? Check? Try to crush local mom-n-pops? Check.
Back in 1999 Wal-Mart tried to get 38 acres of shoreline property in Eureka rezoned for its big box. Voters said no. So this year it found a back door that required no rezoning, a vacant former department store in Bayshore Mall. For months Wal-Mart’s plans percolated along, labeled cryptically as “tenant” in documents on file with the city.
It finally ‘fessed up earlier this month, saying it had just been getting its official announcement all nice and ready while the Journal was asking questions.
Wal-Friends keep pointing out that if you don’t like it, you don’t have to shop there. Wal-Foes might just wish a raft of other scummy “free enterprise” practices would get one-tenth of the scorn and attention this shlockshop does.
Oh, and Wal-Mart?
We know you’re so good to your women employees, and really into equal opportunity and all, so we’re especially glad you’ve figured this one out:
No doesn’t really mean no.
Clearly, we were asking for it.
— Carrie Peyton Dahlberg
This article appears in Top 10 Stories of 2011.
I don’t understand the logic of pointing out the labor practices, low wages, and other management problems of Walmart as a reason to exclude them from the Northcoast when their local competitors, i.e., “Mom and Pop” stores, pay minimum wages and ZERO benefits in general. I challenge one competitor or opponent to provide some verifiable information that “Mom and Pops” provide higher paying jobs (including benefits) and job security than Walmart.
This is a better comparison than most. Let me give it a go.
Small businesses move smaller volumes. Hence small businesses, in most industries, are price sensitive. In other words if the bulk of your target market can drive down the street a few blocks and shop at WalMart then WalMart’s pricing has to be considered when a small business sets it prices.
A small business doesn’t have all the MIS and DSS computing making programs available to it, nor the high-powered high degree professionals behind it, analyzing every layer of the business to optimize costs. The small business owner is usually playing with several hats even if he/she is lucky enough to have the superb business degree. Hence small companies often have higher overhead which leads to higher prices. Small business move less volume so they are charged higher fees from suppliers. A good supplier might drop a small business completely if they couldn’t service a big company volume for WalMart and the small business.
Therefore the pressure for Mom and Pop’s to pay the lowest wages possible is ripe–that part may be true. But ethically since Mom and Pop’s usually live in this community there is social checks and balances on the employer (and often it is family and friends who are employed) which WalMart will not even consider those variables because they are not economically efficient.
In effect the elephant on the street is the leader on the street and those that choose not to follow the leader are frequently doomed.
Of course the real leaders are the consumers. Those who choose to shop at WalMart are feeding the elephant which dictates how the smaller “organisms” can survive. It isn’t a small footprint.
The problem isn’t simply Walmart, although, we can thank them for exposing the worst aspects of an entire predatory big box industry.
The problem is the number of poverty-wage jobs a community can sustain.
And that’s exactly what credible economic researchers analyze. In this case, Eureka paid a bundle hiring “Bay Area Economics” to tell us we were saturated in low-wage retail ten years ago!
The number of local low-wage retail jobs has steadily increased since then.
How many working people can taxpayers afford to provide housing aid, Medi-cal, and food stamps for?
Where’s the outrage??
One Walmart will consume the same number of low-wage positions that would serve hundreds of independent Mom and Pop outfits.
I don’t understand the logic behind the statement, “consumers will decide Walmart’s success”.
The reality is that Walmart, like our own Ray’s Market in Eureka, won’t need customers for a decade, or more!
All they need to do is siphon-off a trickle of sales from the area’s static retail dollars to destroy the smaller, independent competition.
Then, their prices will soar.
Walmart and Home Depot have left their empty hulks behind in many rural communities in America. They destroyed the independent businesses, forcing residents to drive to the next town to shop.
The independent businesses took generations to establish themselves and do not return overnight.
WalMart is #2 in line buying prison bonds, bundle and sell, and bundle and sell, to Lehman Bros. Kinda like ‘human trafficing’…they’re scum.
Oh god! Walmart doesn’t pay $35 an hour to run a cash register! They must be complete assholes!
I can’t be the only one that wonders how Carrie Peyton Dahlberg said “no” to Walmart in the first round, since she wasn’t even in the area at the time.
She must be one of those magical people.
Humboldt County lost Anon-r-Mouse, and gained Carrie Peyton Dahlberg. That’s progress!
Great article to see in print.
Yeap, meet the new boss, just like the old boss! Joel you still mad at me for giving you a pimpslap 6 years ago?
“We” said no to a ZONING ISSUE. The voters had their say on that. Voters do not have any say over what private business can purchase another private business’ property. Walmart came through no back door. They did not sneak in. They purchased an UNUSED business property properly zoned for BUSINESSES. It doesn’t matter what you or anyone else thinks about this. It only matters what Walmart and whoever sold the property to them think. The only say you have is in whether or not you will shop there. I know certain people of the “liberal” (in quotes) persuasion get frustrated when they can’t control every tiny aspect of everything that goes on in the world, but in this case, you have to deal with it. Sorry if this hurts your feelings.