This will only make sense to two people, but it's our last ditch effort to fix a mistake ...
Last week, you contacted us through the contact form on the *cino site. Unfortunately, due to a technical glitch, we didn't get the e-mail addresses you submitted. If you happen to see this, could you re-submit your information? We'd really like to get back in touch with both of you!
Well, as noted previously, we've moved over to a new blogging system. And while the move was mostly successful, we did lose a couple of things in the process. The designs of our blogs, of course, have been significantly altered and I'm working to get those looking better. More importantly, though, we've lost all of our comments from the old system. Hopefully this will be a temporary loss; we're working to restore those shortly ...
We've changed all of *cino's blogs over to Movable Type, a powerful blogging tool developed by six apart. We're still transitioning a bit and learning how to use the new system, but we're excited about the change.
One of the many great features in the new blogging system is the RSS feed, which allows users to "subscribe" to our site for notification of updates through an RSS reader.
I'm really not out looking for this stuff about Wal-Mart; these things just seem to have come across my path as of late.
This story (originally from the Los Angeles Times) is particularly interesting: "Wal-Mart Seeks Unbiased Research -- and Gets It." Wal-Mart commissioned an academic conference to study its effects in communities across the United States. To their credit, they hired an outside firm to conduct the study in an effort to maintain objectivity.
While the results were certainly mixed, Wal-Mart can't be too happy with some of the findings. Here's the bulk of the relevant information from the Times article:
Some of their findings, which a few of the researchers released before the conference, tend to confirm what Wal-Mart critics have been saying for years.
At least two concluded that Wal-Mart stores' pay practices depressed wages beyond the retail sector. Another found that states on average spent $898 for each Wal-Mart worker in Medicaid expenses.
One study concluded that Wal-Mart's giant grocery and general merchandise Supercenters brought little net gain for local communities in property taxes, sales taxes and employment; instead, the stores merely siphoned sales from existing businesses in the area.
Not all the news was bad for Wal-Mart. Several of the studies noted that its stores led to lower prices throughout a region. Two suggested that Wal-Mart increased a county's total employment, with one pegging that long-term gain at 1% to 2%.
David Neumark, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, found that "residents of a local labor market do indeed earn less following the opening of Wal-Mart stores."
Worse yet, he wrote, is Wal-Mart's influence in the South, where it has its greatest concentration of stores. There, Neumark and his coauthors found, Wal-Mart has decreased retail employment and total employment.
Michael Hicks of the Air Force Institute of Technology and Marshall University found that each employee of Wal-Mart caused "the average state to expend just under $900 a year in Medicaid benefits."
In a look at the Supercenters' effects on local businesses in Mississippi, Albert Myles and his coauthors found that a Supercenter's own community benefited from sharp retail sales increases -- as much as 59% -- though nearby towns suffered annual decreases. Any gains, the researchers found, came at the expense of local merchants.
"Many times the net increases are minimal as the new big-box stores merely capture sales from existing businesses in the area," they wrote.
Emek Basker of the University of Missouri, however, found that Wal-Mart stores decreased prices across a region and increased total employment. And in a study of Ohio, economist Hicks found that a Wal-Mart store increased commercial property tax revenue and raised employment.
A study of the San Francisco Bay Area also presents a mixed picture. UCLA researcher Randall Crane and his coauthors found that once Wal-Mart established itself as the region's leading grocer -- the company is already the national leader -- it would probably depress grocery store employees' wages by hundreds of millions of dollars. But, they found, the company also would save shoppers hundreds of millions of dollars by offering cheaper food.
So it seems that the gains Wal-Mart claims to bring to a community are slight, if they exist at all, and, in just as many cases as not, they have a detrimental effect on a community.
Of course, this raises a lot of questions. Is a low price always best? Does it justify shopping at a big box store where profits are sent outside of your community? Does it justify putting local businesses owned by your neighbors out of business? If this trend continues, will their be enough living wage jobs in the United States? Will we buy ourselves out of jobs and, if we do, will the prices at Wal-Mart be low enough for its own workers to afford shopping there? And, ultimately, does this kind of retail (which Wal-Mart leads, but is not the sole player) represent Christian economic principles? And this is only a short list off the top of my head ...
Here's the full Global Insights report, if you're interested.
Wal-Mart seems to be on the brain today ...
After much thought, we've decided to host a private screening of Robert Greenwald's new film, "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," next week at World Fare. Our hesitation stemmed from the nature of Greenwald's other work--"Uncovered: The War on Iraq" and "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism"-- and our ongoing discussion about whether or not this film would be winsome for our community.
We settled on the private screening option. We'll have a select group of folks view the film during its screening week and then we'll decide together if we should hold a public screening later. If it's too left-wing and reactionary, we'll probably nix a larger showing.
Salon.com has an excellent review of the film that seems to indicate that it might not be as left-wing as I anticipate it being. And it seems as though it might bring up a lot of issues that our small, working class town needs to think about as we anticipate a Wal-Mart moving into our community:
We also meet the owners of longtime local businesses destroyed by Wal-Mart -- places like Esry's Grocery, of Hamilton, Mo., and H&H Hardware, of Middlefield, Ohio -- African-American and female employees who worked eagerly and hard for years at poverty wages and were told there was no place for them in management; customers victimized by crimes in the stores' vast, unpoliced parking lots; and a former global-services manager who says he was fired for reporting the truth about the chain's factories in Latin America. What makes the movie so powerful is the totality of the portrait, both in its details and its sweep. Most of these people are entirely unexceptional Americans from the working class or lower-middle class, believers in flag and country and God and capitalism, not left-wing activists or academics with some theoretical critique. Most of them believed in Wal-Mart, too, and were genuinely horrified to learn that its low prices depended on enforced poverty, whether theirs or somebody else's.
For me, the crippling moment arrives when Greenwald takes his cameras to a factory in China, where workers toil 14 hours a day, seven days a week, to make toys for Wal-Mart. They're paid roughly 30 to 40 cents an hour (with rent for the factory's dormitory, with its triple-decker bunk beds, deducted) and perhaps an economist could convince me that's a decent wage in that context. But for me these workers and their painful, hopeful stories recalled the righteous anger of Chapter 4 of Marx's "Capital," with its descriptions of the Industrial Revolution's workday that began long before dawn and went deep into the night, of women locked in sweatshops and 8-year-old children fed their lunches inside the machinery. I started anxiously reading the labels on my shirts and asking myself questions: Where did I buy this -- I'm hoping the answer is the Salvation Army -- and where did it come from before that? And am I really willing to buy a shirt at a price that would pay the person who made it a decent wage?
An article in the New York Times the other day describes an interesting scene:
Inside a stuffy, windowless room here, veterans of the 2004 Bush and Kerry presidential campaigns sit, stand and pace around six plastic folding tables. Open containers of pistachio nuts and tropical trail mix compete for space with laptops and BlackBerries. CNN flickers on a television in the corner.
The phone rings, and a 20-something woman answers. "Turn on Fox," she yells, running up to the TV with a notepad. "This could be important."
Here's an idea for politicians and Wal-Mart: instead of spending so much time on your image, focus on the problem itself. Perhaps Wal-Mart, with all of the money it's spending on these "image consultants," could figure out how to actually address its labor issues or the effects its stores have on communities. Of course, that would require a confession of sorts, an admission of wrongdoing. Maybe it is easier just to make people think that you're doing things better than you're actually doing them.
