Wal-Mart: Raising New Standards for America

[alexisfree]

Wal-Mart: Raising New Standards for America
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Reply to: [e-mail]
Date: 2005-01-13, 6:18PM PST

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050103&s=featherstone

Down and Out in Discount America
by Lisa

On the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest shopping day of the year, Wal-Mart's many progressive critics--not to mention its business competitors--finally enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude when the retailer had to admit to "disappointing" sales. The problem was quickly revealed: Wal-Mart hadn't been discounting aggressively enough. Without low prices, Wal-Mart just isn't Wal-Mart....

That's not a mistake the big-box behemoth is likely to make again. Wal-Mart knows its customers, and it knows how badly they need the discounts. Like Wal-Mart's workers, its customers are overwhelmingly female, and struggling to make ends meet. Betty Dukes, the lead plaintiff in Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the landmark sex-discrimination case against the company, points out that Wal-Mart takes out ads in her local paper the same day the community's poorest citizens collect their welfare checks. "They are promoting themselves to low-income people," she says. "That's who they lure. They don't lure the rich.... They understand the economy of America. They know the haves and have-nots. They don't put Wal-Mart in Piedmonts. They don't put Wal-Mart in those high-end parts of the community. They plant themselves right in the middle of Poorville." .........

Many Wal-Mart workers say they began working at their local Wal-Mart because they shopped there. "I was practically born in Wal-Mart," says Alyssa Warrick, a former employee now attending Truman State University in Missouri. "My mom is obsessed with shopping.... I thought it would be pretty easy since I knew where most of the stuff was." Most assumed they would love working at Wal-Mart. "I always loved shopping there," enthuses Dukes plaintiff Dee Gunter. "That's why I wanted to work for 'em." ....

A week later, Carolyn Goree, a preschool teacher also hoping for a Winona Wal-Mart, wrote in a letter to the Post editor that when she shops at most stores, $200 fills only a bag or two, but at Wal-Mart, "I come out with a cart full top and bottom. How great that feels." Lacking a local Wal-Mart, Goree drives over the Wisconsin border to get her fix. She was incensed by an earlier article's lament that some workers make only $15,000 yearly. "Come on!" Goree objected. "Is $15,000 really that bad of a yearly income? I'm a single mom and when working out of my home, I made $12,000 tops and that was with child support. I too work, pay for a mortgage, lights, food, everything to live. Everything in life is a choice.... I am for the little man/woman--I'm one of them. So I say stand up and get a Wal-Mart."

Sara Jennings, a disabled Winona reader living on a total of $8,000, heartily concurred. After paying her rent, phone, electric and cable bills, Jennings can barely afford to treat herself to McDonald's. Of a recent trip to the LaCrosse, Wisconsin, Wal-Mart, she raved, "Oh boy, what a great treat. Lower prices and a good quality of clothes to choose from. It was like heaven for me." She, too, strongly defended the workers' $15,000 yearly income: "Boy, now that is a lot of money. I could live with that." She closed with a plea to the readers: "I'm sure you all make a lot more than I. And I'm sure I speak for a lot of seniors and very-low-income people. We need this Wal-Mart. There's nothing downtown." read more..

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

1. Alex, DU has rules about fair use..you need to edit this down to

4 paragraphs.

Thanks for sharing the article, though. Very enlightening..but not surprising.

[alexisfree]

6. done.

and kick!:)

[Erika]

2. The Waltons are obscenely rich

and want to remain that way. Their usage of slave labor in overseas labor markets and their low wages here show their true motives.

I rarely shop at Walmart.

[jmowreader]

3. $15,000 is a lot of money?

Yeah, I guess when you make $12,000, $15,000 sounds like a lot.

However, average what the store manager makes (a Home Depot store manager makes about $220,000 per year, so a Wal-Mart store manager probably makes half that) with what the part-timers working the floor make and you get $15,000.

Didn't I see somewhere that most of the people working the floor at Wal-Mart are doing about $7500 per year?

[alexisfree]

4. wow!!!...$220

.....workers make on average, just over $8 an hour, and if they want health insurance, they must pay more than a third of the premium--contribute to an economy in which, increasingly, workers can only afford to shop at Wal-Mart.

[jmowreader]

31. More like $150

After you take out taxes, the average WM floor worker--who, as we all know, is probably a part-timer--might take home $150 per week.

That's $300 per paycheck, or $600 per month IF she's not on the Wal-Mart employee stock ownership plan, the Wal-Mart 201(k) plan, or any other of the myriad "benefits" a Wal-Mart associate can sign up (and pay out the nose) for.

I have never seen the Wal-Mart associate handbook, but I assume it has something in it prohibiting you from living behind the trash compactor.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

5. The last line of your excerpt says something to me...

"There's nothing downtown."

Although I haven't read the article, I have a suspicion that the reason "there's nothing downtown" is related to the Wal-Mart's existence, although most don't see it. Did the Wal-Mart damage or destroy the town's commercial infrastructure? It's what they do in other towns.

Gods, I hate that company.

[Solon]

7. I find this somewhat amusing...

I worked at Wal-Mart for 2 years, and in all that time, even with the discount card, I still got most of my crap at goodwill. They are the cheapest in town, Wal-Mart is for the Lower Middle Class, not the workers who work there.

[punpirate]

8. The unpleasant coda to this...

... is that Wal-Mart intends in the next decade or so to capture 15% of the entire retail market in the country. To put that into perspective, two-thirds of the GDP is consumer spending, or about $7 trillion. Auto sales, new and used, probably accounts for about $400 billion per year. Home sales of all kinds probably runs around $2 trillion. Add in some miscellany not captured by Wal-Mart, subtract those from the $7 trillion, and the remainder is about $4.5 trillion. 15% of that is about $675 billion per year. That's almost 160% of the nation's current defense budget.

Wal-Mart is now the nation's largest employer, and will grow exponentially, since their current sales are about $250 billion per year. That's a gigantic pool of underpaid workers, and a greater pool of displaced workers as Wal-Mart forces local businesses to close by undercutting prices.

Also says a lot about the level of relative poverty in the country that Wal-Mart anticipates....

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

9. Here in LA people used the ballot to keep them out

They are now beginning an ad campaign to overcome the hatred communities have for them.

[punpirate]

10. Yup, I remember...

... there was a vote by the LA city council, and the campaign in Inglewood, as well.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

11. Inglewood was on the ballot and got rejected

[Nikia]

12. They discount at the expense of manufactureres

They demand that manufacturers sell them products at lower costs than manufacturers normally sell to other companies. They demand that these prices decrease every year. Since things generally cost more, not less, to make every year, manufactureres can find themselves in a big dilemma after a while. You can only decrease prices so much without sacraficing quality or cutting labor. Walmart not only hurts their workers but American manufacturing workers also.

[Shopaholic]

13. There was a great article in The Nation

a couple of weeks ago. It was about how Wal-Mart encourages their workers to apply for Medicaid and Food Stamps and other forms of government assistance. Basically, the American taxpayer subsidizes the Wal-Mart work force! I believe that's called Corporate Welfare. And then they have the gall to run these commercials where a worker talks about how since he worked for Wal-Mart and had great insurance, his sick child was taken care of. In all probability, this man was a manager and actually could afford the insurance. The average worker cannot.

[alexisfree]

30. ......I know...

now the same shit is being done in Mexico City were Wal-Mart had planted a fucking store on a archeological area!!! …piss me off!!!

[BiggJawn]

14. "Is $15,000 really that bad of a yearly income?"

Uh, yeah, it is.

Unless you're living on your mom's couch.
I couldn't pay for housing and transportation on only 15 kilobucks.

[cattleman22]

15. I guess it depends on your lifestyle and where you live

The total expenditures for my wife and I in one year is not much more than $15,000.



c

[Bridget Burke]

16. So--where do you live?

I'm in Houston, Texas. (It's in my profile.)

It would be rough to make it on $15,000 in Houston--& my lifestyle is not especially lavish. However, I have a job. Don't many cheaper places to life have fewer jobs?

[MadHound]

17. Well, here in Mid Mo, I was making 7.50/hr twelve years ago

Managed to buy a small starter house, and live decently, though frugally on that salary. Since then, I've put myself through college, and worked my way up in the money dept also.

Cost of living around here is still OK, but it is getting increasingly difficult to find decent low cost housing. And sad to say, wages aren't keeping up with the cost of living. While 7.50 is still the average wage for the service, non-skill jobs in town, housing prices have shot through the roof. That small house that I bought in '93 for $35,000, I was able to sell for $50,000 ten years later. Amazingly enough, it was to a young couple, with child, who were just getting started out. They went through the same block grant program that I did(paid for half the down payment, and wipes your credit factor out of the loan consideration), and are making about the same amount I was when I first bought the house. What is really sad though is that house payments for a house like this are cheaper than paying rent in this town. Being a college town, landlords rule the roost, and a decent one bedroom apartment runs from five to eight hundred a month. I know that doesn't sound like much to those in larger urban areas, but for around here, it is quite a problem.

[LostinVA]

20. Housing where I live

is crazy. A "starter house" 50 years old that needs new plumbing, a new roof, and is 1,000 sq foot, with a tiny yard, is in the paper today selling for $179,000. Two bedrooms, one bath, no garage or carport. I live in VA, and not the Northern/DC part. I can't afford a house here on $29,000 a year. I can hardly pay rent, even with a roommate. And, there is a Wal-Mart in town.

[MadHound]

22. Geez friend, get the hell out of there.

Move west, there are jobs in Mid Mo, and while the cost of living is going up around here, it is nowhere near that crazy. With 29,000/yr, you can buy a decent house, and live fairly comfortably. And while Columbia does have a big fat WalMart brand on it's ass, it is still a college town, and is still fairly liberal. Besides, we have the best pizza(Shakespeare's), subs(Sub Shop), and burgers(Booche's) in the world.

$179,000 for a starter house, that's fucking crazy! You would have to starting as a trust fund baby to afford that kind of shit! Who's buying that kind of place? To pricey for the poor and working class person, too dilapidated to appeal to those who could actually afford it. Man, that's just nuts. I hear all of these prices for rent and houses in other parts of the country, and I truly feel bad for you folks, and shake my head and wonder how you do it. I thought I was struggling, but it must be insane on the coast. One reason I've stayed in this area, I can afford it.

Hell, the house that I bought last year is cheaper than those starter houses, and it is over twice as big, with twenty acres in the country.

Move out here friend, you'll not regret it. Besides, we need all the liberals we can get out here to turn this state blue again.

[durablend]

18. No way in HELL you'd even qualify for a mortgage

On $15K a year, let alone pay for it, lights, food, utilities, etc. unless someone else is providing a second income (they probably conveniently left that out).

That woman sounds like a ravenous bushbot for sure.

[cattleman22]

28. Columbus, OH

Our lifestyle is not lavish at all. For us, we derive little or no pleasure from simply purchasing consumer goods. I believe the unemployment rate for this area is less than 5%.

[BiggJawn]

19. I'm skeptical.

You two must be living like religious Hermits.

I tallied up my expenditures in a year for:
Apartment
Telephone (just land-line, not the pre-paid cellie)
Natural Gas (heat source)
The REST of the utilities (gotta bathe and flush, and I can't do it in the dark)
Truck payment (OK, so after 30 years of driving used SHIT, I got extravagant, so sue me)
Truck insurance
"Food" for the truck
Food for ME.
and I came up with $17,316 a year.

This doesn't include stuff like the afore-mentioned pre-paid cellie, Medical expenses, clothing, "entertainment", etc.

I'm not saying it can't be done, shit, 20 years ago I was supporting a family on $98 take-home every week. Don't remember having much of a "lifestyle" back then.

[alexisfree]

23. ok

rent/ food/ cellphones/utilities/car payments/gas/insurance= $24,250 for two people and still need for two more girls plus medical bills, expenses around the house like toothpaste/paper/laundry/soap.....etc and still shopping at costco or target ...

[cattleman22]

29. It is cheaper for two people than just one person alone.

But since we drive older cars, though with decent gas mileage, with high deductible insurance, our transportation costs are minimal. Especially since we have very short commutes.

A lot of it is also lifestyle. We do not derive much pleasure from making purchases of consumer goods. We look for free of low cost entertainment options. In many ways it is a choice to live below your means.

[neebob]

21. I make more than three times that much

and I just barely get by. I'm still paying for two years with a psychopath who tried to ruin me, but even without the extra expenses I would not be well off. Definitely not living large here. A single parent with one child needs at least $40K a year to live decently, in my opinion. I really don't know how families with less income and more people do it.

[WilmywoodNCparalegal]

25. It really depends on where you live...

Here in the NYC metro area, hubby and I make close to $100K combined, but the rent alone kills you. We can forget ever buying a place around here.

Sure, we could move to some less expensive area, but I doubt there is much of a need for corporate immigration paralegals who work with fashion models and celebrities :D

On the other hand, people in this area don't want Wal-Mart...

I myself prefer Target anyways... better quality and the decor is much more stylish.

[neebob]

27. I live in a Colorado tourist town

where housing is more expensive than a lot of places, but I got a deal. What I spend on housing and psycho-payoff combined is about what most people spend on housing - better housing than mine, but then I'm not complaining. Otherwise, the cost of living is comparable to where I came from (Salt Lake City).

My brother still lives there, makes less than I do and somehow manages to support four kids and a stay-home wife AND pay for a suburban castle and two vehicles that are bigger and newer than mine. I think he's in debt up to his eyeballs and gets help from his in-laws.

Anyway, I don't think it's possible to live on $15K a year unless you have no debts and eat Ramen noodles and never buy anything new.

[PA Democrat]

24. I lived on $15,000 a year....

25 years ago! I was also single and had no children then either. I can't imagine raising kids on that. I wonder how much a worker would have to chip in for health insurance for their family as a Wal-Mart employee. Anyone know?

[alexisfree]

26. is tough

California is very expensive....and still manage not to choose Walt mart to save .30cents per item>??