This depressing animated map shows Walmart taking over America

[Crashed~N2~Me 970]

For people that want to see the map, and not have to read all the left wing propaganda that goes with it.

Thanks..,sometimes it's just too much effort to point and click. & left wing propaganda usually makes me feel nauseous.

[LibCampFireClub 635]

Firstly, it's a known fact that small business currently contributes more than 70% to the US economy. As soon as government puts their hands on business, we find ourselves in a jimmy carter job market----like right now.

When you consider how much good Wal-Mart has done for not only the USA, but especially China it is overwhelming. They have created jobs and a better life for people in rural areas where mom-and-pop could not.

[Sousuke 1,214]

Firstly, it's a known fact that small business currently contributes more than 70% to the US economy. As soon as government puts their hands on business, we find ourselves in a jimmy carter job market----like right now.

When you consider how much good Wal-Mart has done for not only the USA, but especially China it is overwhelming. They have created jobs and a better life for people in rural areas where mom-and-pop could not.

I don't really get the bold part.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Walmart is more efficient than 2-3 mom and pops that would cover walmart's goods. Greater efficiency means less jobs. Less jobs means less money in the community.

Mom and pop keep and use the money in the community they live in. A decent percentage of walmart's money goes back to the corporate headquarters in Bentonville.

Finally, Walmart has the political clout to force local governments to lower their property taxes. Mom and pop don't have that clout.

Making unsupported statements is not an argument, it is propaganda.

I don't really get the bold part.

No surprise here.

[Sousuke 1,214]

Making unsupported statements is not an argument, it is propaganda.

No surprise here.

You are a rude ####### aren't you.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

You are a rude ####### aren't you.

No, I believe my mom and dad were married when I was conceived. I can prove that.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

here are 10 ways Walmart has facilitated Americas industrial decline:

1. Buying billions of goods that werent made in America.

The vast majority of merchandise Walmart sells in the U.S. is manufactured abroad. The company searches the world for the cheapest goods possible, and this usually means buying from low-wage factories overseas. Walmart boasts of direct relationships with nearly 20,000 Chinese suppliers,[iv] and purchased $27 billion worth of Chinese-made goods in 2006.[v] According to the Economic Policy Institute, Walmarts trade with China alone eliminated 133,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2006 and accounted for 11.2 percent of the nations total job loss due to trade.[vi] But China is hardly the only source of Walmart goods: the company also imports from Bangladesh, Honduras, Cambodia, and a host of other countries.

2. Pushing U.S. companies to move their factories overseas.

With $419 billion in annual net sales, Walmarts market power is so immense that the even the largest suppliers must comply with its demands for lower and lower prices because they cannot afford to have their goods taken off its shelves. Companies that used to manufacture products in the United States, from Levis jeans to lock maker Master Lock, were pressured to shut their U.S. factories and moved manufacturing abroad to meet Walmarts demand for low prices.[vii]

3. Making it easier for other U.S. retailers to buy from foreign factories.

Walmart was a leader in sourcing goods overseas, establishing a centralized purchasing system, technological infrastructure, and linkages to foreign factories that other companies imitated and built on. While researchers find that Walmart still imports disproportionately more goods than other apparel retailers,[viii] its innovations accelerated the use of offshore suppliers by its competitors, speeding the loss of American manufacturing jobs.

4. Forcing layoffs among its U.S. suppliers.

Even when Walmart products are made in the United States, manufacturing jobs still get eliminated as suppliers cut costs to meet Walmarts demands for low prices. A spokesman for the National Knitwear and Sportswear Association noted that producing goods for Walmart forces domestic manufacturers to compete, often unrealistically, with foreign suppliers who pay their help pennies on the hour.[ix] A Walmart spokesperson admitted that this was the point of the companys efforts to buy domestic goods: one of our big objectives was to put the heat on American manufacturers to lower prices.[x] Even as manufacturing costs increase, Walmart demands that suppliers prices go even lower, a dynamic that helped push Kraft Foods to plan the closure of 39 factories and lay off 13,500 workers. [xi]

5. Promoting domestic sweatshops.

Layoffs arent the only way manufacturers contrive to meet the low prices Walmart demands. Walmarts domestic suppliers lower wages, cut benefits, aggressively fight employee efforts to unionize and bargain collectively, and skimp on worker comfort and safety. For example, Louisiana seafood processor C.J.s Seafood, which sells an estimated 85 percent of its processed crawfish to Walmart, has recently come under scrutiny for allegedly abusing employees working in the U.S. on temporary immigrant visas (known as guestworker visas).[xii] A complaint to the U.S. Department of Labor claims that the Walmart supplier engaged in extremely coercive employment related actions, including forcing guestworkers to work up to 24-hour shifts with no overtime pay, locking guestworkers in the plant to force them to continue to work, threatening the guestworkers with beatings to make them work faster, and threatening violence against the guestworkers families in Mexico after workers contacted law enforcement for assistance.[xiii]

Im an 81-year-old retired apparel manufacturer. I had five factories, and all of them were here in Texas. I was producing apparel for JC Penneys, Sears, Montgomery Wards, and a multitude of independent stores, small chains. I had a business and I built it up to $50 million a year, which was a pretty good size back in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

When I started my companies, I said were going to do everything possible to make conditions as good as possible and wages as good as possible. Not out of the goodness of our heart, but I believed if we treat people right and pay reasonable wages and have good working conditions that well have good, productive workers. And it worked for us. I hired the best engineering firms in the country to come in and make my plants the most modern plants in my industry: productive, efficient.

Im out there competing with the rest of the manufacturers in this countryI probably had a thousand competitors. But we had the best, most efficient plants, I could be priced efficiently.

Walmart would squeeze you so much on prices that you couldnt do these things and remain manufacturing in this country.

I was president of the Southwestern Apparel Manufacturers Association. There was a meeting sometime between 1985 and 1990. Walmart had contacted our organization and asked if they could meet with us at our beautiful Apparel Mart we had here in Dallas, which has now been razed, because all the independent merchants dont exist that used to come to it. Two people from Walmart came down and they said they were going to be sourcing goods from overseas and we would have to meet those prices for consumer products and to get ready for itwe are going to be sourcing the world. Walmart was the only company that came out and said this.

It was sort of shocking: I was selling them some merchandise at the time. On the back of their trucks it was saying Bring it Back to America! They had the big keep it in America program going at that time on the big signs in the stores. Meanwhile when I reminded the buyer of that, she told me, that is just for domestic consumption, were going to buy at the cheapest we can anywhere on earth.

I could see that if youre going to be a player in the apparel industry youre going to have to sell Walmart: they were just too big a user. Their orders were like telephone numbers the quantity. You dont negotiate prices with Walmart because they can just tell you what theyre going to pay and thats it. You got to make it cheaper than you did last year.

People didnt start importing from overseas because they wanted to. They did it because they had to, to survive. Those that didnt join in the club are not around anymore.

I could see the handwriting on the wall.

6. Squeezing U.S. manufacturers out of business.

Walmarts unrelenting push for low prices eats into the profit margins of its U.S. suppliers, often weakening companies in the process. Journalist Charles Fishman provides a vivid example: Walmart provided 30 percent of Vlasic Pickles overall business and insisted that if the company did not allow Walmart to sell a gallon jar of pickles for the ruinously low price of $2.97, they would stop buying Vlasics other products. The pickle maker had spent decades convincing consumers that they should pay a premium for its brand. Now Walmart was practically giving them away.[xiv] According to Fishman, Vlasics profit margin from pickles shrunk 25 percent or more. Nor is Vlasic alone in seeing its business cannibalized by Walmart: of the top ten companies supplying Walmart in 1994, four sought bankruptcy protection by 2006.[xv]

7. Discouraging American innovation.

By squeezing its suppliers, Walmart leaves companies without the resources to make new investments in research and development. And once companies become dependent on Walmart as a massive purchaser, their greatest incentive is to keep producing the products Walmart has decided to sell, making it unnecessary and unprofitable to innovate.

8. Driving competitors to squeeze manufacturing.

If discount retailers like Target and Kmart want to remain competitive with Walmart, they must demand similarly low prices from suppliers. As a result, the pressures pushing down costs and propelling the elimination of American manufacturing jobs are magnified.

9. Lobbying for policies that make it easier to move U.S. jobs overseas.

According to the non-profit Center for Responsive Politics, Walmart spent $7.8 million on lobbying in 2011 alone.[xvi] While this money was paid to influence a range of legislation, from promoting corporate tax cuts to opposing a bill to guarantee paid sick time to working people, trade policy was among the issues Walmart lobbied on most aggressively. In fact, Walmart has lobbied to make it easier to push American jobs out of the country for years, playing a key role in in lobbying for NAFTA in the early 1990s.[xvii]

10. Making growing inequality the accepted norm

Walmart has set the template for todays economy: one in which increased economic productivity is not shared with working people, and the vast inequality that this creates is seen as normal. Today the six members of the Walton family who inherited the Walmart fortune enjoy wealth equal to that of the least-wealthy 30 percent of Americans combined.[xviii] These billionaires are the ultimate beneficiaries of Walmarts push to cut costs, condemning retail employees to work in poverty and American factory workers to unemployment.

Walmart is the nations largest employer and one of Americas most profitable companies, netting $15.7 billion in profits in 2011.[xix] With the great resources at its disposal, Walmart could afford to take the high road, supporting good manufacturing jobs in America by allowing for higher wages and more investment in its supply chain and paying its own employees from retail associates to warehouse workers and cleaning contractors a living wage. That would set the template for a new American economy, one in which Americans might once again make things and also find greater dignity and stability in selling them.

Demos calculations based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

[ii] John Nichiols, Supreme Court Decides That Walmart's a 'Too-Big-for-Justice' Corporation, The Nation, June 20, 2011. Citing independent market research group, IBIS World.

[iii] Living Below the Line, Wide Opportunities for Women (2011). http://www.wowonline.org/documents/WOWUSBESTLivingBelowtheLine2011.pdf

[iv] Walmart China Factsheet, Walmart Corporation, http://www.wal-martchina.com/english/walmart/index.htm.

[v] Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. Metropolitan Books: 2009. p 159.

[vi] Robert E. Scott, The Wal-Mart Effect, Economic Policy Institute, 2007.http://www.epi.org/publication/ib235/.

[vii] For an account of this history, see: Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart You Dont Know, Fast Company, December 1st, 2003, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html

[viii] Emek Basker and Pham Hoang Van, Wal-Mart as Catalyst to U.S.-China Trade, working paper, Department of Economics, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, 2007. http://economics.missouri.edu/working-papers/2007/WP0710_basker.pdf.

[ix] Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. Metropolitan Books: 2009. p 158.

[x] Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. Metropolitan Books: 2009. p 157.

[xi] Barry Lynn, Breaking the chain: The antitrust case against Wal-Mart, Harpers Magazine, July 2006. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/07/0081115.

[xii] Richard Rainey, Striking guest workers from Breaux Bridge crawfish plant protest Sam's Club in Metairie, Times-Picayune. June 06, 2012. http://www.nola.com/business/index.ssf/2012/06/striking_guest_workers_from_br.html

[xiii] Jennifer J. Rosenbaum, Complaint To The Wage And Hour Division: Violations of The Fair Labor Standards Act And H-2B Regulations By CJL Enterprises, Inc. Dba CJs Seafood and Michael Leblanc, National Guestworker Alliance, June 2012. http://www.guestworkeralliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/CJL_DOL-complaint.pdf

[xiv] Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart You Dont Know, Fast Company, December 1st, 2003, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html

[xv] Barry Lynn, Breaking the chain: The antitrust case against Wal-Mart, Harpers Magazine, July 2006, http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/07/0081115.

[xvi] Lobbying: Wal-Mart Stores Summary 2011, Center for Responsive Politics, http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000367&year=2011.

[xvii] Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Harvard University Press: 2009.

[xviii] Sylvia Allegretto, The few, the proud, the very rich; The Berkley Blog, UC Berkley, December 5th, 2011, http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2011/12/05/the-few-the-proud-the-very-rich/.

[xix] See CNNs Fortune 500 list http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/snapshots/2255.html

[Sousuke 1,214]

No, I believe my mom and dad were married when I was conceived. I can prove that.

Fine. You are inherently rude. Better?

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Fine. You are inherently rude. Better?

I find nothing rude in my statements.

[Sousuke 1,214]

I find nothing rude in my statements.

No surprise there….

Lets start over.

Do you disagree that walmart is more efficient than a mom and pop? Do you disagree that with greater efficiency, walmart needs less jobs?

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

http://www.demos.org/publication/not-made-america-top-10-ways-walmart-destroys-us-manufacturing-jobs

Thanks Stephen for the wall of propaganda.

[LibCampFireClub 635]

The only alternative to free-market is socialism. Government has never been successful in controlling business. From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.

So, who pays for that? In your lala world do you believe that those with ability will tolerate continually giving to those who are lazy and unwilling to work? America is the most giving nation on earth. But, responds best to true need, not demands and a sense of entitlement.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

The above post has enough facts worth responding to. Pick one.

[LibCampFireClub 635]

The above post has enough facts worth responding to. Pick one.

Thank you. I agree. Which item in my post do you find most compelling?

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

No surprise there….

Lets start over.

Do you disagree that walmart is more efficient than a mom and pop? Do you disagree that with greater efficiency, walmart needs less jobs?

If Walmart was delivering the same goods and services to the same customer base, you would be able to prove, or disprove that. However, since Walmart delivers more goods and more services to an increasing customer base, your argument lacks foundation.

Edited March 12, 2014 by The Postmaster