Walmart Community produced the video, so you are hardly getting an objective presentation. However, this story reminds me of an urban redevelopment project I learned about firsthand while studying at Eastern University in the '80s. Deliverance Evangelistic Center, a prominent African-American Church in North Philadelphia, an area devoid of a full-service supermarket, had acquired the land where Connie Mack Stadium once stood. They wanted to develop the land into a strip mall with a supermarket anchor. I heard the story from a woman who was instrumental in developing what became Hope Plaza, a tale complete with coalition building, political maneuvering, and many prayers. The short of it is that they finally got a Thriftway store as an anchor.
Outsiders thought Thriftway was nuts. Yet within two years, the store became the number one grossing Thriftway in the northeast. McDonald's opened on one corner. Burger King moved in across the street. There are now ninety-five businesses at that location.
Thriftway brought name brands, lower prices, and more jobs to the neighborhood (and also killed off some neighborhood shops.) The spillover effect of attracting even more businesses added more amenities at lower prices and more jobs. Walmart does this on steroids.
As I've noted before, Walmart impacts the economy and disproportionately helps the poor. Food, clothing, and the basic staples of life are a much larger percentage of the household budget for the poor. These are the goods that Walmart succeeds in keeping so low. Economist Jason Furman, one of Obama's economic advisors, wrote that Walmart and big box stores have had a profound impact on improving the standard of living for the poor:
The single most careful economic study, co-authored by the well-respected MIT economist Jerry Hausman, found that grocery sales by Wal-Mart and other big-box stores made consumers better off to the tune of 25 percent of food consumption. That doesn't mean much for those of us in the top fifth of the income distribution—we spend only about 3.5 percent of our income on food at home and, at least in my case, most of that shopping is done at high-priced supermarkets like Whole Foods. But that's a huge savings for households in the bottom quintile, which, on average, spend 26 percent of their income on food. In fact, it is equivalent to a 6.5 percent boost in household income—unless the family lives in New York City or one of the other places that have successfully kept Wal-Mart and its ilk away.
I'm not ready to nominate Walmart for sainthood, but I think many would do well to re-examine their knee-jerk opposition to Walmart and big box stores.
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