Summary
Two studies reveal that Walmart’s entry into communities lowers household incomes by 6% over 10 years and increases poverty by 8%, even when accounting for cost savings.
Its practices, such as undercutting competitors, suppressing wages, and squeezing suppliers, harm local economies by reducing employment and forcing smaller businesses to close.
Walmart’s “monopsony power” enables it to pay lower wages and dominate suppliers, compounding these effects.
The findings challenge the idea that low prices alone benefit communities, emphasizing long-term economic harm.
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Isn’t this obvious?
If an outside Corp comes in displacing local business, the profits that would cycle back into that community now get taken out. It doesn’t matter what the prices are, when the community as a whole has less money with each transaction.
Thank you for pointing this out. When you shop small locally-owned businesses, the money is often directly reinjected into local economies. The money you spend at locally businesses puts a girl through ballet lessons instead of putting dollars towards a new yacht. And the ballet company is owned by your neighbor.
If people really want to fight income inequality, stop giving your money to billionaires everywhere you can.
I’m not sure it has been empirically proven.
Hypotheses that make sense at face value are dime a dozen in economics. Some of Milton Friedman’s hypotheses on inflation made sense but were proven wrong. Nevertheless they were used for decades to drive policy with horrible impact on the working class. Lots of people still believe they’re true, because they make sense at face value.
The “velocity of money” has been very much proven. You take money out of a community, you deny it to that community. That’s why the existence of the wealthy is the presence of a parasite.
It’s trade balance and it’s very well proven. If the money coming into a community is less than the money going out then that’s going to affect everything from road repair to groceries bought.
This is why at the international level there are balance payments in trade deals.
So tariff math might be a thing
In part.
That’s one of the long term goals. But tariffs have short term economic effects, and political effects that also need to be taken into account.
Tariffs are more complicated.