Wal-Mart is not an anti-poverty program

This week, John Tierney's weekly NYTimes column takes issue with Wal-Mart critics. Instead of accelerating poverty in local communities, as many Wal-Mart critics have proposed, he claims that Wal-Mart is in fact responsible for helping to alleviate poverty. First, Wal-Mart jobs are highly competitive - there are hundreds of job applications for each open position at a new Wal-Mart. Then he cites a study completed by a visiting NYU professor, which found that the low- to middle-income families that shopped at Wal-Mart saved at least $800 per year from the lower price index, compared to other shoppers who might have patronized Target (the middle price range) or Costco (the most expensive of the three).

Well. Wal-Mart jobs are highly competitive among workers because Wal-Mart tends to drive out competition among employers. Second, no one disputes the lower prices that Wal-Mart offers, but I find the price index comparison a shallow measure. In measuring cost-savings of only the cost of the goods purchased, it doesn't take into account the cost of taking advantage of those goods - gas, time spent driving to Wal-Mart, and the social cost of having Wal-Mart replace the community network. All of these are quite expensive in the long-run.

Wal-Mart is at best a short-sighted alleviation of poverty. More significantly, it erodes many options of creating wealth for lower-income families by turning them into the workers and customers of the same large corporate machine - and the one that has replaced their community.

Thanks to TimeSelect, you can't read the article. A search for the text turned out to be fruitless, and I guess most bloggers aren't blogging about this because the article isn't available. I guess I'm the only sucker.