black friday and the race to the bottom

[xchrom]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/12/black-friday-and-the-minimum-wage.html



Black Friday began on Thanksgiving Thursday this year, and continued into Shopaholic Saturday and Sunday. With discounts of up to forty per cent, there were the usual mob scenes at Walmart and Target, the usual brawls over TVs and towels, the usual shoppers with phone cameras immediately uploading footage of the mayhem to YouTube, the usual millions of views within three or four days. It’s becoming an American holiday tradition, a retailers’ Hunger Games.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Although a hundred and forty-one million people bought things in stores or online, exceeding the 2012 figure by one per cent, they spent $1.7 billion less than they did last year. Why didn’t the new, extended Black Friday weekend achieve the desired results in consumer dollars? According to the Times, “Walmart and Target both trimmed their yearly forecasts recently, citing economic factors like slow wage growth, unemployment and sliding consumer confidence.” In other words, as Steven Greenhouse reported in a bleak post-Thanksgiving article, too many Americans now work low-paying jobs—for example, stocking inventory and ringing up merchandise in big-box stores like Walmart and Target—to have enough purchasing power to boost sales. Americans are too poor to stimulate economic growth.

One obvious solution is to pay them more—more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, more than the eight dollars an hour that a Walmart employee makes in base pay. Henry Ford paid his assembly-line workers five dollars a day, enough to buy a Ford car. Target pays its “associates” enough to buy a sixty-inch flat-screen TV at Target.

Around the country, there are the beginnings of a wage movement. A minimum-wage hike has become law in Massachusetts, and similar efforts are under way in New York and numerous other towns and counties. (In this week’s issue of the magazine, Steve Coll writes about one in Washington State.) President Obama announced his support for a Senate bill that would increase the federal minimum wage to $10.10 over two years. Fast-food workers have been protesting low pay for months, and they plan to walk off the job in a hundred cities this coming Thursday, demanding fifteen dollars an hour. On Black Friday, more than a hundred people were arrested outside Walmart stores from coast to coast. This movement is the great social-justice cause of our time.

[Laelth]

1. "Americans are too poor to stimulate economic growth."

k&r for the truth, however depressing it may be. We need a much higher minimum wage, and we need it now.

-Laelth