Tonite's Frontline - Is Wal-Mart Good for America?

[Randypiper]

Some economists credit Wal-Mart's single-minded focus on low costs with helping contain U.S. inflation, others charge that the company is the main force driving the massive overseas shift to China in the production of American consumer goods, resulting in hundreds of thousands of lost jobs and a lower standard of living here.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/

[physioex]

1. I started a thread earlier on today....

Yes we should encourage more people to watch....

I will give this thread a kick, and it would be nice others joined in also..... :)

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. Walmart destroyed small town business

I remember the 70s, when there were small department stores, dime stores, and mom and pop stores on the square of most small towns. Then Walmart would come in, and these would go under. Selection diminished, and the community was diminished as folks who really were concerned with the town lost their businesses. There's now a small comback in downtown small America, but, sadly, the resergence is in thrift stores and used furniture stores-this is all people can afford around here in Arkansas.

[salvorhardin]

6. Walmart didn't start it

It started with the adoption of the suburban lifestyle in the late 1940s/early 1950s. Before Walmart there was K-Mart, and before K-Mart there were many regional chain department stores. I grew up in a small town in upstate NY in the 1970s and 1980s and witnessed first hand the flight of consumer dollars from our downtown to the chain department stores in the small city about 30 miles away. In our neck of the woods, we're talking about stores like Jamesway and Nichols Discount City.

In the 1980s this accelerated greatly, but this time the fligght was to mall stores in the slightly larger city about 50 miles away and the regional department store chains started to suffer, even if some of them were anchoring malls. By now stores like Jamesway and Nichols were starting to suffer and the larger regional mall-anchor department stores were taking over. The only one I can remember is Bradlees.

By the mid-1990s it was pretty much all over with almost every single store on our Main Street converted to service the tourism trade that has swept over our small town. I guess our town is lucky in a way, because at least our Main Street still looks vibrant (at least between April and November). However, there isn't a single business left on Main Street that caters to the needs of the locals. In the small city 30 miles away, the Jamesway is gone entirely converted into a Catholic School and the Nichols (and the minimall it anchored) also disappeared to be replaced by a health clinic.

Even K-Mart disappeared when Walmart moved in during the mid-1990s.

So Walmart didn't start it, but they certainly perfected the kind of business that destroys smaller town business districts and saps the county social services.

Oddly enough, I kind of long for the days of the strip malls with the cheesy department stores interspersed with the crappy not-so-fast food establishments. In a bizarre sort of way I like the 1970s and sort of wish we could go back to that time. I kind of think it was sort of an ideal compromise where you still had small Main Street businesses that provided all your basic needs, and for anything else you could drive the 30 miles and partake of the garish commercial circus. Maybe I'm just nostalgic, maybe I'm just wierd.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

7. You are correct when you talk of suburbia

but I was talking about small towns that are isolated from larger cities. I hated suburbia/big cities and sought out these kinds of towns in which to live. The downtown was still alive and well there until Walmart and its like invaded.

[salvorhardin]

8. Yeah, the Walmart invasion of smaller towns

is relatively recent (last decade) and almost always a death blow for their downtowns.

All I was getting at, is that it's just the culmination of a very long process. Walmarts decimate their local economic ecology so they must continuously move into other environs in order to survive. Personally I thought Walmart had expanded just about everywhere it could in North America and that there was no way they could continue to thrive. I really thought with the economy in the dumps that Walmart would start to shrivel, wither and die. How silly of me. My friend in Germany mentioned that there's a Walmart near where he lives. I had no idea. I felt like I should apologize to him as a representative of the German people on behalf of America, but then I've felt like that so many times over the past few years.

[blondeatlast]

3. I'll be watching; thanks for the heads up! nt

[tsuki]

4. Hear part of it on Frontline.

If you can, watch and report. I don't have Frontline. But the report on NPR made me more determined to STAY AWAY from NaziMart.

[physioex]

5. LOL....

Nooo...It's on your PBS channel.

Check local listings here:

tv.yahoo.com

[tsuki]

14. I don't have PBS. But NPR had a segment on today that was killer.

[Dude_CalmDown]

9. On now

For me at least.

:kick:

[FizzFuzz]

10. I thought it weird that there was NO mention of the world's largest

class action suit, 1.6 million people, mostly women, around the country sueing for sex discrimination.

Wal Mart--Low Wages--ALWAYS

[SmokingJacket]

11. Yeah, like Twinkies are good for my ass. n/t

[slowroll]

12. CBS

had a good two hour special the other night on the same subject.

[Zech Marquis]

13. walmart is destroying the US economy

yeah you'll get cheap stuff made in China, but at what cost to us as whole? What's so fucking about cheap products when those prducts are made in China, leaving only low wage jobs for the working class here?! :argh: