I grew up in the poorest county in my state. It was an hour to anywhere. There were no bookstores, no movie theaters, no fast food restaurants, nothing but cows for miles. There wasn't even a public library.<p>It might be true that in an area with established retail, Walmart tends to put those businesses out of business. But in areas like my hometown, those businesses were <i>already</i> out of business. We used to have a little Sears store. It had a few things in stock, but mostly it was a place you could walk into, peruse the Sears catalog, and order with free shipping. It went out of business years before Walmart got to town. There was, at some point, a small department store as well. It had been boarded up in the 1970s.<p>Literally the only businesses in town that survived through the 1980s were the feed store, the gas station, the pharmacy, and an independent grocery store. The grocery store went out of business when Food Lion came to town, and nobody cried because Food Lion had a much wider selection of food products.<p>I think Walmart is a very mixed bag. But we aren't poorer because of Walmart.
I doubt the studies accounted for the time and cost savings of having a single location for purchases which would've reacquired multiple stories previously, or the benefits of having access to many items that would not have been available at all without a large store like Walmart.
From the comments here, I don’t think people understand how much small retail supports an entire local economy.<p>With big retail, you get the smallest possible wages and all the profit sucked out to somewhere else.
Before the US had a rust belt, a meth belt, and opioid belt, you could go to Western Auto and put a bicycle on layaway. I think the malls out-competed a lot of the older nostalgic stores. Walmart did siphon away enough business from malls to come out on top.<p>FYI, Sears acquired Western Auto and most of it was put into Advance Auto Parts. The headquarters in Kansas City was converted into 101 condos.<p><a href="https://www.apartments.com/western-auto-bldg-multi-family-kansas-city-mo/w65wtkl/" rel="nofollow">https://www.apartments.com/western-auto-bldg-multi-family-ka...</a>
This seems to always be the issue, the visceral experiencing of prices now at the cash register versus long term effects.<p>“But if Walmart’s example reveals anything, it is that, in the long term, low prices can have costs of their own.”<p>The scale of corporation can pull many levers in the pursuit of profit and can have longer vision because it has economic means to persist, the individual consumer is weak and short sighted in comparison, always.
I don’t see how this makes sense. Walmart is consistently the cheapest grocery store around (save for Aldi but they’re not that reliable). The alternatives are mostly Kroger or Albertsons owned and their prices are just ridiculous these days. The smaller grocery chains end up having to charge a premium to stay open. I hate Walmart but when the products are the same I’m going with whoever has the lowest price. If they were around people would be spending more, period. If anything I’d blame the dollar stores for creating food deserts in already poor areas.
> we find that poverty is still 3 percentage points higher in treated counties 10 years after the Walmart opening.<p>So... 10 years after Walmart opens, poverty is 3% higher, and annual household earnings decline by $4,230. Is this a huge effect? This is something like a 10 point difference on the SAT (<a href="https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~misha/DIReadingSeminar/Papers/DixonRoman13.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~misha/DIReadingSeminar/Papers/DixonR...</a>).
Most people will read the conclusions from this research and believe we’d all be better off without Walmart. The question really is whether you think we’d be better off getting rid of all big corporations and reverting to a much much smaller economy with only mom and pop shops. It’d be a world where businesses have no economies of scale. As a result, would you be ok with a country of significantly less consumption of everything and significantly fewer conveniences (ie free overnight shipping)? I mean electronics, food, clothing, and everything else you buy today sold by Amazon, Target, Walmart, etc. I don’t have a very strong stance either way on this, but that’s the reality you have to be ok with if you believe big corporations are bad.