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0 pointstreehau510y ago0 comments

> Walmart is the best thing that ever happened to the US, economy-wise.

Care to elaborate? From my school of thought, Walmart is the worst thing that has ever happened to the US economy. Sure they might have that scotch tape you want for 50 cents cheaper, but that came at the cost of less small businesses and lower wages overall.

Scores of businesses and shops that were once thriving and profitable in small town main streets are now empty because Walmart opened up on the other side of town.

Walmart also only lets their buddies near their shopping centers, and charge a high premium to any mom and pop stores or restaurants to in the shopping center, which is why if you drive across the South you always see the same 3-4 stores in a Walmart shopping center.

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6 comments · 2 top-level

Pyxl10110y ago· 3 in thread

Yes, and before we had efficient textile factories, scores of small businesses and individuals worked as wool spinners - many of them women (the origin of the term "spinster"). These businesses went kaput when industrialization came along.

Same thing with farming. In the middle ages, and long after then, there were many small businesses engaged in farming. In fact, quite a lot of it was subsistence farming. Fortunately, textile manufacturing brought down the price of clothing from thousands of dollars per suit to far less, and industrial farming has made food (by comparison to the past) cheap and plentiful. In the course of it, this shut down many small businesses who could not compete with the scale and efficiency of larger ones, but it brings down prices for everyone - as bambax mentioned, the general public cares about prices, not how goods are provided.

In the modern age, we live better than kings did in the middle ages, with electricity, sanitation, health/vision/dental care, access to food and water, fuel, entertainment in our homes - all of the benefits of modern life come from the steadily lowering price of technology and scale and knowledge. Small businesses are not intrinsically good, and large ones are not intrinsically bad. Large businesses tend to have economies of scale and investment in technology that small do not, which brings down prices and raises the quality of living for everyone.

tw0410y ago

Which works AWESOME, as long as you either: 1. Have new jobs to shift the people who were previously doing those other jobs to.

2. You have a basic living wage that isn't treated like a handout to people who can't find work.

At this point those mega-businesses are creating a lot of unemployment and that's about it.

venomsnake10y ago

The problem with large business is their unfair influence over the policies of the countries. And their bordering on monopoly bargaining power.

Both of whose are not entire free market friendly.

treehau5OP10y ago

> These businesses went kaput when industrialization came along.

You are equating a renaissance in labor to Walmart? Industrialization brought new jobs to the table as well. If you used to be a professional seamstress, and you were replaced by a machine, you can now go learn how the machine works and go repair them for all the factories, or help them install them. More than likely you probably got paid more now because of the increased productivity.

When Walmart comes into your town, and desolates your small business, you can go work for that Walmart, in a reduced role, with a fraction of the pay.

edit: basically tw04's comment.

bambax10y ago· 1 in thread

> Care to elaborate?

Sure...

Well, actually, Pyxl101 just did, but I'll add that the formulation "competition dilutes profits" is really misleading; it seems to say that profits disappear into thin air, they're destroyed.

But that's not the case. Profits are not annihilated, they're transferred from firms to the general public, who become richer in the process.

So the correct formulation should be "competition makes you richer".

That's why we have anti-trust laws, and that's why any country which would take the "monopolies are good" theory of Thiel seriously would be in big trouble... (That's also why, on a more controversial note and IMHO, patents and copyright are very very bad.)

snowwrestler10y ago

Patents and copyright enable competition by creating property rights. Without property rights, whoever starts out the biggest can just seize everyone else's property and get even bigger. This is how the feudal system worked: the lord owned all the property and took from his peasants whatever he wanted. The only competition was between lords and it was basically just border disputes.

Copyright and patent laws were developed to broaden the economic base by empowering small authors and inventors to extract payment from big companies in return for their creative works or inventions. This allowed them to accumulate and direct new pools of capital, which is what sustains competition over the long term.

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