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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

I think this is obvious if you watch the walmart movie[1]

There was an interesting scene in the movie where a small town was getting a new walmart, and they drove around downtown.

They pointed at each of the stores and assigned values like "6 months" or "3 months" as an estimate of survival after they lost all their business to walmart.

Another wave of change has been moving in slow motion for years with online purchases and local stores, but the pandemic has been a tsunami in comparison.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart:_The_High_Cost_of_Low...

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Here’s an episode of econtalk where the guest worked at Walmart and described his experiences https://www.econtalk.org/platt-on-working-at-wal-mart/

Worth a listen if you want a counter point to the “wal mart is evil” trope.

Walmart purposefully designs their pay structure to externalize their labor costs to taxpayers.[1] They have gladly led the way in lobbying for offshoring manufacturing jobs.[2] They do everything they can to avoid paying taxes and bust unions.[3][4]

They will burn a small town's economy to the ground so they can turn a profit selling goods produced in sweatshops and labor camps. If that's not evil, I'm not sure what would qualify.

[1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-45.pdf

[2] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Walmart#Walmart_is_a_D...

[3] https://qz.com/1701404/walmart-allegedly-created-fictitious-...

[4] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-ove...

To be clear, I was more making a point about market forces more than "walmart is evil" (although they are a ruthlessly efficient distribution system)

I know walmart is bigger, but I wonder if (when?) amazon's market cap will surpass it.

I don't know if walmart can transition if that's the endgame. Will they transition to online like netflix, or blockbuster?

They already compete with Amazon online, but I don’t know how much of their sales occurs there vs in-person

To be fair to Wal-Mart, that seems to have less to do with Wal-Mart being a devious corporation and more that the lower class can scarcely afford to live anymore without the ultra-efficient economies of scale Wal-Mart provides.

In a world with a livable minimum wage, I imagine Wal-Mart would have less of a captive consumer base.

I mean, part of why that is the case is that walmart itself depresses wages. It comes to town, undercuts other businesses, those businesses close, people need jobs, they go to work at walmart (possibly at a loss of income but probably a loss of hours even if not), and then they can't afford to shop anywhere but walmart anymore. And the cycle continues.

It's not like they're doing this in a snidely whiplash scheme-y sort of way but they are still doing it, and they're not unaware of or innocent in the effect they have.

As someone who makes more than enough money to not have to shop at Walmart, I still shop at Walmart. Even brand name food items will be 20% cheaper than most grocery stores (Aldi's excluded). And meat is just incredibly cheap, $1.78/lb for boneless chicken breast? Yea, I'm gonna keep shopping at Walmart.

Just because I have money to burn doesn't mean I want to burn it overpaying for basic things.

Right, but at some point you have to question why these things are so cheap. What conditions are you helping to perpetuate by buying inexpensive clothes and meat?

Not that you're obligated to spend your money differently than you do. But this speaks to the country's yawning divide between red/blue that some of us choose to spend supporting local economies, buying ethically sourced goods, and generally trying to reduce the negative externalities of our lives. Meanwhile, other people don't want to worry about that, which is fair, but I don't know how culturally sustainable it is for groups to be polarizing at each end of that continuum.

I don’t know, I think the decision to pay workers in literal company scrip had some mustache-twirling behind it.

https://www.reuters.com/article/mexico-walmex-idUSN054659132...

I don't think we necessarily disagree here. I think these things are evil. I just don't think they're unique or special in the modern capitalist system. It's all gross.

But I think people get into a cognitive dissonance trap when they try to think of the people who are selling them cheap chicken legs as literally evil, when they can only imagine people doing things like engaging in slavery or wage suppression or whatever as things only people who wake up every morning going "How can I be evil today, I'm bored of tying people to train tracks!"

But nope. That's that guy you met at the last Startup Weekend event doing that. He seemed nice and you had a drink with him. He's a real person with a family and he made his money off diamond mining or selling the work of 8 year olds, and now he's a VC.

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