You'd have a hard time getting through college without meeting at least one person who gleefully expounds upon the evils of Wal-Mart. The list of offenses is daunting and varied: Wal-Mart allegedly engages in predatory pricing, pays its workers insultingly low wages, encourages sweatshop production, employs child labor and pumps toxic chemicals into every natural environment it can find. To be honest, all of that may be true. I don't plan to take a stance on any of those accusations because, frankly, I don't know enough to have an opinion.
But one criticism of Wal-Mart irritates me to no end, and it is in fact the most common. Even if I accept the charge as true, I still can't bring myself to vilify Wal-Mart owners. And here it is: Wal-Mart forces local stores out of business. Mom-and-pop shops are tragically forced to sell off their assets, perhaps by some cruel irony only having the store that drove them out as a possible employer.
I don't mean to make fun. It really is tragic. One would have to be quite mean-spirited to wish a mom-and-pop store out-of-business. But the fact horse-and-buggy drivers were forced out of business when the Model T rolled around was fairly tragic in its own way too. I don't see anyone crying for them, pining for archaic modes of transportation.
So what did Wal-Mart really do? Simple: it solved an economic problem. Its owners found a way to get cheap, low-quality goods to people who would rather spend their money on cheap, low-quality goods. The real complaint isn't that Wal-Mart actually did anything particularly nefarious, but that they gave people what they wanted. If we're going to blame anyone, it should be the customers that don't want to pay higher prices at local stores. All Wal-Mart did was respond to demand.
Others complain that not only does Wal-Mart destroy businesses, but it also keeps entrepreneurs from starting up new ones. It's true: in a town with Wal-Mart, anyone trying to start up a retail or grocery business is going to have a serious fight on their hands. They'll likely find it impossible. But so what? Someone did it already; they're out of luck. No one complains it's unfair they can't invent the telephone. They just accept the fact someone else solved the problem first, and they'll have to do something else.The real problem is people don't want to change. They'd rather keep selling groceries if that's what they grew up doing. It's an understandable instinct but an unrealistic one. But a parting thought: consider the craft beer market.
Large corporations controlled almost the entire market until-after they were made legal-smaller breweries found customers who wanted to buy their brand of beer more than they wanted Budweiser. Despite the appearance of market dominance, smaller "companies" succeeded. All they did was follow the age-old rule of making a living: find or produce something people want to buy and then sell it to those people. It's pretty much always worked that way; it seems immature to start complaining about it now.
