People of Walmart

There is nothing like Walmart in the Netherlands, for which I am thankful. If you want to know what poor people look like in America, you have to go to Walmart. 

People Of Walmart

Walmart is ubiquitous in America. They carry a little bit of everything and all of it is cheap, both in terms of price and quality. Before we had Walmart we had discount stores like K-mart and Pamida. We referred jokingly to K-mart as "Came-apart", because that's what things you got at K-mart did. Then they were bought out by Sears and both companies went under. Walmart was something more or less along the same lines, but worse. 

Beginnings

Sam Walton was the founder of the company. He was the family patriarch. It was founded in Arkansas in 1962 and incorporated in 1969. By the 1970's they had spread into five states and by the 1990's they were everywhere. In the beginning they were just a mercantile store. They had a toy section and a hardware section and household goods and clothes. Then they moved into things like furniture and groceries and opened their own pharmacy and their own bank in the stores. How convenient, right? Except that they destroyed locally owned businesses and siphoned money out of communities. From the start, Sam Walton set things up so that all of the money his stores made went into trust funds for his children to shelter it from taxation. The Waltons are America's richest family, and they made all of their money from the poorest people in America. 

Gutting America

Before Walmart we had "Main Street", which is to say we didn't have everything in one place. We had grocery stores and pharmacies and drug stores and bakeries and record stores and auto repair shops. In place of shopping malls there were department stores. Then there were shopping malls, and that struck a blow to local businesses, but there was worse to come because then Walmart came to town and they couldn't compete. Walmart had lower prices. They had the ability to buy in bulk and they strong-armed their suppliers into selling them merchandise at below cost. Everyone could get everything in one place, but cheaper than the local businesses could sell them. Business after business went under because they couldn't do business with Walmart on the scene. There was a Walmart in nearly every town of any size. Pretty soon people had to shop at Walmart because there wasn't anywhere else to get it. All of the competition was gone. 

Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 3.0

Whereas local businesses would have put the money back into the community because the owners lived there, Walmart took it out of the community and sent it back to Arkansas. People who could have gone to work for local businesses found themselves in a position where Walmart was the only major employer in town. As a matter of fact, they are the biggest employer in the US. But Walmart didn't want to pay benefits, so they made almost all of their employees part-time with unpredictable hours. Their employees had to resort to things like welfare and food stamps just to make ends meet. In essence, Walmart was subsidizing their low, low prices by taking advantage of government programs designed to fight poverty. They did this to the tune of billions of dollars. Besides that, they take out life insurance policies on their managerial employees without telling them, but the families receive nothing in the event of their death. Since Walmart doesn't pay enough for people to leave much of an inheritance to their children, there is no probate investigation which would uncover the life insurance policy. To top it all off, Walmart demands that their employees do a cheer at the beginning of every shift swearing loyalty and devotion to the very employer who is keeping them poor. 

Moving Along

Once Walmart had killed all of the local businesses and made themselves the only show in town, they started to leave. Like a plague of locusts, they left nothing of value and no alternative for local residents. They left the empty shell of a store and a parking lot. In rural communities this was a disaster. Not only was America's biggest employer laying off a great chunk of the local residents but there was nowhere to buy groceries or get your car serviced. They had monopolized the local economy and then gone, leaving the communities they'd gutted in tatters. Unemployment and a Main Street they had killed. They left food deserts, whole communities where fresh produce and nutritious food were difficult to come by. Not that they could afford it anyway now that they were all unemployed. 

What Happens When Walmart Leaves?

The reason for this is tax reform measures. The law changed and Walmart was going to have to offer benefits to their employees and pay local and state taxes. Before that states and small communities clamored to have a Walmart because in their ignorance of how Walmart works, they thought that they would be revitalizing their local economy. They'd finally made it, they got a Walmart. They'd offer tax incentives, like 10 years of deferred taxes. They didn't look ahead to what Walmart would do as soon as the incentives ran out. They left. And just like Amazon after they raised their starting wage to $15 an hour, they laid off employees en masse as soon as they had to pay them anything approaching a fair wage or benefits.

Fallout

As the decline of small-town America accelerated, Walmart became freak central. You'd have to be there on Halloween to see this in its full glory, but technically speaking every day is Halloween at Walmart. A dystopian nightmare when you go into the parking lot and realize that a lot of the cars have been parked there for a long time. That's because homeless people living in their cars were taking advantage of the free parking and lighted parking lot as well as the bathrooms and cheap food at Walmart. 

They're still living in their cars, but now they have to find another place to park them after Walmart leaves. I'd say "good riddance" to Walmart except for the damage they've left behind them. Now instead of going to Walmart for cheap food because it's all they can afford, Dollar General is taking their place. Canned, off-label processed food, because the reality is that Dollar General is just an overgrown dollar store and they don't carry anything fresh. 

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Walmart has destroyed the American way of life, because it was a collaborative effort. They weren't the only business doing this, they were just the biggest. If you want to understand the socio-economic situation for the poor in America, look at Peopleofwalmart.com. Just don't judge us too harshly by what you see. Poverty and desperation make people into something they wouldn't have had to be. It's embarrassing for me to look at my people and know that this is where I come from. At the same time it brings me deep sadness to see us like this. It didn't have to be this way. It shouldn't be like this.