You Get What You Pay For
McClatchy has a thoughtful opinion piece, Wal-Mart and the high cost of ‘cheap’, about the efforts by WalMart to build a store near the Wilderness Civil War battlefield.
As always, Wal-Mart stresses new jobs and the economic benefits to the area of the store, but that isn’t the way it works, and I know from local experience.
First off, WalMart has a corporate contractor building their stores, and the actual construction doesn’t generate local jobs. The only local boost from construction is from the purchases of the crew that are brought in to build it.
A newly opened WalMart does indeed feature very low prices, but those go away after all of the local competition withers and fails. When you allow a WalMart you are transferring jobs, not creating them. Almost everything in a WalMart is trucked in, including the meat and baked goods. Most local supermarkets have butchers and bakeries these days. Despite that you can find things that are cheaper at a Publix, than a WalMart, and you can get really fresh baked goods, instead of defrosted goods.
There is a difference between inexpensive and cheap – WalMart sells cheap.
