Does It Bother You That Team USA’s Olympic Uniforms Are Not Made in the USA?

Your opinions puzzle me.

“Walmart has destroyed every local business area it operates in.” Is there a particular reason you lay this blame solely at Walmart’s feet? The same claims have been made at K-Mart, Montgomery Wards (when they still existed) and most other chain stores, as well as large grocery chains, etc.. Walmart destroys all business’s it competes with because of superior operating policies. Wishing for the “good old days” of mom and pop stores is comforting to some but sorely misses reality. Chains, with economies of scale, have been decimating small shops and lessor performing bigger ones for decades in the developed world. Walmart just happens to be extremely good at it. If that’s a sin, so be it, but don’t expect general trend reversal anytime soon.

“Instead of having local jobs.” I’m willing to bet that retail sale employee numbers improve in communities that contain a Walmart “mall”, not lesson. Walmart itself hires a lot of people, they have to, they move a lot of inventory, and that’s not even mentioning their national employee force such as their warehousing folks, their truck drivers, etc. Then you might consider the myriad of small shops that line the storefronts of those Walmart “malls”. Willing to wager many more people get jobs and the community general standard of living increases when Walmart arrives.

“…every dime of sales Walmart produces goes either to China or the corporate fortune of the …”. You sure you want to stand by that statement? Taking the China part alone, I suspect every retail organization in the States buys a substantial amount of its inventory from China, just like they used to buy the bulk from Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, and before that Japan … you get the idea. Several decades ago you would of heard the same complaints from Europeans about all the cheap junk sold to them by the US. The US has advanced well beyond the “commodities” phase of industrialization. It’s just the natural order of things. Same situation in Europe and Japan, and now beginning in the Five Tigers (S. Korea & Company). No matter what you think of it, it’s the way it is, not going to change.

“They use as many part time jobs as they can get away with so that they don’t have to provide benefits.” Yes, that’s called good operating policies to keep costs down. Virtually all companies do this. Walmart is just more visual because it deals directly with consumers and its just friggin’ big and everywhere. If you’re inferring Walmart is cheating its workforce, then I’ll have to differ. I believe all people who contract up to work at Walmart are aware they are entering into a part time position. I don’t believe Walmart signs people up under coercion. Retail sales is not brain taxing work. If a person is looking for a higher scale of wages, working in retail is probably not an informed decision. I doubt if Walmart demands many “technical skills” or completed training courses as a prerequisite for employment. Low skilled workers naturally are low income earners. I fail to see your reason for complaint. On the contrary, companies like Walmart provide jobs to people with limited skills, not deprive them of them.

“People are poor because the good manufacturing jobs that created the middle class have been sent overseas, all in the name of the lowest price.” Partially true. What that has to do with Walmart escapes me but I’ll attempt to carry on. Manufacturing did create a sizable blue collar middle class. The outsourcing of those jobs did eliminate those avenues of attaining wealth. And also true, might have rendered some families that failed to prudently budget their finances for contingencies temporarily without a decent income. I’ll grant that under restriction.

1. Early outsourcing by some companies would catch employees off guard. Ok, they’re poor for a couple to maybe four (4) years. Plenty of time to go back to school to acquire skills the economy was shifting to. Workers at companies that outsourced later have no excuses for anything. Obvious to the most casual observer is if a competitor company to the one (1) you work for outsources, a fact of life is, either your company will also outsource or go bankrupt. Must go to school now. This is not brain surgery level thought demanding.

2. People are not poor because of company outsourcing. People are poor because they hadn’t bothered to attain any skills worth employment.

Walmart, AND ALL LARGE COMPANIES, are extremely vicious in dictating the price of the items they buy. But darn, people still sell to them meaning they must still be making profit or they wouldn’t be in business. Way of the world. Don’t understand your reason for complaint here either.

Those companies that are “virtually forced to produce their products with slave labor … “ would be using slave labor anyway, I think you can rest assured on that.

“Perhaps you should do a bit of study before defending them.” You can stick that where the sun don’t shine with my compliments.

To make this short, you still need to do some homework. Forget about Walmart for a moment since you believe they are so great for the world.

When you say that "Manufacturing did create a sizable blue collar middle class", I believe that you are missing a rather large point. Manufacturing is what created the middle class in America, and every other country that has one, for that matter. After WWII, most of the manufacturing plants around the world had been destroyed in the war. We had a tremendous capacity to produce the goods the world needed to recover from the war and virtually no competition. This opportunity not only allowed us to pull out of the remains of the depression but to pay off the deficit created by the war very quickly. The boom after the war quite literally created the most prosperous period in American history and also created the most prosperous middle class the world has ever known.

"People are not poor because of company outsourcing. People are poor because they hadn’t bothered to attain any skills worth employment"

Wow. That statement only proves that you haven't got a clue how economies work. Reality is that not everyone can have a white collar job. Over the last decade or a bit longer, we have lost 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month to overseas enterprises. What is left if you cannot produce things? Service jobs, that's really it. Even Doctors, lawyers, and accountants are service jobs. Since most service jobs are low paying, who is going to make the money for the economy to grow? To produce wealth as a society, you have to do something besides provide a service. It just doesn't get any more simple than that. Service societies produce a few very wealthy people and the rest are virtual slaves. That is the way the world operated from the beginning of time until the 1950's. The middle class is a new thing as far as history goes, and manufacturing jobs created it.

Walmart and other companies could not have made the mass exodus to China and elsewhere without the help of our Government. The huge corporations own our Government. They were bought and paid for long ago. The trade laws they passed were designed to make the rich cats richer and the poor poorer. It's pretty obvious when we add no tariffs to products coming into the States but the countries that produced the goods tax the hell out of our stuff.

Perhaps Walmart is more of a symptom of our failing system than the cause. I do get carried away about them because they are a screaming red flag pointing to the downfall of America. People complain that there are no good manufacturing jobs left and yet they head for Wally World every time they need something without even giving it a second thought. Having said that, they are still an evil company, IMHO. They use business and employment tactics that are nothing less than evil, even compared to other huge companies. Their employment tactics are nothing less than usury but they can get by with it because when they put all the competition out of business, they have a captive workforce with no other options than to work for them or move.

I do sincerely hope that whatever you are studying in school works out for you and you can get a good job when you finish. I'm not being sarcastic, I mean that. But, please don't look down on people who do not have the opportunity, the intelligence, or the money to obtain a higher education. The world has to have ditch diggers too, or else you may have to do it.