Enjoy Walmart's low prices... until your job moves overseas
Walmart is the biggest company in the world .
Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don’t change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.[…] Steve Dobbins has been bearing the brunt of that switch. He’s president and CEO of Carolina Mills, a 75-year-old North Carolina company that supplies thread, yarn, and textile finishing to apparel makers—half of which supply Wal-Mart. Carolina Mills grew steadily until 2000. But in the past three years, as its customers have gone either overseas or out of business, it has shrunk from 17 factories to 7, and from 2,600 employees to 1,200. Dobbins’s customers have begun to face imported clothing sold so cheaply to Wal-Mart that they could not compete even if they paid their workers nothing.
“People ask, ‘How can it be bad for things to come into the U.S. cheaply? How can it be bad to have a bargain at Wal-Mart?’ Sure, it’s held inflation down, and it’s great to have bargains,” says Dobbins. “But you can’t buy anything if you’re not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs.”
Updated: Forgot to mark an elision in the quoted text.
Henry Ford may have been a Nazi, but at least he understood this. It's long past time to start asking, "who is our economy for?" This country was founded as a democratic republic, not an experiment in laissez-faire capitalism, and it's a deadly mistake to confuse the two.
I grew up in a blue collar household in a paper mill town, and I remember watching the smug assholes in "safe" white color jobs having a jolly old time laughing about the blue collar jobs going overseas because it meant that their cars and clothes were less expensive. Well, the shoe's on the other foot now.
Posted by Mike Jones on November 21 2003 09:50
Not too much I can add to this. I've been thinking for a long time, "Lower prices don't do the economy much good if no one has a job to afford all that crap!" Glad to see it isn't just me.
Posted by Jimcat on November 21 2003 13:50