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Sure, Walmart provides jobs in your community... But they cost state and federal taxpayers in a significant way. Walmart's business model depends on state and

by tshtf 10y ago

Sure, Walmart provides jobs in your community... But they cost state and federal taxpayers in a significant way. Walmart's business model depends on state and federal government assistance to their low-paid workers: http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/the-high-public-cost-of-low-wages/ http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/the-high-public-cost-of-low-... It is true that Walmart brings in local revenues through sales and property taxes, however this is more than offset by the assistance state and federal governments have to provide to low-wage Walmart workers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/15/we-are-spending-153-billion-a-year-to-subsidize-mcdonalds-and-walmarts-low-wage-workers/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/15/...

brudgers 10y ago
I don't disagree. I think Walmart expresses the structure of health care access in the United States. I don't think the contractor model as implemented in the consumer facing gig economy or more traditionally in Amazon's warehouses has noticeably better economic outcomes for workers. My impression is that when journalists muckrake contract labor, healthcare access gets lumped in with employment instability and attempts at assigning responsibility to the big brand for the effects of outsourcing to the lowest bidder.
- tshtf 10y ago
  Agreed. The gig/contractor model is certainly no better for workers than Walmart, and is perhaps worse.
  - brudgers 10y ago
    The anti-Walmart meme makes it easy to assign responsibility to Walmart while still assuming the status quo regarding access to the health care system and the underlying economics.
rsheridan6 10y ago
Any unskilled job is going to have a low enough pay rate that many of the employees will qualify for public assistance. This goes for Walmart, Target, and the mom and pop shops Walmart replaced. If Walmart went out of business tomorrow, these people would still be on public assistance. That's today's economy.
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  > Any unskilled job... That's a moving target with software in the economic picture now. We know about the "That isn't AI" effect. Each incremental advance coming out of AI research or just software in general is countered with a problem domain the advance doesn't address, and the advance is dismissed as not really ground-breaking. This effect is commonly seen in action with traditional games (checkers, chess, Go, etc.), but I see it with all sorts of automation. I posit there is a converse rule: every incremental gain (which admittedly are infinitesimal steps towards AGI/strong AI) has the potential to move the goalposts of what constitutes an "unskilled job". We often fail to recognize this because the incrementalism's effect upon jobs is not nearly as dramatic as what we today imagine the transition from horses to cars to be (when in fact it was quite incremental back then as well). There aren't as many checkout cashiers as before due to software- and infrastructure-enhanced advances (bar codes and their scanners, supply chain management, etc.*), but because checkout cashiers aren't completely gone yet we don't viscerally perceive the economic effects. What used to be a skilled job is now classified as unskilled however, so the economic impact is huge. I contend we don't need AGI for massive automation-originated social disruption. If someone produces software that roughly approximates the reasoning abilities and kinesthesia of a 7-11th grader, then that is the majority of people in the developed world, not to speak of the developing world. That developmental range is roughly equivalent to what the mainstream media content targets in the developed world. We'll see continuous, smaller disruptions far before that point, though it is an open research question if we will get there in the near future. For example, we still don't have a general software solution to a task as "simple" as folding clothes, sheets and towels grabbed at random from a dryer.
- drivers99 10y ago
  This article[1] though on a biased (in that they have a point of view) site, has links to some state data, so it's convenient to link to it. It's also specific to medicaid benefits. > Of the 50 companies with the most employees on Medicaid in Massachusetts, almost half are retail and restaurant chains. The list includes CVS, Home Depot, May Department Stores, Sears, Kohl’s, Walgreen, Lowe’s, and Best Buy. > Similar data was recently released by Wisconsin, Missouri, and New Jersey. Topping all three states’ lists are many of the same retailers, including Walmart, Target, Dollar General, and Home Depot, as well as restaurant chains such as Olive Garden and Red Lobster. It doesn't seem exactly fair to do it based on total number of employees though. What about percentage of employees? Looking at the Missouri (state health care) data, Walmart is at about double the rate as Target, it has: Walmart work force: 43,281 Walmart MHN Enrolled employees (E): 2403 Walmart MHN Enrolled family members (N): 3633 Walmart total employees (E+N): 6036 Walmart Percentage of Missouri Workforce Enrolled(E) or Responsible for Enrollee (N) 13.95% Target work force: 7,580 Target MHN Enrolled employees (E): 282 Target MHN Enrolled family members (N): 317 Target total employees (E+N): 599 Target Percentage of Missouri Workforce Enrolled(E) or Responsible for Enrollee (N) 7.9% Actually the rest of the data[2] is interesting (kind of old; 2011), and too much to summarize here, but there are a lot of worse companies than both of those, percentage-wise. For example, Dollar General is at 42.24%. [1] https://ilsr.org/chains-walmart-foods-free-ride-taxpayers-expense-responsible-small-businesses/ https://ilsr.org/chains-walmart-foods-free-ride-taxpayers-ex... [2] https://dss.mo.gov/mhd/general/pdf/2011-employer-match-report.pdf https://dss.mo.gov/mhd/general/pdf/2011-employer-match-repor...
aianus 10y ago
I never understood this meme. How would the state save money if those people sat at home instead of working at Walmart? How is it Walmart's fault that the minimum wage is so low and the regulations are written in such a way as to incentivize part-time labour over full-time labour? Hate the game, not the player.
- paulmd 10y ago
  Walmart gets a lot of heat but they actually do lobby for a higher minimum wage (which they believe will hurt their less-efficient competitors more than it does Walmart). And really, most retail and food-service companies are no better. With that said, it's certainly possible to run a retail store without totally screwing your employees. Costco is extremely profitable despite providing very high wages and good benefits, far better than Walmart's warehouse-club subsidiary Sams Club. At the end of the day Walmart is still making a choice to screw over their employees just because they can get away with it, regardless of if everyone else is doing it. Tu quoque is not a good defense.
  - brudgers 10y ago
    Costco is primarily B2B. This allows it to have membership fees and to combine bulk purchase with retail. Here's the page for "pork": http://www.costco.com/pork.html http://www.costco.com/pork.html The least expensive item [in my browser] is ten pounds of bacon $6.50 per pound. A cash flow that allows allocating $19 to toilet paper is necessary to shop at Costco: http://www.costco.com/toilet-paper.html http://www.costco.com/toilet-paper.html The $100 shopping cart doesn't contain the diversity to cover fairly basic human needs, even ignoring the membership fee [I see $55 today].
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    Walmart are in profit aren't they? They don't need to lobby for a wage increase they can just give their employees one (as you intimated). If they're lobbying for higher minimum wage when they don't already pay a higher wage themselves then it seems their motives are malicious. It's not something that reflects well on them anyhow.

by tshtf 10y ago

brudgers 10y ago

I don't disagree. I think Walmart expresses the structure of health care access in the United States. I don't think the contractor model as implemented in the consumer facing gig economy or more traditionally in Amazon's warehouses has noticeably better economic outcomes for workers. My impression is that when journalists muckrake contract labor, healthcare access gets lumped in with employment instability and attempts at assigning responsibility to the big brand for the effects of outsourcing to the lowest bidder.

tshtf 10y ago
Agreed. The gig/contractor model is certainly no better for workers than Walmart, and is perhaps worse.
- brudgers 10y ago
  The anti-Walmart meme makes it easy to assign responsibility to Walmart while still assuming the status quo regarding access to the health care system and the underlying economics.

rsheridan6 10y ago

Any unskilled job is going to have a low enough pay rate that many of the employees will qualify for public assistance. This goes for Walmart, Target, and the mom and pop shops Walmart replaced. If Walmart went out of business tomorrow, these people would still be on public assistance. That's today's economy.

yourapostasy 10y ago
> Any unskilled job... That's a moving target with software in the economic picture now. We know about the "That isn't AI" effect. Each incremental advance coming out of AI research or just software in general is countered with a problem domain the advance doesn't address, and the advance is dismissed as not really ground-breaking. This effect is commonly seen in action with traditional games (checkers, chess, Go, etc.), but I see it with all sorts of automation. I posit there is a converse rule: every incremental gain (which admittedly are infinitesimal steps towards AGI/strong AI) has the potential to move the goalposts of what constitutes an "unskilled job". We often fail to recognize this because the incrementalism's effect upon jobs is not nearly as dramatic as what we today imagine the transition from horses to cars to be (when in fact it was quite incremental back then as well). There aren't as many checkout cashiers as before due to software- and infrastructure-enhanced advances (bar codes and their scanners, supply chain management, etc.*), but because checkout cashiers aren't completely gone yet we don't viscerally perceive the economic effects. What used to be a skilled job is now classified as unskilled however, so the economic impact is huge. I contend we don't need AGI for massive automation-originated social disruption. If someone produces software that roughly approximates the reasoning abilities and kinesthesia of a 7-11th grader, then that is the majority of people in the developed world, not to speak of the developing world. That developmental range is roughly equivalent to what the mainstream media content targets in the developed world. We'll see continuous, smaller disruptions far before that point, though it is an open research question if we will get there in the near future. For example, we still don't have a general software solution to a task as "simple" as folding clothes, sheets and towels grabbed at random from a dryer.
drivers99 10y ago
This article[1] though on a biased (in that they have a point of view) site, has links to some state data, so it's convenient to link to it. It's also specific to medicaid benefits. > Of the 50 companies with the most employees on Medicaid in Massachusetts, almost half are retail and restaurant chains. The list includes CVS, Home Depot, May Department Stores, Sears, Kohl’s, Walgreen, Lowe’s, and Best Buy. > Similar data was recently released by Wisconsin, Missouri, and New Jersey. Topping all three states’ lists are many of the same retailers, including Walmart, Target, Dollar General, and Home Depot, as well as restaurant chains such as Olive Garden and Red Lobster. It doesn't seem exactly fair to do it based on total number of employees though. What about percentage of employees? Looking at the Missouri (state health care) data, Walmart is at about double the rate as Target, it has: Walmart work force: 43,281 Walmart MHN Enrolled employees (E): 2403 Walmart MHN Enrolled family members (N): 3633 Walmart total employees (E+N): 6036 Walmart Percentage of Missouri Workforce Enrolled(E) or Responsible for Enrollee (N) 13.95% Target work force: 7,580 Target MHN Enrolled employees (E): 282 Target MHN Enrolled family members (N): 317 Target total employees (E+N): 599 Target Percentage of Missouri Workforce Enrolled(E) or Responsible for Enrollee (N) 7.9% Actually the rest of the data[2] is interesting (kind of old; 2011), and too much to summarize here, but there are a lot of worse companies than both of those, percentage-wise. For example, Dollar General is at 42.24%. [1] https://ilsr.org/chains-walmart-foods-free-ride-taxpayers-expense-responsible-small-businesses/ https://ilsr.org/chains-walmart-foods-free-ride-taxpayers-ex... [2] https://dss.mo.gov/mhd/general/pdf/2011-employer-match-report.pdf https://dss.mo.gov/mhd/general/pdf/2011-employer-match-repor...

aianus 10y ago

I never understood this meme. How would the state save money if those people sat at home instead of working at Walmart? How is it Walmart's fault that the minimum wage is so low and the regulations are written in such a way as to incentivize part-time labour over full-time labour? Hate the game, not the player.

paulmd 10y ago
Walmart gets a lot of heat but they actually do lobby for a higher minimum wage (which they believe will hurt their less-efficient competitors more than it does Walmart). And really, most retail and food-service companies are no better. With that said, it's certainly possible to run a retail store without totally screwing your employees. Costco is extremely profitable despite providing very high wages and good benefits, far better than Walmart's warehouse-club subsidiary Sams Club. At the end of the day Walmart is still making a choice to screw over their employees just because they can get away with it, regardless of if everyone else is doing it. Tu quoque is not a good defense.
- brudgers 10y ago
  Costco is primarily B2B. This allows it to have membership fees and to combine bulk purchase with retail. Here's the page for "pork": http://www.costco.com/pork.html http://www.costco.com/pork.html The least expensive item [in my browser] is ten pounds of bacon $6.50 per pound. A cash flow that allows allocating $19 to toilet paper is necessary to shop at Costco: http://www.costco.com/toilet-paper.html http://www.costco.com/toilet-paper.html The $100 shopping cart doesn't contain the diversity to cover fairly basic human needs, even ignoring the membership fee [I see $55 today].
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  Walmart are in profit aren't they? They don't need to lobby for a wage increase they can just give their employees one (as you intimated). If they're lobbying for higher minimum wage when they don't already pay a higher wage themselves then it seems their motives are malicious. It's not something that reflects well on them anyhow.