John Kuthe wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Oct 2015 19:52:06 -1000, sf > wrote:
> ..
> The United Statesians are really stupid!!
>
> Look what we did:

Shaddup, you ****ant hater of the poor.

Why don't you ever go after Dollar General or K Mart?

You ****wit!


https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publi...al-communities

The Wal-Mart effect: Poison or antidote for local communities?

Wal-Mart even scares businesses that aren't direct competitors, at least
not yet. Banks, for instance, lobbied Congress hard to keep Wal-Mart
from becoming an industrial loan corporation, which, in effect, would
have allowed it to offer banking services.

But some argue that the company can be, and often is, a force for good.
Wal-Mart's low prices are hard to dispute, and the biggest benefactors
are low-income shoppers. Wal-Mart has been widely lauded for its $4
pharmacy program, which has rippled through drug and pharmacy industries
to the delight of consumer advocates.

The company has received considerable attention for various
environmental initiatives. It has widely replaced store lighting with
energy-saving bulbs and given the bulbs prominent space on store
shelves. The company announced in November that it has increased the
energy efficiency of its buildings and truck fleets by 15 percent since
2005, and has committed to using solar energy at 22 sites. It also
promised to cut solid waste from its U.S. stores by 25 percent by next
October. Earlier in the year, the company announced a pilot program with
a small number of suppliers (among its 60,000 worldwide) who will start
measuring, and hopefully reducing, their carbon footprint.

So the fedgazette decided to take a closer look at the matter,
attempting to answer a seemingly straightforward question: What economic
effect does Wal-Mart have on local communities in the Ninth District?
Conventional wisdom suggests that Wal-Mart's economic influence is
significant and obvious. If that's indeed the case, then we should see
palpable change in measures commonly used as proxies for community
health—things like jobs, firms, income, population and poverty.

So the fedgazette looked at 40 small counties in the district that saw
Wal-Mart come to town between 1986 and 2003 and compared them with 49
similarly sized non-Wal-Mart counties in the district (see methodology).
The fedgazette then looked at these familiar benchmarks—jobs, firms,
population, income and poverty—from 1985 to 2005 to see if Wal-Mart
counties performed differently than non-Wal-Mart counties.

Readers should understand that all results come with a host of caveats
(again, see methodology for examples). The point of this research is not
to offer the last word on whether Wal-Mart is helpful or harmful—it is
clearly both, though which it is depends on the circumstances. In fact,
in this matter Wal-Mart is no different from any new business—large or
small—coming to town and competing with incumbent businesses for finite
spending in a community. Wal-Mart just competes for a larger share of
it, and within a bigger geographic area. As a result, the hope of this
research is to better frame the friend-or-foe debate over Wal-Mart.

Given the terror that Wal-Mart is purported to inflict on communities,
the fedgazette's findings of the firm's economic influence are almost
mundane. Despite its kill-them-all reputation, Wal-Mart is not the
threat that many fear, at least in terms of economic benchmarks commonly
associated with healthy, growing communities.

For example, Wal-Mart is widely believed to destroy local firms and jobs
and to have a dampening effect on wages. But fedgazette findings suggest
the opposite: Firm growth, employment and total earnings were somewhat
stronger in Wal-Mart counties and, in some cases, even in the retail
sector. The research does suggest that retail earnings per job fell in
virtually all counties studied. But they actually fell by less in
Wal-Mart counties.