Did you hear the news? Coming soon, 1500 more communities will be able to buy cheap plastic crap from China! Get out the party hats and blue vests!
That's right kids, WalMart's coming to town!
But what about that title of mine?
I firmly believe that WalMart is personally responsible for accellerating the decline of the American economy. This megacorporation, which is currently more than 2% of the entire GDP of the United States, is bent on
destroying workers' rights, actively seeks to
destroy communities with mom & pop stores (i.e. "competition"), is responsible for
10% of the US trade deficit with China, trashes the
environment both through manufacturing and constructing new stores, has been responsible for
driving numerous companies out of the US to manufacture goods cheaper and cheaper in other countries, causes ... oh, I could go on and on.
In a nutshell, WalMart is bad for America, and especially the American economy. It is capitalism taken to its logical and terrible extreme, rolling over everything in its endless quest for the Almighty Dollar. Because it is helping to destroy the economies of small communities, both through killing all competition and instantly shipping off the profits out of the local economy, it is destroying the ability of middle- and low-income Americans to survive in an increasingly "have/have not" society.
It is a downward spiral -- people feel they don't have enough money to shop anywhere else, people work at low-paying part-time jobs without benefits because the better-paying jobs have been destroyed, people have less and less to spend, people feel they have no money to shop anywhere else... on down to the bottom of the heap. Considering that WalMart's stated goal is to encompass 25% of the GDP of the United States, I think there is no question what "the WalMart effect" will do to our already fragile national economy in the near future. They're already nudging it closer and closer to the edge of the cliff.