Wal-Mart Updates
Since the campaigns to damage (or destroy) Wal-Mart have shaped up (at least to me) to be part of the wider left-right political debate, I thought I'd take note of some recent news items:
While wakeupwalmart.com and the other union organizations aren't likely to be successful in unionizing (and thus destroying) Wal-Mart, they are getting a little success through the back door. Apparently as many as 30 states are considering legislation to force Wal-Mart to devote 8-11% of its payroll to health insurance. This follows an attempt at similar legislation in Maryland that was vetoed by Gov. Ehrlich last May.
The problem with the Maryland bill was not just the intrusion into business. The bill, sponsored by Democrats and heavily supported by unions and Wal-Mart's competitors, was targeted directly at Wal-Mart. The threshold was set at 10,000 employees, and only 3 or 4 businesses in the state are large enough. Wal-Mart was the only one not saddled with company-crippling union-mandated health plans and thus would have been the only one to be subject to the tax. Supporters promise to resurrect this ill-concieved plan this year. Although their chances for overriding the veto are good, I expect this bill will be successfully challenged in court based on its discriminatory nature, and potential conflict with existing federal labor law. Should that occur, the other 30 or so states will likely abandon their similar bills.
Remember the Zogby poll sponsored by WakeUpWalMart that said 56% of Americans thought Wal-Mart was "bad for America"? Turns out that that John Zogby may have had a conflict of interest issue - he was accepting money for testimony against Wal-Mart in civil suits (here's an analysis of the Zogby poll by Mark Blumenthal at Mystery Pollster). A more recent poll (Jan. 4) appears to effectively disspell the Zogby poll as hopelessly skewed (more details here).
The poll, sponsored by Working Families for Wal-Mart, also exposes an interesting fact. The vast majority of union members shop at Wal-Mart - 32% shop regularly, 64% shop occasionally, for a whopping 96%. Amazing how union members act counter to their leadership time and time again. Maybe if union leadership paid attention to their members instead of their political interests....
Last week, it appears that Wal-Mart was a victim of their own website. Someone did a search on a Planet of the Apes video, and the site recommended a Martin Luther King video as a "similar item". Naturally, the anti-Wal-Mart troops rallied around this as proof that Wal-Mart is a racist institution. Wal-Mart says the mistake was just over-zealous marketing, as the MLK film was cross-referenced to disparate items in order to spur sales.
Incidentally, if you search "similar items" to "Wal-mart - The High Cost of Low Price" (paperback) at Amazon.com, you get a list that includes a children's book called "Missing Pieces (Red Rock Mysteries)" by Jerry B. Jenkins & Chris Fabry (Screen Shot Here) . Here's part of the description:
Someone is playing mailbox baseball in the town where Bryce and Ashley Timberline live. All clues point to their stepsister’s boyfriend, Randy, and Bryce is determined to prove it. Will Randy find out before they can discover the truth?
Also in the same list is a breathless conspiracy book about 9-11 (The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions And Distortions by David Ray Griffen) that claims the Bush administration was actively involved in the planning and execution of the 9-11 attacks.
Is Amazon making a statement about the maturity and intelligence of the anti-Wal-Mart crowd?
To round out this round-up, there's a press release from Institute for America's Future (a far-left group) that claims Wal-Mart "sucked more than $20 billion out of local economies across America this holiday season". The basis for their analysis are figures from Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR). Among ILSR's claims to fame is an apparently famous study of a McDonalds:
ILSR also tracked the dollar flows of a neighborhood franchise--MacDonald's--in study that remains a classic. We found that of the $750,000 spent there almost two-thirds left not only the neighborhood but the metropolitan area. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we insisted that every time a fast food restaurant opened the number of jobs in the local economy actually declined.
I patiently await their study of the disproportionately high income McDonald's brings in to Oak Brook, Illinois, or a similar study of the effect of Target or Best Buy (both based in ILSR's backyard of Minneapolis). Or how about a historical analysis of the effects of the Sears Catalog in small towns during the 1950's?
Update: The link for Institute for America's Future is good, aparently their website is having problems.
