Ah yes, the “Free Market”. The one where the biggest company in the world demands TIF money and corporate welfare in order to bless a neighborhood with one of their stores while those mom & pops are left to compete in the “real” market.

I truly believe Wal-Mart is the root of all evil as is popular opinion. They are typically cruel to their workers (there was an incident in my town when Wal-Mart first moved in where they framed employees for shoplifting and then engaged in illegal interrogation in back rooms of the store which was allowed by a loophole in corporate policy), they use incredibly unethical practices to keep their prices low, and have been a large part of the rise of inflation over the years.

However it doesn’t hurt to hear of a good experience once in a while. It’s..possibly refreshing to hear that Wal-Mart is being careful, creating example stores that try to disprove their bad reputation. Clearly everything they’re doing in this store is being very careful with their corporate policy, trying desperately (and even a little blatantly) to prove that they care about their employees and it appears to be working.

It really doesn’t matter if he was trying to live off the Wal-Mart wage, or how long he worked there. The important part of this story is that you can’t monitor and understand any entity until you’ve heard every angle. I personally chose to understand the angle of this story as being an example of how Wal-Mart is careful to create a caring corporate identity even though it’s not truly who they are when you take a closer look.

You have completely missed the point here, whether accidentally or willfully. The only place you actually touch on the question of pay is where you note that workers can increase their wage with training courses, but as has already been noted, you neither state the amount of the increase or if this policy even existed when Barbara Ehrenreich wrote her book. Mr. Pratt, you completely failed to address the argument you claim to have disproved.

And for everyone who seems to think some people aren’t forced to try survive by working at Walmart, I’d like to know which reality they live in, because it sure as hell isn’t the one I know.

1. The Cult of Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart exhibits some clearly cultist behavior. It has large pictures of the found and his sayings in the back common room. The opening cheer of the day is another thing I find cultish. The fact there are no last names at the store and the different language used, tops off this section. Alcohol is even frowned on. I remember my SWAS manager saying that during his training that he got very, very dirty looks when he ordered a beer on company dime at a dinner with other managers. Tobacco and firearms are not sold in stores in Canada either. I know they are in the States though. The moralism also extends to profanity where they don’t allow anything “offensive” sold in their stores, including profanity in songs. (company policy)

2. Low Wages that don’t go up

Wal-Mart doesn’t just keep prices low by squeezing the producers, they squeeze the employees. The managers get incentives to keep your wages down. I certainly didn’t have my pay increase when I got better skills. I think the most squeezed though are the assistant managers in the store. For the work they do, they are the least paid. (From what I heard)

If you can get past those two points, Wal-Mart is a great place to work. For all the good reasons mentioned in the original post. Safety and regulations are adhered to impeccably. If you do what is in your job description, you have nothing to worry about.

If you want to avoid the cult, get into one of the sub-stores, like the tire-lube express or the pharmacy, they are pretty sheltered. There is just no way to get paid more by these people.

It would be nice if they didn’t have to, but I don’t think it’s fair to say the parents “really couldn’t afford to have kids” if what they couldn’t afford was to put them through college.

Yeah, it’s not like those things are causally related or anything. ::sarcasm::

+10

I wondered to what extent a preconceived agenda might have biased her reporting

Gee, ya think? 100% correct you are. Except that I couldn’t call it “reporting”. Ehrenreich- who, as a scientist should have known and practiced better- simply took her attitude and tried to create data (or something like it) to support it. I do remember he saying at some point in her book that she wasn’t trying to do a precisely controlled experiment. That’s obvious… I haven’t read Scratch Beginnings, but I imagine that to some degree or other Adam Shepard may well have indulged in the same sort of bias validation. He doesn’t, however, have anywhere as much emotional/political baggage as Ehrenreich, who somehow fails to make much of the fact (or even mention) that she’s head-first and ankle-deep in the Democratic Socialists of America.

OK – “small businesses” who try to compete with WalMart fail.

Businesses fail every day. Do you propose a national program which props up every business, which makes it impossible for any business to fail?

Good luck with that.

Generally speaking, when a business fails it’s because its customers decide to take their business elsewhere. Why do customers do that? Better price, more selection, more convenience … the reasons are as varied as the consumers themselves.

Do you believe consumers who shop at WalMart should be denied that right in order to prop up the mom & pop’s?

The premise of so many of these comments is that consumers who shop & the people who work at WalMart are idiots in need of protection from their betters. Strikes me as incredibly arrogant.

Actually he attended college on a basketball scholarship.

How are people ever supposed to better themselves when they are always giving the minimum amount?

A lot of people on here seem to think that it’s OK for people to have to struggle while the fat cat bosses rake in more and more every year and screw suppliers for every penny they can.

Just take this current climate, is it the people at the top who have created this mess who are struggling to survive?

It’s about time that these elite few was taxed more so that there is better Education, better Health care and better social security for a better society.

He asked why the Unions are targeting Wal-Mart; of course they are going to target the biggest companies as it trickles down to everyone. They are hardly going to target a corner shop now are they?

My friend at Safeway made more then the my other friend and I and is actually moved up with the company. At Costco my managers loved me and wanted to move me into the meat department but I left for an internship at the Denver Business Journal. My friend at Walmart on the other hand… The worst paid out of us, with the worst manager and ended up getting hurt because a pallet stack he warned management about fell over on him.

Walmart lets it’s management ruin it’s reputation and need to clean up shop.

How are people ever supposed to better themselves when they are always giving the minimum amount?

A lot of people on here seem to think that it’s OK for people to have to struggle while the fat cat bosses rake in more and more every year and screw suppliers for every penny they can.

Just take this current climate, is it the people at the top who have created this mess who are struggling to survive?

It’s about time that these elite few was taxed more so that there is better Education, better Health care and better social security for a better society.

He asked why the Unions are targeting Wal-Mart; of course they are going to target the biggest companies as it trickles down to everyone. They are hardly going to target a corner shop now are they?

What about having kids as a pension plan?

The popular belief that, at large, offspring will grow up to achieve a higher standard of living than their parents, is false.

“As for all those Wal-Mart horror stories—when I went home and checked the web sites that attack the company, I found that many of them are subsidized with union money. … Why are unions so obsessed with Wal-Mart? I’m guessing that if the more-than-a-million Wal-Mart employees could be unionized, they would be compelled to contribute at least half a billion dollars per year in union dues.” (emphasis added)

If Mr. Platt’s agenda or bias weren’t already obvious, this snn question revealed his anti-Union stance. Only a die hard anti-Union writer would ascribe bad motives to organizations that are fulfilling their explicit mandate.

Mr. Platt’s rhetorical question is as malicious as asking “why do hospitals have ambulances? I bet it’s so they can get patients to get millions in medical bills.” Or, more topically, “why do the Steelers players try to score touch downs? I bet it’s so the organization can make more money from the fans.”

Unions have the explicit goal of organizing and protecting workers. Monitoring the activities of an anti-Union organization, which is not only the largest retailer in the United States, but (from the Union’s point of view at least) underpays its workers and treats them poorly, would obviously be something one would expect of a Union.

Mr. Pltt wrt ths rtcl n bd fth.

Not only that, but somebody has to actually make the car you drive, the bus you ride, the train that delivers goods to the part of the country you live in and the truck that delivers them to the WalMart you shop at. And some of the consumer goods you buy are even still *gasp* made right here in the USA, rather than in some Chinese sweatshop. So moving everyone “up” to a non-manufacturing job would do what, exactly? In a society composed exclusively of investment fund managers and white-collar corporate execs, where would the everyday goods come from, and how would they get to where they need to go?

I’m getting the impression you’ve never seen the inside of a factory, and have never actually known anyone who worked in one. And no, at this point nothing you say will convince me otherwise, because you’ve already made it clear how truly naive you are.

Look, you started out with an agenda, and you made some valid counterpoints. It’s dishonest for you to pretend at neutrality.

As for Adam Shephard, I would like to suggest that he also develop schizophrenia, a drug habit, a history of abuse, a poor or non-existent education, extremely poor personal hygiene stemming from a life of neglect, and weak bones and muscles due to malnutrition … and then try his little experiment again. You may be incorrect, but Shephard is just a dipshit.

Umm, one of the fundamental precepts of neoclassical economics (the basic religion of the free market: “Our market which art in equilibrium, hallowed be thy name, thy will be done, as thy invisible hand fondles us”) is that corporations big enough to effect the market are absolutely harmful to it (how could they not be? Free doesn’t just mean free from unions and the state, it means free of ANY organisation big enough to have undue influence on it – monopolies, monopsonies, oligopolies… all bad, ok yah?), and generally blamed on the result of government intervention.

Not my opinion (I think the post-autistic economics movement is rather more rational and interesting), but an article splooging for the holy Free Market would be helped by showing at least some understanding of it, and its precepts.

You can’t just go and work at Walmart for a couple of weeks and then pronounce from upon high. Even Charles Dickens took longer way than that ooop North researching Hard Times, and still never really scratched the surface. Personal anecdotes and cheap ad-hominems do not research make. Populist Daily Mail churnalism for sure, but not science.

Sure any given individual may be able to make it, with hard work, and an upbringing sufficient that they can write a book about it. But can all individuals? Only the worthy? Can individuals who aren’t just poverty-tourists, slumming it in order to write books and articles, that have damn all relevance to the people they are writing about and exploiting maury povich style?

Point scoring is easy, understanding is hard. I wonder why people always go for the former.

CostCo treats it’s workers much better. My mother-in-law has worked there for years, climbing up from product demos to mid-management – with middle class wages and good benefits the entire time. I’m kinda shocked the author didn’t mention this well known comparison. And although unions are allowed there – it’s not completely unionized.

for any of the above answers the qualifying statement would be that he borrowed the money for the car from his grandmother

Note that I am not saying Charles Platt is an astroturfer for Wal-Mart, or that he is in any other way corrupt. I hope I know better than that. I’m not sure what would happen to someone who tried to bribe Platt, but I have faith that it would be bad. Also, he’s just plain flat-out entitled to his views, and that’s that.

All I’m saying is that if I were looking for an example of a capitalist enterprise succeeding via competition in the open market, Wal-Mart’s not who I’d pick. IMO, they’re an example of that other pattern, where companies that become big and successful use their power to try to get rid of that pesky level playing field.

The reason so many public-interest groups target Wal-Mart is that they’re experts at shifting their costs onto other payers (taxpayers, mostly), and pressuring local authorities into giving them tax abatements and other subsidies. (Quick summary version.) It’s not what I’d imagine Howard Roark doing.

Cicada @10, Wegman’s and Costco both have good reputations.

Cicada again @56:

Being sane, not addicted to drugs, and without kids is “rigging the game”?

Say rather that being single, in good health, effectively childless, and otherwise unattached, not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and having reliable transportation, orderly finances, and a place to live that’s not a constant source of stress, doesn’t recreate the full experience of being poor in America.

Kaden @66, feel free to expand on that.

Morningstar @69, I take it you’ve never had to put that into practice. It’s not nearly as simple as you think.

A_B @76, I’d be happy to let you make exactly the same points if you would scale back the adjectives.

Baldhead @99, that’s extremely unrealistic. If you aren’t aware of the basic fact that in many parts of the country it’s impossible to live and work without a car, you don’t understand the situation.

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