How come I never hear people denigrating Target with it's severely over-priced crapola? Their wages, in many cases, are lower than Walmart. Or how about ShopKo, which pays some of the lowest wages of all even though their prices have gone way up?
Bruce McQuain sums it up so beautifully in his article today:
Jordan Weissmann has a piece in The Atlantic entitled “Who’s Really to Blame for the Wal-Mart Strikes? The American Consumer.”
Balderdash.
While I will admit that the demands of the American consumer being partly responsible for the wage scale paid by Wal-Mart, I frankly see no consumer liability in that responsibility. Wal-Mart saw a need, constructed a model and has successfully fulfilled that demand. And last I checked, no one has twisted anyone’s arm or marched them into Wal-Mart and made them take a job.
The American consumer’s role? It is like us saying “you can have open borders or you can have a welfare state, but you can’t have both”. You can demand the lowest prices or you can demand “mom and pop” be saved and pay their workers more (but then you have to commit to voluntarily doing business and paying higher prices) but you can’t have both.
Weissmann is essentially claiming that the consumer is to blame for impending strikes by demanding lower prices. Lower prices mean lower pay and because Wal-Mart isn’t paying a “living wage”, it’s employees are striking. Again it’s a part of the left’s disingenuous”fairness” argument. read the rest
More:
Tom Woods: Walmart Protests Amount to Little
Conservative Hideout: Union Thug Alert: Refuse to Talk to Media, Walmart Black Friday Protest Failure
Boston Hereld: Walmart reporting best Black Friday ever
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