Is Wal Mart Good for America?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/view/

Don't care that much about the topic. But in the first minute of the first video, it shows a massive wal mart share holder rally (reminds me of a Hitler rally). But at the rally there was a large contingent holding the flag of Vietnam.

I know this was posted a while ago, but I'll try to answer anyway.

In America there is a lot of hype against Wal-mart literally "curb stomping" local businesses and destroying mom and pop stores because they can no longer compete. However, the case is simply that Wal-mart isn't the all powerful evil which everyone makes it out to be. Just like how fast food chains don't destroy local restaurants, Wal-mart isn't going to compete with high quality good manufactures. People can cry all they want but it brings jobs to the people, improves the standard of living, and helps bring some materials which weren't available before to the people (when I was traveling to Alaska, people loved the Wal-mart in Ketchikan simply because they couldn't get general goods anywhere else).

People say that they treat their employers unfairly, give horrible benefits, and bad pay. However they have yet to open their eyes to the fast food chains which dominate the land-scape and they don't seem to have a problem with it; only because they provide services in one section of the industry, not multiple sections like Wal-mart can offer.

All in all, this is just another example of an American buisness dominateing the market and expanding chains across the globe, exploiting labor of poor nations.
This is nothing new, the food industries have been doing this for a very long time, and no one seems to care. Isn't this country great?

I disagree. I know people who had earned modest but good businesses that were effected by MALL-WART's presence abd they do pose a problem for everyday people trying to make a living. Yes they provide many jobs, but if you look at it consequentially, for every job the walmart creates three are lost. And now they have the nerve to beg the commons for help in insuring their employed. Interesting thing is that in places like India walmarts are not allowed to have a business inside their country.

Quote:

earned modest but good businesses

In over saturated markets which Wal-Mart provides at cheaper and better rates. If you can get the same quality chair from China as you can in America, and the chair in China is 30 dollars cheaper I don't see how buying in America helps anything. You are promoting economic inefficacy. Having people with 30 more dollars in their pocket helps the economy and common welfare of the people.

It provides everyone with more money and the ability to buy more goods, and to low income families this can mean only buying lunch-dinner, to breakfast-lunch-dinner; and to me this is very important.

If you want the over inflated value of the U.S dollar to buy inefficient goods which can be produced in other countries far cheaper than go ahead. But don't argue against Wal-Mart being an economic weight, because it isn't.

Quote:

If you can get the same quality chair from China as you can in America, and the chair in China is 30 dollars cheaper I don't see how buying in America helps anything.

It helps to maintain the privileges of the American bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy against the perspectives of development of a thirld world country.
The weight of Wal Mart is as an imperialist financial giant influencing WTO policies, trade treaties, governments, invading the weak markets of the thirld world, dumping wages in the global competition... For that reason the solidal internationalist unity of the world's workers is needed, to keep wages and rights high worldwide, instead of the labour aristocracy's anti-delocalization and protectionistic campaigns typical of some reactionary trade unions in the first world.

Its just the manifestation of monoply capitalism.