Summary
Two studies reveal that Walmart’s entry into communities lowers household incomes by 6% over 10 years and increases poverty by 8%, even when accounting for cost savings.
Its practices, such as undercutting competitors, suppressing wages, and squeezing suppliers, harm local economies by reducing employment and forcing smaller businesses to close.
Walmart’s “monopsony power” enables it to pay lower wages and dominate suppliers, compounding these effects.
The findings challenge the idea that low prices alone benefit communities, emphasizing long-term economic harm.
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Another quality-of-life lowering thing caused by Walmart/Amazon that’s obvious but they didn’t go into, is that once Walmart and Amazon have eliminated so many local businesses, everyone is forced to shop at them. Even if we don’t want to, we have nowhere else to go–we can’t just boycott them and still get stuff we need.
Walmart decides what you will and won’t have access to buy. They’ve pared down the variety of brands and offer a subset of items by those brands minimum, for their efficiency of ordering and stocking items, including groceries. Then the brands stop making the items that Walmart decided not to stock, so they’re gone. There are still a few other grocery stores but most have them have merged into a few mega-grocery chains with the same issues as with Walmart.
So even if you’re OK with going to Walmart your choices are limited (those of us old enough to remember things we used to be able to buy that are long gone these days may notice this more). So what it’s come down to is you get what Walmart offers you, or you order it from Amazon or Temu. There are still a few places to get real things of good quality, but they’re harder to find, never local stores, so you have to order online sight unseen, and of course it’s an expensive and time-consuming process compared to being able to just go to the store and grab something.