Carnival of Wal-Mart

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Starling Hunter at The Business of America is Business puts together collections of weblog posts on a couple of topics on a regular basis. One of those is Wal-Mart, and he included one of my posts in his latest collection:  Carnival of Wal-Mart III.

Among the others, there are posts about Chicago and Maryland’s new employment laws that affect (or, in Maryland’s case, would have affected) Wal-Mart employees, Wal-Mart’s failure in Germany, the Walton family’s shrinking tax bill,  and Wal-Mart’s new shoplifting policy.

Starling Hunter has worked at Boeing as an Electrical Engineer, at Exxon, at MIT’s Sloan School of
Management, and now at American University of
Sharjah, "just outside of Dubai, United Arab Emirates". His perspective on Wal-Mart is, unsurprisingly, definitely different from mine — but I do like his take on Rockonomics.

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The Wal-Mart Bargain

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John Lanchester, "The Price of Pickles", London Review of Books, vol. 28, No. 1, 22 June 2006. — Link.

Robert Reich, "Don’t Blame Wal-Mart", New York Times, February 28, 2005. — Link.

The good thing about Wal-Mart stores is well-known, simple, and can be stated in three of the company’s own words: Always Low Prices. The bad things about Wal-Mart are what it does to get those prices low. These are now also well known: cut costs remorselessly and exploit the benefits of scale.

Few would argue with the claim that a low price is, by itself, a good thing. The trouble is that there is no such thing as "low price, by itself". Wal-Mart’s low prices are unavoidably one side of a two-sided coin. Wal-Mart knows how to push its costs onto others so that the prices on their shelves stay low: how to buy land cheap and still get subsidies from cities, how to pay so little that employees in many US states rely on government programs for health care and food stamps, how to squeeze suppliers so that they have to export jobs, and so on. … Continue reading

Worth Reading: On Suburbia

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Saturday’s Grope & Flail has a fine article by architect Jack Diamond on the whole suburbia and sprawl thing. It’s behind the subscription wall, but here are a few excerpts:

   
       
       
      
 
 
   
   
   

Most new urban growth occurs on the perimeter of urban centres, and
does so at densities that render residents of those areas
automobile-dependent — such low densities make public transit
uneconomic. Paradoxically, this also means that significant sectors of
the population are rendered immobile. Those who don’t own cars, or who
are too young or old to drive, have no alternative means of
transportation. Automobile dependency also acts as a social centrifuge,
segregating land use and socio-economic groupings into discernibly
distinct areas. Indeed, urban poverty is now centred in suburban
growth, where it is largely invisible, distant from inaccessible, but
desperately needed jobs, social services and retail facilities. The
rioting in Paris suburbs is an instance of the results of this
festering, but unrecognized, problem.

      
 
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UnMarkets Everywhere: A Courageous “Blogger”

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From the recently-discovered weblog of Michael Perelman, an uplifting story about a civic-minded news service in Monrovia, Liberia.

Perelman says:

I don’t really have a good foundation in this
technology. I realize that it doesn’t take much to sit at a keyboard
and make grant pronouncements about the way the world should be.

Today I read in the New York Times about the
“blogger” using centuries-old technology in a way that puts the modern
media to shame.

The article describes Alfred Sirleaf, the
33-year-old managing editor of The Daily Talk, a white plywood shed
trumpeting the latest headlines along Tubman Boulevard, one of the
capital’s main thoroughfares.

He writes his stories very carefully on large
blackboards and even makes accommodations to help communicate the
material to illiterates. He had to struggle to get a high school
education. He has been arrested. And yet he continues to persevere.

And most of all the displays a spirit that puts the the corporate media to shame.

From the New York Times article:

The shoestring operation brings him no income.

“I just manage along with whatever money … Continue reading

Book Review in Winnipeg Free Press

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Thanks to MC for letting me know about this. From Sunday’s Winnipeg Free Press:

A different take on consumer power

Sunday, July 30th, 2006. Reviewed by Lindsey Wiebe

‘WE
make choices every day," writes Ontario author Tom Slee. "We choose the
clothes we wear, the way we travel, the movies we watch, and the places
we shop."

But even with all this choice, Slee says, the rich are getting richer, while the middle class and poor are losing ground.

"What has gone wrong?" he asks in this thought-provoking mix of academic and social critique.

"Why is it that with more choices than any in society in history, we do not get what we want?"

These basic questions form the underpinnings of this first book by the Waterloo software professional and researcher.

In
it, Slee explores the pitfalls of a free-market economy; in particular,
what he refers to as "MarketThink," the idea that consumers control the
market, and can hold corporations accountable.

Slee does his
best to debunk this mindset, arguing that even the most reasonable of
individual decisions can produce negative results for the general
public.

Much of the book … Continue reading