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Walmart is not the pinnacle of economic responsibility. Not even close.

sustainable, responsible business development, shall we?

Illustration: John Hendrix

I found myself reading a stream of conversation regarding Walmart on Facebook recently lauding Walmark as the hallmark of all that is good in America and how the Waltons are exemplars of what is right in business. It was linked to an article in Forbes I found so insulting I refuse to credit it with a link.

One of these water-bearers for Walmart explained how the company was well known for its corporate responsibility and its responsibility to its workers.

to its employees and that making Walmart -time to avoid paying any form of medical benefits made perfectly good business sense. Stop.

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Just stop.

STOP talking about Walmart as if they are doing a public service by having stores. Just from what I have learned from doing my research, Walmart and by proxy, the Waltons, is the equivalent of a blue whale sifting the ocean, extracting plankton by the ton using its stores as the baleen, stripping money from the economy, while returning as little as possible to its workers and those communities.

The straight skinny on Walmart and deplorable wage structures are public knowledge if you know where to look:

paid at that level.

A spokesman clarified for the Huffington Post that in fact less than one half of one percent of its hourly workers, which it calls associates, make the state or federal minimum wage.

Yet that figure leaves out the fact that the low-wage retailer relies heavily on part-time workers. And a recent survey of Walmart locations found that over half are only hiring temporary workers, not full-time positions.

And even if workers are making more than the $7.25 minimum wage floor, they may not be making much more. The company claims that full-time workers make $12.78 an hour, but an IBIS World report puts that number at $8.81.

$1 million worth of public benefits, such as food stamps and Medicaid, at one location alone. The

While it is easy to say that Walmart should be able to make as much money as the market will bear while paying the least amount to its employees and that the company has no obligation to pay its workers any more than the market will bear but consider this:

e does not afford a worker who is working full time with enough to pay for a two bedroom apartment anywhere in the nation.

-time associate earns as little as $21,811 per year.

That salary, according to the Living Wage Calculator

Kentucky, and $26,000 less in Dutchess County, New York. (A living wage is one that enables a household to meet basic needs such as housing, food and medical care.) [2]

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This means any worker who is working a minimum wage job is putting in 40 hours of work and must still find another 20 hours somewhere to actually make the money necessary to pay the rent, pay their bills, buy food, pay for gasoline and provide whatever other sundries their household may need for any particular month.

Working 40 to 60 hours a week and still often able to be eligible for social services, such as food but

the company should be able to force the US government to subsidize these workers[3] (to the tune of $6.2 billion dollars a year in public assistance) who do not earn enough to live on. In effect, putting money into the pockets of owners while taking it out of the pockets of taxpayers.

THIS IS UNCONSCIONABLE.

The Price of Doing Business?

When I was a New Yorker and was occasionally mugged, it was considered an occupational hazard. You gave the mugger the $20 you set aside for that kind of thing and no one got hurt. That $20 likely made a significant difference in the life of that mugger. Definitely not worth getting killed over.

day or a week. When corporations undermine the social fabric of our nation by exploiting their power to allow them to pay as litttheir employees.

-being of their employees. Walmart has even had to pay out through legal actions due to their less than effective management style:

Wal

s of class-action lawsuits that WSJ , 11/21/12). In a separate

2010 case [4]

A $188 million wage-theft lawsuit employees further cemecontract. [8]

to live on the wages their organization pays. The money they earn does not appreciable change

employees and giving them benefits, this would, in a significant way, change the lives of their employees significantly for the better.

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Removing the desperation, the need to work 60 hours to earn what an effective living wage would provide at 40 hours. 20 hours they can put into their families, 20 hours they could put into the social fabric, keeping their children on track, keeping their households together; stabilizing both the economy and society at large, reducing stress, reducing accidents, reducing falling asleep at the wheel, heart attacks, strokes, and high blood pressure, just to name a few afflictions living a full-time

The Waltons are so rich they cannot see past their perspective on money to understand how their policies harm their employees.

You see, keeping people poor has more than the effect of making Walmart RICHER. Because

every penny they STEAL from their employees is simply done by what could be attributed to malice, because they enjoy watching their 1.6 million employees unable to do anything but show up to their offices as miserable as possible, as stress as possible with as FEW options as possible.

I will tell you, if this is the best the richest and most powerful family in the nation can offer its workers, a life of desperate poverty, struggling to make ends meet while mocking them with less

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hours, less opportunities, less health care and calling this a successful business model, then all of us are screwed.

Because ultimately, every corporation in the nation will, if they grow large enough, be in exactly the same straits as Walmart one day.

Diminishing returns as their companies grow larger, with less money being spent, businesses costing more to run, expenses increasing, profits slowly declining as they become larger. With more outlets but losing profits, their only margin they can exploit effectively is wages.

Doubt this: much money will it take to maintain the monolith that Walmart has become? Who will be paying the cost in energy, in resources, in exploited manpower, natural resources harvested, objects manufactured, toxins created from the creation of cheap products, materials shipped, products made, garbage created. Who pays this cost? [5]

All of us will. As Walmarts, McDonalds, Burger Kings and other super-franchises blanket the country it can only make the economic fabric of the nation more tenuous and fewer and fewer workers can afford to sustain these vast networks of corporations.

Take a look at this projection chart of the Growth of Walmart and Sams Club stores. (Click this link for the annual growth interactive map. [6])

Watch the Growth of Walmart and Sam's Club Across America | FlowingData Walmart (blue) started slow in 1962 and then spread like wildfire in the southeast, starting in 1970,

projects.flowingdata.com

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What makes this worse is that this graphic stops in 2010 with 4,393 stores. In 2014 there are more than 11,000 Walmart stores in the US. What you need to see is what happens when you zoom in and look at the areas where there is a store every couple of miles, draining the economy of the areas into the coffers of Walmart, while returning far less TO those economies than they take away. It looks like an economic dragnet sweeping across the country.

Walmart wants to sell this like there is a symbiosis but considering how little Walmart returns to these local economies, in terms of taxes, wages and investment in the areas, this looks a lot more like parasitism.

How can Walmart make a profit dropping stores every few miles?

fast food franchises and any other megacorporation that resembles a ponzi scheme, or cancer cluster.

They have to keep growing in order to make a profit to they use to develop a new chain of stores to fund the ever growing pyramid of costs. Each growth wave provides less profit than the last. This means they have to keep cutting costs to keep up with their expenses.

bulk, they ship in bulk, they get the best rates you can buy on cheaply made crap from all over the world (read that as mostly China).

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Nothing you buy fto cut there. They are already buying the cheapest land possible since the economic collapse has made real estate as cheap as it has been since Whites stole the land from the Native Americans.

So there is only one place left to trim margins: the staff. Cut their hours to part-time, reduce their

minimum wage, ergo $8.81.

How long before Walmart fails to hire any full time staff? Five years? Maybe less before every store will only hire part time staff. Only their offices will have full time workers and only the executives will make any real money.

Walmart and any business that works like they do is DOOMED.

They will be able to stave of their cannibalization of themselves only by moving overseas where they can get cheaper land and cheaper workers to funnel more money to the top while they strip mine the planet making crappy products no one needs, that are imminently disposable, but not recyclable, cheaply made, but expensively sold.

Not in price. But in the social, economic, cultural and personal price paid by every employee enough vision left in this country to

realize, you cannot have a consumerist economy when no one has enough money to be a consumer.

Are you sure you want to cheer for them?

Carry water for corporations like Walmart if you like. But you cannot blame anyone but yourself when their business practices become the practices of EVERY bloated corporation needing to make profit for their board room masters, who are entirely concerned with profits, and far less than the effects of their world-spanning corporations are doing to the drones stuck working for them, too poor to buy even the cheapest of their products.

of control without concern for the environment in which they exist in to sustain them. They have cut their staffing so much [7] they can no longer even stock the shelves in thousands of stores across the nation.

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From the Concord Monitor, in Concord NH.

It is already a well kept secret they have been closing stores in areas that can no longer support the economic drain on the local economies. Walmart and corporations like it are little more than

This was the question asked of me when I wrote everything above it in my response to the conversation in Facebook. My answer was:

le without people to buy products, skipping all of the other variables I mentioned. No one to buy, nothing else happens.

If you are wealthy enough to be able to buy everything you have been buying since 2009, God Bless You. Most people are nowhere near as fortunate. Their hours are long and their dollars are short.

enough money left in circulation in the hands of people who buy things at the scales needed to support their businesses:

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THEN THEY DESERVE TO GO OUT OF BUSINESS.

Sigh. At this point I was clear I wasn't making myself understood. My final volley at trying to be clear to the waterbearers for Walmart.

COUNTRY.

They are like drug addileaving the US for larger populations hoping this will stave off the growth issues they are having,

They are growing at a such a rate that what took them twenty years to achieve once upon a time, they will have the money and tools to accomplish in five. Doubling up until they simply have NO MORE NEW FRONTIERS to exploit. Then they will simply collapse in on themselves unless someone has been doing the smart thing and shutting the business down, in a controlled burn or controlled implosion.

allow the corporation to die, liquidate what they can, take their cut off the top and let the wonders of bankruptcy deal with the ruins.

Privatizing the gains, and socializing the losses. Business as usual in the US of A.

corporation that they are. We see them as an individual location or eight in our neighborhoods. We

This is a problem of scale. When a corporation reaches the scale of Walmart, they are like a force of nature, with long-term, unpredictable, long-lasting environmental effects no one has ever given thought to, let alone expected to have to deal with.

Nor do I expect you as an individual who has read this far to be responsible for making change on your own.

I expect you to take the time and do a bit more research. Look at Costco, and its CEO who draws down a mere $300,000 a year and pays his workers a living wage. Sustainable corporations are possible, no, they are necessary if any of us are to have a future at all.

I expect you to consider all of the reasons we need to get corporations like Walmart who cover the landscape of our nation as a fishing net, drawing away billions in profit while returning less and less to those same communities, to do better, not just for themselves but for society as a whole.

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If this isn't changed, those corporations will grow fantastically rich, their founders will have a great payday and the carcasses of their empty storefronts will litter the landscape of our once-great nation when they are unable to sustain themselves any further.

We deserve better than that, wouldn't you agree?

Living Wage Calculator Living Wage Calculation for Boyle County, Kentucky.30 Nov. 2014. <http://livingwage.mit.edu/>

Thinkprogress.org. N.p. Web. 30 Nov. 2014. <http://thinkprogress.org/>

Report: Walmart Workers Cost Taxpayers $6.2 Billion In Public AssistanceForbes.com. N.p. Web. 30 Nov. 2014. <www.forbes.com>

Hemlockontherocks.com. N.p. Web. 30 Nov. 2014. <http://www.hemlockontherocks.com/>

<http://www.motherjones.com/>

Nov. 2014. <http://projects.flowingdata.com/>

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Wal-Mart Customers Complain Bare Shelves Are Widespread.Web. 30 Nov. 2014. <http://www.bloomberg.com/>

Walmart ordered to pay $188 million in Pennsylvania wage theft lawsuitWeb. 17 Dec. 2014. <http://www.dailykos.com/>

Originally published on on Nov 30, 2014 on Medium.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Thaddeus Howze is a California-based technologist and author who has worked with computer technology since the 1980's doing graphic design, computer science, programming, network administration and IT leadership.