Interesting story in today’s Times O.C. edition regarding the proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter for Garden Grove. This is of course a controversial issue. The unions and some religious organizations despise Wal-Mart because they pay less than unionized supermarkets. There is a sentiment amongst some religious extremists that Wal-Mart is anti-poor.
In truth, Wal-Mart serves the poor better than any other retailer. The Wal-Mart in Santa Ana is one of the top grossing Wal-Mart stores in the nation. It is always full. The folks that shop there are predominantly poor Latinos. Why do they shop there? Because they can buy nice items for their home at a low price. It really is that simple.
As for the employment and salary issues, let’s face it – Wal-Mart creates hundreds of jobs at each of its stores – many of those stores serve economically depressed areas where there are no jobs to be had. They also employ elderly workers that simply cannot find work at all.
As for the health care issue, Wal-Mart recently led the charge against high-priced prescription medicines when they dropped the price of hundreds of generic medicines to only $4 per bottle. Then they began to open low-priced medical clinics – which are often the only resort for the working poor.
Is Wal-Mart perfect? No – but they are not the bad guys that liberals make them out to be. To date no one has ever been forced to either work or shop at a Wal-Mart. People actually do so of their own volition, believe it or not.
Expect this store to become a political issue in the campaigns for the 1st Supervisorial District. Here is what Janet Nguyen, the Garden Grove Councilwoman who is the leading Republican candidate had to say about the proposed Supercenter in the Times article in question, “This is going to enhance the quality of life of our residents, and it will be an anchor to a blighted area.”
Well said Janet! I wonder what the other candidates have to say about this store? I wonder if Carlos Bustamante will actually defend the store? My guess is no he won’t. This should be a litmus test for Republican candidates.
What about small businesses that are allegedly run out of town by Wal-Mart stores? Guess what? There are no constitutional guarantees that give folks the right to run uncompetitive enterprises. You can operate such businesses – but the consumers will decide your fate. That is harsh but it is reality. Ever watch those nature shows on Discover or National Geographic? What happens to the old and sick wildebeests that can’t keep up with the herd? They become lion food. That is just the way of the world – the circle of life if you will. In business you either keep up with the herd or you die. That is the risk you run when you open a business.
I know this firsthand. I used to own and operate a small chain of stores dedicates to collectibles. My wife and I had a lot of fun and made a fair amount of money but eventually the Internet took a lot of our sales, as did various collectibles swapmeets/shows. They ran us out of business. We ended up closing some stores and selling the rest. I went back to school and worked for a few years in marketing and advertising and then moved on to industrial work and ended up working as a safety director for various contractors. I bring this up because it is an example of what you do when your back is up against a wall – you start again. I now owe $55,000 in student loans, but I also have two degrees and a great career working for a very successful restoration and environmental abatement contractor. Was it easy? No. I had to work very hard to get to where I am today. And that is the moral of the story. There is no easy money – just hard work.
Does Wal-Mart crowd 0ut uncompetitive enterprises? You bet. Is that hard on businesspeople? Sometimes. That’s life. In this country there are no shortages of other opportunities. It’s like the latest Will Smith movie where he plays a struggling single father who becomes a stock broker but first he has to suffer and endure homelessness and a total lack of money. He goes through Hell – but he succeeds! Anyone can – but the road is not easy. No one said it would be.
Here is what a small business owner in Santa Ana had to say about the proposed Supercenter, “The Supercenter will wipe out the small-business owner because of the store’s aggressive pricing policy.” Yes, it might. So the store will need to compete with better customer service and perhaps a totally different approach. Wal-Mart serves only one sector. They can’t figure out how to serve folks who are well off. There is opportunity at the high end of the market.
The Rev. Wilfredo Benitez, rector at St. Anselm Episcopal Church in Garden Grove says that, “…we all have the moral imperative to stand on the side of the poor and those who would be exploited. We don’t want that Supercenter here.”
Benitez is wrong! The poor are best served by Wal-Mart. Why should they pay more instead of less?
An owner of a dry cleaning business located in the center where the Supercenter will be built says that, “A lot of businesses lose money every month. We’re all waiting for Wal-Mart to move here and bring people back to this plaza.” Indeed. What does Benitez have to say about that sentiment? Nothing.
Here is another telling story from the article: Shelly Holman owns one of the few businesses in the immediate area that has survived more than a few years. Her pet store, Collar and Leash, has outlasted larger retailers, such as Petco and PetSmart, so Holman isn’t very worried about Wal-Mart. “You can’t really fight them; you might as well compete against them,” Holman said. “Competition makes you change, but it also makes you better.”
Yes it does! I could not have said it better.
The issue will come to a vote in the Garden Grove City Council in June or July. Let’s see how the council member end up voting. Assemblyman Van Tran recruited Dina Nguyen to run this year and she defeated a Supercenter proponent, Harry Krebs. Will she vote for the Supercenter? If she doesn’t, we will need to lay the blame for this at Tran’s feet.
As for Janet Nguyen, she summed up the issue best when she explained her support for the Supercenter, “Wal-Mart was one of the few companies that came into Garden Grove not asking for a subsidy.” That is rare and it should be celebrated. Consider that in Santa Ana, Bustamante voted for two eminent domain deals that handed both private and public land to millionaire car dealers at city taxpayer’s expense. Is it any wonder that I am supporting Janet Nguyen for the 1st District and not Bustamante?
Hey Art,
I guess if lower prices for consumers were the only issue related to Walmart stores, then I would have to agree that Walmart is a good benefit for our communities.
However, you know that the issue is not that simple. Walmart is able to offer lower prices for a combination of reasons. Two particular reasons are their sales volume and lower payroll costs facilitated by the fact that they do not provide the majority of their employees with health insurance and even encourage their employees to seek public assistance when eligible. Of course, if they are not eligible they simply can go to the nearest hospital and use the emergency room, rack up a huge inflated bill, and be in healthcare debt for the rest of their lives.
But so what if they rack up that debt, as long as the stock holders make some extra dividend. But wait, there’s more…
We have the reality that the other stores in the community cannot compete effectively and continue to offer their employees health care and other reasonable benefits. These companies are left with the stark reality that if they wish to compete, they must do business the same way Walmart does such as.
1. Offer health care, vacation, holiday and sick time pay only to full time employees and then only schedule the majority of employees to work part time.
2. Pay the lowest possible wage, usually minimum wage. Art, try making it on minimum wage working full time, now try doing so on 25 hours a week. At this rate, we should simply open food stamp offices inside the HR departments of every Walmart. We could call it one-stop shopping. Wait in tine to apply for a job and if you get it wait in the other line to sign up for food stamps.
Art your support of Walmart should logically translate to support for universal health insurance for all. Base upon your logic, we’re already paying for it so I guess we should go for broke.
Happy New Year Art.
“Luv ya, mean it”
Chris,
Thanks as always for your comments! You make some good points – but I think I can answer them.
1. Health insurance – How often do most of us use our health insurance? The truth is that people tend to abuse the system when they have insurance. They end up going to the doctor for every single sniffle. There are already free and low-cost vaccination programs at the county level. Aside from that, you can buy a high-deductible policy from Blue Cross that will cover hospitalization and major diseases for very little money. What to do about the deductible? Good question. You can save up money for a rainy day, or figure on getting help from family and friends if necessary. If nothing else, bankruptcy is an option.
Wal-Mart is helping out big-time with low-cost clinics and low-cost prescriptions, as I noted in my post. Why didn’t you acknowledge that Chris?
2. Wal-Mart and supermarket jobs in general should not be looked at as career jobs. They are good jobs for teens and college students, and those already retired or semi-retired. Yes, you cannot raise a family on this income. So why even try? Almost anyone can get student loans and go to college. Or you can learn a trade. The point is – why get bogged down in a nothing job for life? That’s nuts.
Besides, if you pay too much for these jobs the result will be higher prices. Consumers don’t want that!
I know what it is to be broke – I got married at 19 and at the time I worked for very little money, at an Aaron Brothers Art Mart. I turned that job into a job at a CD factory in their screen printing department. I turned that job into a job at the OC Register in their advertising department. That job led to a job at a graphics company designing ads. In the process I more than doubled my hourly wage. You get the picture? Society does not owe anyone a job or a way to make a living. You have to fend for yourself. Why do you think so many immigrants end up getting rich in this country? They have the gumption to work hard and create their own opportunities. No one hands them a free ride.
Chris, on a related issue, I cannot tell you how many times I have seen people use food stamps at the grocery store to buy ridiculous packaged items. If you are poor you ought to be cooking your food from scratch. A canister of oatmeal will go a lot further then boxes of sugary cereal. You can cook up a nice spaghetti meal for under ten bucks – including adding sauteed ground beef to the pasta sauce. You can make chicken tacos, with rice and beans on the side, for less than ten bucks. You can cook hamburgers for five people for less than ten bucks. So why do the poor waste so much money on frozen food, packaged food and fast food? Because they can do so with other people’s money. It is ridiculous.
I feel for the poor as much as you do. But not when they game the system. And not when they allow themselves to become mired in misery of their own volition. As the saying goes, rolling rocks gather no moss. You have to keep moving and keep improving yourself. You can blame Wal-Mart all you want but they are not creating poverty. Their job is to sell products at the lowest prices possible. That’s it. They owe us nothing else.
Ok Art, I’ll play…
“1. Health insurance – How often do most of us use our health insurance? The truth is that people tend to abuse the system when they have insurance. They end up going to the doctor for every single sniffle. There are already free and low-cost vaccination programs at the county level. Aside from that, you can buy a high-deductible policy from Blue Cross that will cover hospitalization and major diseases for very little money. What to do about the deductible? Good question. You can save up money for a rainy day, or figure on getting help from family and friends if necessary. If nothing else, bankruptcy is an option.”
Your kidding, right? On the wages Walmart pays saving up to pay a huge deductable is not really an option. And to suggest that bankruptcy is an option after your illustrious Republican controlled Congress passed, and YOUR President signed, revisions to the bankruptcy laws that make that option unavailable.
“Wal-Mart is helping out big-time with low-cost clinics and low-cost prescriptions, as I noted in my post. Why didn’t you acknowledge that Chris?”
Art, Walmart helping out with low cost clinics is the same ruse used by Phillip Morris with their smoking cessation and youth education programs. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting non-smoking education and millions in advertising targeting youth and countering those programs.
2. Wal-Mart and supermarket jobs in general should not be looked at as career jobs.
Tell that to the more than 22,000 members of UFCW Local 324 serving OC and LA counties.
The fact that art has spent so much time on this article is interesting. We need more commentary like this, big issues with the local focus. Kudos Art, seriously. But I totally disagree with you and agree with these other comments. The $4 drugs and the clinics are a public relations weapon that is meant to neutralize criticism. GSK and other pharmaceuticals manufacturers also have measly “affordability” programs to subsidize access to needed medicine. But they spend millions in ad dollars just to tell all of us about it, which is wasteful since only a small portion of the viewing audience will actually qualify. No, they’re advertising these programs on national TV to neutralize criticism about their historic profits and the vast discrepancies between what they charge Americans and what they charge, for example, Canadians. BP heavily advertized its ecology-conscious policies for years, calling itself a new and ecological oil company. But in the last two ears it has been subject to accidents and spills that it should have avoided with routine maintainence.
And to add something that others have not really touched upon… much of what Walmart sells comes out of foreign sweatshops, many of which produce the products Americans used to. Nobody knows what percent of the items come from places where women work 14 hour days and then fall asleep at their sewing machines before starting again – and for pennies and hardly a living age in the local economies. American and other countries’ brands won’t say where they contract for their jeans and shoes and chairs and games and children’s books.
Walmart is a leader in the global race to the bottom in terms of wages and work-conditions, and when they come to town they bring that ugly race into town with them in the form of “low prices, always.” They drive out smaller stores – even K-Marts – by underselling them. Don’t be surprised if one day it comes out that Walmart even takes a loss for a while when it first enters a market in order to drive out the competition.
Happy new year.
JS
Joe,
Great points – and a Happy New Year to you too! But do we really need legislation or council actions to address any of this? Why not vote with our feet by not walking into Wal-Mart stores? South Park had a great episode about this. A Wal-Mart type store came to town and the townspeople objected. But then they all started shopping and working there. Eventually the town burnt down the store only to end up doing all their shopping at a local store that then grew enormously and became a Wal-Mart type store. They burned that one down too. Moral of the story? We are all hypocrites. We cry about these stores and then pump them up by buying stuff from them.
As for the production of products overseas, there are two sides to the story. For one thing, global commerce helps poorer nations to get on their feet by creating jobs and exports. The downside is losing American jobs – but that is going to happen no matter what. We just cannot compete with cheap overseas labor – and our overpaid union workers are part of that equation. Look at what is happening to our domestic car business. American car companies cannot compete, period, and their union workers are putting them out of business. Of course the lack of creativity at these companies and their complete inability to produce cars with better fuel economy is part of the problem, but labor issues are at the top of their list of woes.
As for the cheap pharmaceuticals – the truth is that Wal-Mart’s move led to Target’s similar move. That is huge and it should be acknowledged. Even if their motivation was wrong, the result was good.
As for Chris’ remarks, what those workers need to do is go back to school, the sooner the better. It is a New Year – time to get to work.
All that we need is Wal-mart’s and vending trucks, that all that we need. oh, and shoppping carts, too
Art. This is an appropriate post on a real policy story that is not going away anytime soon. I am pleased to see some great comments from both points of view.
The fact that Wal-Mart is not seeking any “corporate welfare” from the public troth is a breath of fresh air as well as a major recognition that they have done their homework and know the proposed Supercenter will be successful.
Ask Supervisor Chris Norby about the many redevelopment projects around the state where the city or county government Agencies provided financial aide to have these megastores or auto malls locate in their communities.
As to competition. Although we may not be happy with some of Wal-Mart’s policies they do provide low cost items which benefit those unable to shop in the upscale stores. As to the debate between union vs non-union employees. No one forces you to take a job at Wal-Mart. Sorry folks but labor unions have played a major role in the demise of the big three automakers in Detroit. That’s simply one illustration.
During a major contract negotiation the CEO of a firm we represented once told me “I will do anything for your customer but go out of business.” We live in a global marketplace where third world countries are manufacturing items that are no longer produced in this country. We simply can’t compete. When is the last time you purchased electronic items or a camera made in America?
If Wal-Mart owns or obtains real property for their store without the use of “eminent domain” and is not seeking financial assistance from the city of Garden Grove I can support their locating a Supercenter in that city. Yes, you can and should do an EIR just to make sure that any reasonable mitigation measures can be performed. Sadly the Mom and Pop businesses, operating on thin margins, have a very difficult task in trying to figure out a way to survive.
You may be able to slow it down but you will rarely be able to stop this runaway freight train called Capitalism.
Welcome to the global marketplace.
Larry Gilbert.
Art,
I do vote with my wallet and do not set foot in WalMart.
Why are we racing towards the lowest common denominator. We talk about that when it comes to entertainment, but we do not discuss the decline of wages, the rise of health care costs (if provided at all) and stealing pensions (or sticking the government with the tab).
I would not consider WalMart a career job, but I remember as a child growing up that being a grocery store clerk was an acceptable occupation.
There is something to be said for even a few years of experience – better customer service. I prefer going to my local hardware store instead of Home Depot/Lowes because I can get REAL customer service. I pay for it, but I seldom (if ever) go home with the wrong tool (so to speak). Knowing your produce manager, or meat person can tune you in to a better cut of meat or that obscure item the recipie calls for.
I will support a “Mom & Pop” shop whenever I can.
BTW Art, you are a teacher, you own a toxic waste disposal company, you and your wife own a collectible shop (s?). When DO you fing the time to make all of these entrys????
Denmother,
Easily explained. I teach on Saturdays. I don’t own a toxic waste company. I work as a Safety Director for a restoration and environmental abatement contractor. My wife and I sold our businesses a long time ago. She now works part-time for the OCTA.
I try to write posts every morning and every evening. I think I probably write more than most reporters on a weekly basis.
I strongly encourage the Garden Grove City Council to approve the Wal-Mart. ‘Nuff said.
The article cites the fact that the organized opposition to the supercenter is from outside the city.
Now moron politicians looking for their own 5 minutes of fame in Santa Ana are also looking to ban supercenters, and there is not even any such project on that city’s horizon.
There is no excuse for such sleazy pandering to the unions. These types of projects should be based solely on the merits of what they can provide for the community (reasonably priced goods, huge tax base proceeds, anchor tenants, jobs, etc.) and should not be dismissed by pocha politicians.
I hope Garden Grove proceeds in a rational manner and disregards all the outside emotional influences, and cities like Santa Ana don’t limit their options by banning stores that can actually help their community.
Chris,
Quick & easy question: Should fast food restaurants offer a “living wage” and full health care benefits to ALL of their unskilled employees?
If you say yes, how many days would it take them to go bankrupt offering $13 Whopper Meals & $9.50 Happy Meals?
If you say no, then why should WalMart? What is the difference?
Ryan Gene Supports the Walmart.
Nuff Said