Wal-Mart Rules

Our girlfriday has picked up on our Wal-Mart posts (here and here) of some time ago.  Now we have this story about 25,000 residents in the Chicago area applying for 325 positions at the local Wal-Mart.  The irony is that Chicago would not let Wal-Mart build, so the store built just across the city line in an adjacent suburb.  While Prof. Blanchard may have little experience of inner-city poverty, I do, in that very same Windy City of Chicago.  For five years I lived in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood and for three of those years I coached 9-12 year-olds in baseball (league champs in year three, btw).  I saw boys with horrible home lives being recruited by gangs at the ages of eleven and twelve.  I saw drug deals go down and lived in a neighborhood with two dozen places to buy booze, but only two banks.  What that neighborhood needed, among other things, was hope, hope brought on by jobs.  Wal-Mart provides people who have few skills the opportunity to get a job and work their way up.  Wal-Mart is no different from any other business in that way.  I worked at a local Target one summer in Chicago, and I saw it happen there.  What's the difference between Wal-Mart and Target?  Wal-Mart is more successful.  Few of us were getting rich at Target and few of us got health insurance, but for some Target was a way out of a bad situation in the inner city.  I wish Wal-Mart of Evergreen Park all the success in the world.