Recently Ken Blanchard posted on the Democrat's plan to run against Wal-Mart and provided some very helpful statistics to show the positive economic impact of Wal-Mart since the early 90s. Now there is this piece by Sebastian Mallaby in the Washington Post. Mallaby attempts to show the strength of the Democratic left and weakness of moderates by illustrating the moderates' shift from being Wal-Mart supporters to Wal-Mart bashers. He concludes:
For a party that needs the votes of Wal-Mart's customers, this is a questionable strategy. But there is more than politics at stake. According to a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Jerry Hausman and Ephraim Leibtag, neither of whom received funding from Wal-Mart, big-box stores led by Wal-Mart reduce families' food bills by one-fourth. Because Wal-Mart's price-cutting also has a big impact on the non-food stuff it peddles, it saves U.S. consumers upward of $200 billion a year, making it a larger booster of family welfare than the federal government's $33 billion food-stamp program.
How can centrist Democrats respond to that? By beating up Wal-Mart and forcing it to focus on public relations rather than opening new stores, Democrats are harming the poor Americans they claim to speak for.
Wal-Mart seems to be particularly popular among people of modest income. Perhaps those people are ignorant of their own interests, but I doubt it. I suspect they shop at Wal-Mart because it's what is best for their family budget. The new Super Wal-Mart apparently opens in Aberdeen around mid-September. Good.
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