Of course it helps poor people. I'd argue that Wal-Mart is probably the single greatest force for helping the poor in the world. It provides them with the goods they need at prices that are lower than they could get anywhere else. If you go into the lower income areas of Boston where I live you see a sharp decline in quality grocery stores. Wal-Mart would be a real blessing to those people.

I don't know how to even find a Wal-Mart where I live. I've never seen one in the state. Not sure that this helps anyone but unions.

> I'd argue that Wal-Mart is probably the single greatest force for helping the poor in the world.

Replace world with USA and you are perhaps closer to the truth. There are other retailers elsewhere in the world. Some even more competitive than Wal-Mart. ("Walmart leaves Germany" http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/07/walmart_leaves.php)

Also shipping containers have done more than their fair share in getting consumer prices down.

Fair point about the world comment. Though it's possible that Wal-Mart's infrastructure improvements have become a model for the grocery industry that might be stretching it a bit far.

Conversely, this is also why many people are poor in the first place: not Wal-Mart by itself, but the entire credo of producing cheap crap cheaply for better margins.

This locust-like scheme is also, obviously, unsustainable even in the ideal case. While there are definite benefits to the people in the process of exploiting regions with lower standards of living and moving on to the next region when the old one is bled dry - i.e. when their standard has moved up beyond the narrow margin - sooner or later the world will run out of dirt-poor people, replaced by just regular-poor people which means increased production costs. There is a potential, then, to make up the margins from volume (i.e. decreasing per-item profit), but this is certainly not something most locusts take into account in their current business practices. It is a bit too far into the future.

The second concern is more structural: will the labour colonies be able to utilise the infrastructure left behind by the locusts (assuming the locals still actually have control of their own resources, factories and so on) to become "first world" or forever be left subordinate to others? It seems quite possible that having these industries implanted in societies - rather than having evolved locally - may not allow them to become fully independent, equal players.

Summa summarum: while some if not much of the critique of Wal-Mart is a bit silly or short-sighted (granting the premise that the world is capitalist for the time being), it is not all borne out of a sense of superiority of the latte-drinking elites or whatever the counter"argument" often is.

> Conversely, this is also why many people are poor in the first place: [...]

The rest of your post seems to say the opposite. You tell how people can get out of poverty. Not why they are poor in the first place.

I ought have phrased it "why many people who shop at Wal-Mart in the U.S. and other 'first-world' countries where manufacturing and some other sectors have been decimated are poor in the first place."

My view on the poverty-reducing effects of globalisation are somewhat less optimistic than your portrayal.

> U.S. [...] where manufacturing [...] [has] been decimated [...]

Comments like this always remind me of Germany during the dot-com boom --- when people complained that the country was stuck in an industrial past and had missed the train to the service-economy future.

We had a Wal-Mart come to our small town with no lack of political drama. I've found that the arrival of Wal-Mart provides fast, hard lessons in economics and unintended consequences to local politicos (most of whom previously could barely muddle through the cost/benefit of adding a single traffic signal) that can't be matched by any other event in local government.

It makes you want to make popcorn and watch the spectacle of it all.

Ditto, the area our first house was located in generated about 40% of its tax revenue from Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart began talk of relocating to a neighboring city's tax district right around the time of the election. The incumbent mayor actually backed an idea to help Wal-Mart bulldoze 40-50 homes that were essentially the main downtown area to keep them around. He didn't even think for a second about the impact it would have on the community. Needless to say he didn't win the election.

America seems a strange place. I can't remember seeing so much fuss over any retailer in Germany.

Also people love to hate Wal-Mart. In Germany Lidl isn't exactly liked, but Aldi, Plus and several others can't complain about their image. (Especially Aldi reached near iconic status during the nineties. They should just open more stores in the UK --- so that I do not have to go so far for them. Tesco doesn't match them.)

I've been saying this for a while about Wal-Mart (that it's great for allowing low-incomers to eat and live at higher standards for very cheap), but I frequently get 'scolded' by friends who are very anti Wal-Mart. I'm glad I can reference this article now.

As someone living on a start-up budget, I absolutely love Wal-Mart. The one in Oakland doesn't have produce (though my neighborhood is not lacking in cheap produce), but I get all my dry goods and toiletries there for about half the price they are at Safeway. It's pretty amazing.

Poor people never complain about wal-mart. It's rich white people-- who shop at target-- and conveniently ignore the fact that their impact is essentially the same.

Most of the arguments against wal-mart are more arguments of taste than arguments of morality. Rich people despise wal-mart because it represents poor taste. They secretly despise the poor as well because the living, breathing, real-world poor folks tend to be lazy, overweight, and uncultured (yes, I'm aware that this is just a broad characterization which unfairly lumps many fine, upstanding, educated, highly sophisticated yet otherwise financially poor individuals into this group as well, I know many such people, I've been there myself, don't write letters) to a far greater degree than the hypothetical ideal model of the poor that rich people imagine.

It's far easier to champion the poor in the abstract than it is to do so in practice.

You are right. Poverty is too good a proxy for lazy, overweight, and uncultured. (And probably rightly so --- people who are curious and hard-working have a good chance of getting out of poverty.)

I'd guess that in super-low income areas, it improves health the way the article says, via access to better food.

In lower middle class neighborhoods, it probably hurts health by pushing out the real grocery stores that are in the area.

</gut_feel>

The superwalmarts have really nice grocery stores in them. I've been impressed with the produce in the one near me, much nicer than what you'd get at a cheap grocery store. It's significantly cheaper than Safeway, and a little cheaper than sakNsave.

How many cities were actually planned? Most just grew out of the times they were built.

Yes, but good urban growth is guided by good policy. That involves a good deal of planning, even though it's not all planned at once by a traveling merchant 150 years ago.

I guess they should in fact plan less in America. Onerous zoning laws and rent control aren't really helping cities.