How Does Walmart Affect The Economy

Many small businesses endure the same inevitable outcome upon the opening of a corporate business. A 44-year-old, rural grocery store in North Carolina faced a “30% sales drop” immediately after the opening of Walmart (Wolff-Mann “Walmart Closes”). To counteract the drastic drop in sales, the mom-and-pop ran grocery store lowered their prices in hopes to attract more customers. In return, Wal-mart matched and undercut their prices in order to reduce surrounding competition. Failing to compete with Walmart, the rural grocery store “succumbed to [its] inevitable last October, closing up entirely” (Wolff-Mann “Walmart Closes”).

Wal-Mart's “corporate monopol[y]” (Frick “Is Wal-Mart”) doesn’t only impact the small, locally ran stores, but can affect

Capitalism places the “power in the hands of wealthy business people who aim mainly to maximize profits” (Shipley xi). People living under the reign of capitalism look up towards the “wealthy business people” as idols, as this economic system places them in the top class. Attempting to partake in social and financial mobility, individuals expect to rise to the top by adopting the ideology of continual profit maximization. Thus, resulting in the universal understanding that “the striving for wealth...[is the sole] purpose of being wealthy” (Webber 116). Striving to accumulate an increase of wealth, regardless of the possible negative repercussions, creates the basis of capitalism that “greed is the essence of capitalism” (Richards 119). This financial greed, creates a mindset in most consumers, begins to fuel and foster “individualistic self that includes [a] competiti[ve] lifestyle, private ownership of property, [and] instability or liquid life” (Guitart “The consumer”) as being the foundational ideology to live by. The exponentially increase in focus on competition and the “ownership of property” causes shift from traditional values, the belief in family, god, and community, to the love and obsession over money and materialism, ultimately demonstrating a major flaw that capitalism has on the mindset of consumers. Capitalism centralizes human

The Earth has seen “many instances of the destruction…. [caused] by human agency” (Sweezy 86) throughout history, with one of the justifications dealing with an economic affiliation of each nation. For example,“[capitalism creates, a] system that has only one goal, the maximization of profits in an endless quest for the accumulation of capital on an ever-expanding scale...is a system that is soulless...[and will] never be green” (Magdoff and Foster 96). Capitalism enables a system that places all attention on achieving the goal of maximizing profits regardless of the impact made on the environment. Many ecologists agree that over the past century “fossil fuels, the energy sources of capitalism, destroy life-from the territories where they are extracted to the oceans and the atmosphere that absorb the waste” (Klein 176). Ecologists associate fossil fuels, such as oil and natural gas, as “energy sources of capitalism” because of the negligence and support that capitalists give when using these energy sources. Capitalism is a reckless economic system that disregards environmental impacts for the sake of