Walmart's Impact On America Essay

Hail Walmart!: The Detrimental Effects of Amazon on America

Amazon is significantly more detrimental than Walmart to American culture and social structure. Walmart has expanded greatly since its inception by catering to America’s demand for a wider variety of merchandise at much lower prices than provided by nearby superstores. For a time, the model was a great success. But it has brought with it a certain degradation of America. A chief artifact of that degradation is a new American reliance on goods produced more cheaply by workers outside the U.S. Walmart has thus, in essence, exported American jobs outside the U.S. A secondary artifact of Walmart’s model is the defeat of American labor unions, which traditionally negotiated higher wages,

As a result of booming online demand for low-cost delivery of Walmart-type merchandise, Amazon has launched a sales model that allows consumers to avoid brick-and-mortar stores, such as Walmart, altogether. While consumers hail the Amazon model as a welcome innovation, it is causing even more dramatic negative effects in America than the Walmart model: decreased employment, a lower standard of living (for Amazon workers and consumers alike), a lower property tax base to fund schools and public services, dehumanization of society, and a growing monopoly with more power than we have seen in American history. Such monopolization will reduce consumer’s choices of suppliers and goods. And it will increase prices above the levels they would have reached in a competitive

What garnered the negative attention which would lead Wal-Mart into two decades of consumer love-hate relations was primarily two things: 1) It’s national expansion in 1990 which included the consumer watchdog state of California, the heavy union dominated states of Pennsylvania and Nevada and the religious state of Utah and 2) Wal-mart’s expansion of sales items and services such as groceries, eye care, pets and pet supplies, tires, videos, photography processing and studios, fabrics, automotive supplies and much, much, more. The more items Wal-Mart added and the more locations they added them, the more toe’s Wal-Mart stepped on. Eventually, the mumbles of discontent became outcries of unfairness to workers, poor labor practices and negative environmental impact. What started off as a great American success story now had become a monster that needed to be caged or at least