Drezner gets results from Steve Chapman!!
Steve Chapman’s op-ed column in today’s Chicago Tribune picks up on the debate about inner-city Wal-Marts in Chicago that I touched on last week. The good parts: If Chicagoans loathe everything Wal-Mart represents, of course, they can easily defend themselves by declining to shop there. But the people in the neighborhoods where the stores are ...
Steve Chapman's op-ed column in today's Chicago Tribune picks up on the debate about inner-city Wal-Marts in Chicago that I touched on last week. The good parts:
Steve Chapman’s op-ed column in today’s Chicago Tribune picks up on the debate about inner-city Wal-Marts in Chicago that I touched on last week. The good parts:
If Chicagoans loathe everything Wal-Mart represents, of course, they can easily defend themselves by declining to shop there. But the people in the neighborhoods where the stores are planned (one on the South Side and one on the West Side) bear an uncanny resemblance to other Americans in (a) their desire for a bargain and (b) their preference not to have to travel far to get it. The danger, from the standpoint of the critics, is not that Chicagoans will detest Wal-Mart but that they’ll like it. That has been the case for most people in most places. The company didn’t climb to the top of the Fortune 500 list, sell nearly $259 billion worth of goods last year, and become the largest private employer in the country by failing to cater to ordinary Americans…. It’s true that very few people get rich working for Wal-Mart, but the company says the average hourly wage for full-time workers in its Chicago-area stores is $10.77. It says the typical starting pay for an inexperienced worker at the new stores will be from $7 to $8 an hour (compared to the current minimum wage of $5.15). Some 60 percent of its employees get health coverage through Wal-Mart, with most of the rest getting it through spouses, parents or Medicare. Does the company resist unions? Sure. But that doesn’t exactly make it unusual, since 92 percent of private-sector workers in the United States lack a union. Does it hurt small businesses? Only by offering consumers goods they want at lower prices than established retailers…. Despite our economic troubles, the U.S. unemployment rate remains well below that in supposedly enlightened places like Germany, France and Canada. Not only that, but as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reports, Americans have the highest average purchasing power among the industrialized democracies, partly because “$100 buys more in the United States.” How come? One reason is that we have so many fiercely competitive discount retailers like Wal-Mart. Economist W. Michael Cox of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has called Wal-Mart “the greatest thing that ever happened to low-income Americans.” Anyone who thinks its arrival would be a bad thing for low-income Chicagoans should let them vote on these stores, with their feet.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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