It Provides One-Stop Shopping For The Poor
Walmart/FlickrEmployees of Walmart and Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana pose in celebration of Walmart’s 2009 grant to help Gleaners upgrade its energy systems and supply hundreds of thousands more meals to the needy.
An unpleasant note of snobbery creeps into much of the criticism of Walmart. While many concerns about the company’s labor practices and lobbying activities are perfectly valid, there’s something off-putting about college-educated people in the middle class denouncing a chain of stores whose principal sin seems to be connecting ordinary people with goods and services they can’t get elsewhere.
Sometimes this is as simple as $1 off on paper towels, but over the years, Walmart has expanded into a kind of full-service provider for people who don’t have access to conventional professional help.
Walmart money cards, for example, offer people who don’t qualify for traditional bank accounts a safe place to keep their money, often on terms that are a lot better than a checking account.
Walmart charge cards help people with bad credit recover from past mistakes, and online money transfers are extremely popular with immigrants and customers with needy relatives around the country.
People who can’t get cellphones through the usual channels can buy discount plans through Walmart, and people who are facing disconnection can pay their utility bills from the customer service desk in most stores.
These might not be ideal services to offer people who have better options elsewhere, but phone companies aren’t exactly breaking down the door to give low-income people phone service. And all of this is on top of the $1 billion-plus the Walmart Foundation has been donating to poverty abatement around the world each year.
It’s a lot of fun to beat up on Walmart. It’s big, it’s gauche, and it’s wildly popular with poor and working class people all over the world.
Since the early 1990s, it has been fashionable among people who don’t have to shop at Walmart to bash the company for practices that are either forced on the corporation by market forces (such as restricting access to company benefits) or the fault of their vendors (such as labor practices in the developing world).
The company isn’t evil though, and a lot of what the company does objectively improves both the economy and the environment. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, it’s worth remembering that nobody would ever have heard of Walmart if its business model hadn’t spent the last 50 years redefining retail around the world.
Next, allow this animated map to reveal the explosive growth of Walmart in America.
