Low prices do not legitimize Wal-Mart expansion

In the next few months, Wal-Mart will reopen their Hendersonville Road location as a larger version of the old store, which will bring the total number of Wal-Mart Supercenters in Buncombe County to four.

Wal-Mart’s South Asheville location has been closed since Oct. 2008 and when it reopens it will be around 115,000 square feet, or about half the size of the newest Wal-Mart that opened in Weaverville.

Some are dubbing it a “mini-supercenter,” but whatever you want to call it, it’s just too much.

There are already three Wal-Mart Supercenters in Buncombe County (East Asheville off Tunnel Road, Airport Road in Arden and the newest one just outside downtown Weaverville) and reopening an old store as a new Wal-Mart Supercenter is just overkill.

The Airport Road location is only 4.5 miles, or approximately a six-minute drive, from the Hendersonville Road store. Less than five miles away from the Wal-Mart Supercenter is another Wal-Mart Supercenter. Maybe this would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic and sad.

Before Wal-Mart became such a popular and widespread business, there used to be small hardware stores, corner markets, toyshops and garden supply stores all run by regular people and not a huge corporation.

Wal-Mart came in and within a couple of years, many of these family run businesses had to shut down because they couldn’t compete with the growing behemoth and their low prices.

There are plenty of Wal-Mart shoppers who probably weren’t even alive to experience what mom and pop stores were like. There are some people who don’t know any better than Wal-Mart or Target or any other big box store. To these people, it’s normal to shop at a huge, dimly lit warehouse-type store where one can buy anything from tires to celery.

Wal-Mart is a corporation that prides itself on its low prices. Now there’s nothing wrong with low prices, necessarily, but the way that Wal-Mart provides consumers with these low prices is the problem.

Wal-Mart uses globalization to its advantage and to the American workers’ disadvantage. Jobs that used to make up the fabric of America have been shipped overseas (and this is nothing new) and they’re not being replaced.

Wal-Mart gets many of their items, such as clothing, electronics and toys, for pennies from foreign sweatshops, which enables them to charge such low prices. What’s so ironic about it all is that the steelworker or textile worker who doesn’t have a job because a 14-year-old Chinese girl is now doing it for 75 cents per day, is then more or less forced to shop at Wal-Mart and buy these products so that they can maybe afford to feed and clothe their family.

Maybe the irony would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic and sad.

What also helps Wal-Mart keep their prices down is the fact that they are one of the most fiercely anti-union corporations on the face of the earth. There are numerous instances across the country of people being fired for trying to unionize their department at various Wal-Mart stores.

It certainly keeps prices down when your workers have no one to fight for their right to good pay and benefits.

This newest Wal-Mart hasn’t caused much, if any, discontent in Asheville like big box stores usually do, but that’s more than likely because it’s being built on the site of an old Wal-Mart and doesn’t require the destruction of more land to build it.

Despite this new Wal-Mart Supercenter that is set to open in the next few months, there are still talks of opening even more and even bigger Wal-Mart’s in West Asheville and other parts of town. Whether or not these plans come to fruition, it’s time for people to truly start asking themselves what the cost of these low prices are. Is saving 13 cents on a box of spaghetti really worth contributing to the anti-worker, un-American corporation known as Walmart?

http://www.thebluebanner.net/low-prices-do-not-legitimize-wal-mart-expansion-1.1220407
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I really, truly, absolutely hate this article. I mean what I wrote, but I hated having to write it. It's also not very good. So be it.