Tuesday

Random interesting discussion we had this morning: Chain Corporations; good or bad for the economy?

According to Oren (that hippie farmer always wearing a baseball hat)—they’re bad. Sure, they provide jobs. For every dollar you spend at Walmart, a portion of it will indeed go into the wages of a local employee, who will then spend a portion of that dollar back into the local economy. So that's good. And, like with most companies, a portion of that dollar you spent will go to the cost of the stock that Walmart purchases (from some supplier somewhere). That's not necessarily helping the local economy, but it's inevitable for some products. But a lot of that dollar, goes up the food chain of Walmart employees and ends up in the hands of a small group of people, like a CEO and top executives, not living in Appleton, or Wisconsin, or anywhere around here. And that part of your dollar just got sucked out of your local economy.

 

Whereas for a small company, centered in the Fox Cities, (I shall call it Malwart) all of the dollar you spend (minus whatever you pay your suppliers) goes back into your local economy. After all, all the managers, the executives, if there are that many of them, live close by and will spend that money on local goods. So a dollar spent at Walmart does less to improve the economy than a dollar spent at Malwart. So heed my cry local Wisconsinites! Create new businesses with funny names and we can spend our way back to a happier economy! Maybe.

I feel conflicted for bashing Walmart for a couple reasons. The first of which being that Walmart is not the only huge international corporation picking profit from various small cities around the world and depositing them all in the hands of just a few individuals. The way our economy seems to work is that large-scale corporations allow increased efficiency that tends to allow them to be more competitive, have lower costs, be more successful, and expand. Many large corporations, like Walmart, McDonalds, etc. manage to keep prices lower than local competitors and thus people buy from them instead. Is it fair to blame them for being competitive when it's our choice as the consumer to buy there?

Plus, if Appleton had a very successful start-up business that became national, and Appleton remained the headquarters, and the owner used the profits he/she received here in the Fox Cities, we probably wouldn’t be bashing them. So even though some of the dollar we spent at Walmart left our economy, it's still going out there goes to help some economy somewhere (Walmart's Headquarters are in Arkansas.)

So what’s the answer? I don’t know. But I thought I’d assemble a list of stores around the Fox Cities that are locally based, state-based, nationally-based, or internationally-based. Even if it doesn’t affect my behavior as a consumer, it’ll still be interesting. And if it's not, well, hey--no one's forcing you to read it.