Wal-Mart

The Oberlin Wal-Mart is south of town, on the southwest corner of the intersection of US Route 20 and Ohio Route 58, across the street from the JVS and the abandoned Ames store.

There was a lot of controversy surrounding the placement and size of the building, and Oberlin City Council was not able to regulate the building's size. Today, there is still controversy about college students shopping there instead of supporting locally-owned businesses.

The Wal-Mart is partly to blame for the closing of Missler's at the end of September.[1]

[edit] To shop or not to shop

Please think twice before shopping at Wal-Mart. Oberlin College is located in one of the poorest regions in the country. Student support of Wal-Mart will only hurt the town we live in for most of the year.

Some reasons not to shop at Wal-Mart:

  1. Cheap priced superstores like Wal-Mart hurt local economies by inducing consumers to buy everything from one store, undermining local shops and forcing them out of business. They may provide many entry-level jobs, but only at the expense of a diversity of economic and management positions and entrepreneurial opportunities found in a thriving downtown.
  2. Wal-Mart hurts women's rights: They pay their female workers less money than male workers (recall the recent class-action suit against them, the largest in American history). Their pharmacy refuses to sell emergency contraception.
  3. Wal-Mart hurts worker's rights: The low-cost products sold at Wal-Mart come from overseas manufacturers, hurting American union factories, and often are made with sweatshop labor. Wal-Mart also operates a very aggressive campaign to prevent unionization among its staff.
  4. Wal-Mart hurts the environment: By their locations on the outskirts of towns and because they provide "everything at one place," Wal-Marts almost force consumers to use cars to shop there (downtowns encourage foot traffic by having many different stores all located near where people live). Foreign-produced products require fossil-fuel heavy transportation. The majority of their products are over-packaged in plastics and styrofoams that will never decompose.
  5. Wal-Mart pays its workers so little that most are forced to apply for financial assistance from the government. Wal-Mart actually gives its workers instructions on how to apply. This drains money from state governments like water through a windowscreen. Several states are looking into the legality of this practice in order to save their sore-ass finances.

(See Wikipedia's entry on Wal-Mart for more information on just about everything above.)

One of the best arguments in favor of Wal-Mart is that it provides working class people with access to many goods for prices they can afford. No one is asking people who cannot afford not to shop at Walmart to go somewhere else, but before you drive there, ask yourself if you can afford to go somewhere else.

However, there have been many studies, including some publicized last year in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which show that in the long run a new Wal-Mart only hurts a region's economy. Because Wal-Mart tends to employ part time rather than full-time employees, they get away without providing benefits, promotions or raises, which in conjunction with lost (high quality, full-time with benefits) jobs due to small businesses closing, means that less money ultimately flows into the local economy. Thus the argument that you can't afford to go somewhere else can be somewhat myopic.

[edit] External Links

Retrieved from "http://oberwiki.net/Wal-Mart"