Welcoming Wal-Mart
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Here is yesterday’s news that many of New York’s politicians and special interest groups were hoping you didn’t catch: Wal-Mart opened a store at Oakland, Calif., for which more than 11,000 people applied for 400 positions. In a store at Fremont, Calif., which also opened yesterday, 8,000 people applied for 400 positions. And in Dinuba, Calif., 5,000 people applied for 400 positions.
Our own city’s anti-free-marketers, however, want you to believe that Wal-Mart is a bastion of oppression. It pays workers low wages and gives poor health benefits, they chant. That’s their excuse for why they’ve been frustrating Wal-Mart’s attempts to open up a store in the five boroughs. Earlier in the year, for example, a coalition of unions, small businesses, and environmentalists, backed by politicians supportive of their aims, scared a developer into dropping Wal-Mart from a planned mall in Rego Park, Queens. Last week, the Democrat-dominated City Council passed a bill requiring large grocery stores in all five boroughs to pay some medical-insurance premiums for their employees – a move seen as preemptively targeting Wal-Mart, which doesn’t pay such premiums.
That so many people want to work for Wal-Mart in California suggests that New Yorkers aren’t being given the full picture by their politicians. People choose, voluntarily, to work for Wal-Mart because they believe the salary, benefits, and opportunities it offers are better than elsewhere.
As for the allegation that other businesses can’t compete with Wal-Mart’s low prices, and so jobs are lost, the thing to look at is the larger economy. It is true that when any new business opens others might suffer if consumers find the new business’s products and services more appealing. But older stores can compete by improving the quality of their goods and services. Enormous efficiencies are created overall, and the consumer is the clear winner from this competition. There is one way for politicians to determine whether New Yorkers want the jobs and low prices that Wal-Mart thrusts upon the city: Let Wal-Mart open up stores and New Yorkers vote with their feet and wallets.
