The crescendo of criticism of Wal-Mart will escalate next week, with critics planning a plethora of anti-Wal-Mart events across the country that they’ve calling “Higher Expectations Week.” Most of the events are being orchestrated by America’s labor unions through a new website they have founded, Wal-Martwatch.com. The anti-Wal-Mart fever is also coinciding with a new “documentary” by filmmaker Robert Greenwald, allegedly showing the evils of the world’s largest retailer.

What are the complaints? Wal-Mart, we are told, provides lousy wages and benefits for its workers. The company is said to hurt employment both by driving many other stores out of business and by selling largely foreign-made goods, causing job loss in American companies making competing products. Wal-Mart supposedly devastates communities that it enters, destroying the fabric of town life by forcing many local businesses to close. And finally, Wal-Mart is environmentally unfriendly, destroying pristine woods and pastures with its ugly stores, buying products from countries that wallow in pollution, and, well, you name it.

Yet our research suggests these complaints are generally without merit, and that, on balance, Wal-Mart is good for America. Several academic studies have confirmed what shoppers have known for decades – Wal-Mart’s “everyday low prices” motto is for real. Since Wal-Mart appeals strongly to lower- and lower-middle-income shoppers, the benefits of lower prices accrue mainly to relatively poorer members of society. That is particularly true as Wal-Mart increases its penetration of the food and grocery business.

Looking at 25 smaller communities with Wal-Mart SuperCenters that opened in 2002, we found employment growth on average was more robust in new Wal-Mart communities than in other (mostly non-Wal-Mart) non-metropolitan settings in the same states. Retail trade employment grew in the new Wal-Mart towns, especially relative to expectations, and worker compensation did not suffer. This confirms the findings of several prominent academic researchers, although some of these studies do find modest job loss in specific types of retail trade where unions are strong, such as grocery stores.

Given the benefits for low-income consumers and workers, who would oppose Wal-Mart? Organized labor is among the largest opponents of the retailer, and it turns out that union opposition is intense because Wal-Mart workers have consistently said no to unionization. The workers believe they have pay commensurate with other retail trade workers in their communities, plus decent fringe benefits including private health insurance – which the vast majority of employees enjoy, either through Wal-Mart or others, including spousal benefits – and stock ownership. The loss of business of unionized groceries to non-union Wal-Mart stores is grating to the unions, but hardly justifies a campaign of vilification of Wal-Mart based on distortions or misstatements of the truth. Ironically, unions have been known to hire paid protesters against Wal-Mart, paying them far less than Wal-Mart workers and offering no fringe benefits.

The campaign against Wal-Mart is not unique in retail trade history. In the 1930s, angry small grocery stores attacked the new chain stores like A&P that brought lower prices and greater choice to communities. Congress even passed laws to try to prevent stores from offering low prices to consumers, although those laws were found legally flawed or ineffective. The anti-A&P campaign in the 1930s and the anti-Wal-Mart campaign 70 years later are remarkably similar. Costly service providers are losing out to more efficient companies like Wal-Mart that provide literally billions of dollars of consumer welfare annually to their customers through low prices, greater choice selection, and relatively good service.

Over 50 years ago, the Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson, famously said of his former employer, “What is good for General Motors is good for the country.” By and large, that is true with respect to Wal-Mart today. Attempts to thwart Wal-Mart’s efficiency-induced low prices and good service through labor, environmental, zoning or other type laws or regulations would lower the welfare of the American people, particularly the relatively low-income millions who are its best customers.

Messrs. Vedder and O’Keefe are researchers at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Vedder and Wendell Cox are writing a book on big box discount retailers for the AEI Press, due out in 2006.