Tucker Carlson blasts Walmart's woke executives

The Daily Caller has two video clips of Tucker Carlson blasting Walmart for its decision to stop selling certain kinds of ammunition in its stores.

The Fox News host criticized the retail giant, explaining its critical role in lost jobs, low wages, and the decline of the American middle class.

In 2005, 20 percent of Walmart employees worked part-time. Today, the majority do. It’s the simple cruelty of math: If Walmart keeps employees’ hours low enough, it can avoid paying benefits. Can people really live like that? Not for long.

...Knowing that taxpayers will “subsidize” the low wages with welfare, Walmart is able to continue the practice.

“So to restate what just happened,” Tucker concluded. “The company more responsible than any other for destroying and degrading rural America — for making our towns uglier and cheaper and poorer — the same people who push the appalling lie that brightly-colored plastic crap from China is going to us happy — that company is now lecturing normal Americans — the very Americans they’ve hurt so badly— about how immoral they are for daring to protect themselves with firearms. And everyone in Washington, New York and LA is applauding them as they do it. It’s not a good sign.”

Read more here.

I have immense respect for Tucker Carlson and I agree with his criticism of Walmart's woke executives on gun control but I am and will continue to be a Walmart shopper. I eat a lot of fresh produce every day. They have the best selection at the best prices. I seriously doubt that Tucker's family shops there, so they don't know what they are missing! I also shop at the Dollar stores that beat Walmart's prices on many items. Walmart hires many people here in New Mexico who would not be hired by Walmart's competitors in the grocery business. In rural New Mexico Walmart is the place people shop for groceries. I seriously doubt that many Walmart employees qualify for welfare.

How about paying some taxes, Bezos?

In CNBC, Lauren Thomas reports,

...After Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos on Thursday issued a challenge to other retailers, not naming which ones specifically, to match Amazon’s pay and benefits, Walmart snapped right back.

“Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage. Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It’s a kind of competition that will benefit everyone,” Bezos wrote in his annual letter to shareholders.

“Hey retail competitors out there (you know who you are) how about paying your taxes?” tweeted Walmart’s Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs Dan Bartlett on Thursday morning, sharing an article about Amazon paying $0 in federal taxes on more than $11 billion in profits last year.

...Walmart’s minimum wage of $11 an hour, set in January 2018, is still below Amazon’s, which was hiked to $15 in November. But Walmart has said its average worker earns $17.55 an hour with wages and benefits.

As for Bartlett’s argument: Amazon's low tax bill mainly stemmed from the Republican tax cuts of 2017, carryforward losses from years when the company was not profitable, tax credits for massive investments in R&D, and stock-based employee compensation.

Read more here.

Stop Walmart? From what?

Who writes better editorials than Investors Business Daily? No one that I know. Today they take on Bernie Sanders, who has proposed a "Stop Walmart" act.

Under it, big employers like Walmart would be banned from buying back shares in their own company unless they paid all their workers at least $15 an hour. They'd also have to cap CEO pay at 150 times the median employee pay, and provide seven days of paid sick leave.

Read more here.

What happened when Walmart left this West Virginia county?

Ed Pilkington reports for The Guardian,

Economic losses are only one aspect of the hurt felt locally as a result of Walmart’s passing. There is something intangible, less material – and more chilling – about the fallout, something that seems to flow from the dependency the people of McDowell County developed on the retail magic conjured up inside that big box.

It’s touched upon by Wanda Church when she tries to explain why she cried that day. It was because, she says, she lost her family when Walmart closed.

Her family?

“The people I worked with, I relied on them if I needed help. The customers, they were our family.”

You hear it from Darrell Williams, 42, a truck driver picking wild raspberries on the side of the road to make a fruit cobbler. He recalls that his twin boys acquired their nicknames inside the supercenter. “My kids grew up in there. They called them the Screamers, because they used to scream if they didn’t get what they wanted.”

For Dan Phillips, Walmart was a way of coping with bereavement after his wife died a few years ago. “If you were lonely and had nothing to do, you’d go to Walmart to talk to folk. It was a great social network.”

Being a schoolteacher, Phillips has a theory for what happened when the store closed. “Socialization. We lost our socialization factor. Now it’s hard to keep track of people, there’s no other place like it where you can stand and chat.”

...For the last two years of its existence, the Walmart supercenter provided the food bank with close to 200,000lb of meat, dairy, pies and bread, allowing the McKinneys to increase the frequency of their giving. Now that’s gone, they try to make up for the shortfall by growing tomatoes, arugula and peppers in a greenhouse.

Linda McKinney says that the fresh food they received from Walmart, or “waste” as the corporation classed it, is sorely missed. But, like many of the other residents of McDowell County, she says she also mourns the communal aspect of the supercenter, its quality as a “social hub”.

...McKinney has one other, rather astonishing, reason to regret that the store closed. Walking.

Walking?

“I went to Walmart for the walk,” she says. “I went early and I got a cart and I walked all over the store. I loved walking around it. I would walk and talk, talk and walk. I could walk the store all day.”

That’s a statement that will reverberate far beyond the boundaries of McDowell County, or West Virginia. It could be applied to small towns and rural areas right across the US. This is the statement of communities that have had the communal bled out of them.

Filling the void, as well as helping to create it, came a sparkling new phenomenon: a big box, 103,000 square feet of windowless air, where you could catch up with friends, trade guns, shop to your heart’s content and even take a hike, all within a concrete gash carved out of one of the world’s most breathtakingly beautiful ancient forests.

And now that too is gone.

Read more here.

What a difference!

You don't think the president of the United States has power? Walmart and GM are the latest to announce thousands of new jobs in America, and investment in American made product. The crony capitalists were emphasizing other things during the Obama years, like green energy and climate change.

Amazon, Bezos doing well

Tom Metcalf, Caleb Melby, and Jack Witzig report at Bloomberg that

Jeff Bezos just became America’s third-richest person.

The 51-year-old founder of Amazon.com Inc. has so far added almost $5 billion to his fortune as the online retailer rose in after-hours trading and pushed his net worth above $55 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Bezos passes brothers Charles and David Koch, and ranks behind only Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in the U.S.

Before Thursday’s surge, Bezos’s fortune had jumped 77 percent in 2015 as investors have cheered profits at Amazon and growth in its cloud segment. The $22 billion year-to-date increase is the most of anyone on the index and more than the combined gains of Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Amazon shares rose 10 percent from the close to $621 at 4:47 p.m. in New York. The increase will make him the fifth-richest person on Earth, up from the No. 20 spot on Jan. 1.

The Internet entrepreneur’s soaring wealth contrasts with that of the Walton family who together control more than half of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer. Alice, Christy, Jim and Rob Walton are among the worst-performing billionaires this year, down a combined $43 billion as the mass merchandiser invests in stores and e-commerce in an attempt to revitalize sales at the retailing giant.


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Jeff Bezos just became America’s third-richest person.

The 51-year-old founder of Amazon.com Inc. has so far added almost $5 billion to his fortune as the online retailer rose in after-hours trading and pushed his net worth above $55 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Bezos passes brothers Charles and David Koch, and ranks behind only Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in the U.S.

Before Thursday’s surge, Bezos’s fortune had jumped 77 percent in 2015 as investors have cheered profits at Amazon and growth in its cloud segment. The $22 billion year-to-date increase is the most of anyone on the index and more than the combined gains of Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Amazon shares rose 10 percent from the close to $621 at 4:47 p.m. in New York. The increase will make him the fifth-richest person on Earth, up from the No. 20 spot on Jan. 1.

The Internet entrepreneur’s soaring wealth contrasts with that of the Walton family who together control more than half of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer. Alice, Christy, Jim and Rob Walton are among the worst-performing billionaires this year, down a combined $43 billion as the mass merchandiser invests in stores and e-commerce in an attempt to revitalize sales at the retailing giant.

“People don’t aspire to shop at Wal-Mart,” said Ivan Feinseth, chief investment officer at Tigress Financial Partners, who has a buy rating on Amazon and is neutral on Wal-Mart. “An improving economy is a negative for Wal-Mart. As incomes go up, people stop shopping there. Customers enjoy shopping at Amazon.”

Amazon shares represent about 95 percent of Bezos’ net worth. The closely held Koch family fortune is spread across a number of industrial companies, including paper producer Georgia-Pacific LLC, oil businesses Flint Hill Resources LLC and Koch Pipeline Company LP, as well as manufacturers of fertilizers, polymers and fibers. The asset values are calculated using revenue of $115 billion that’s reported on the website of holding company Koch Industries Inc.

The second-best performing billionaire this year is Spain’s Amancio Ortega, founder of Inditex SA, the world’s biggest clothing retailer, who’s added $15 billion, a 24 percent gain. China’s richest person, Wang Jianlin has added $11 billion, a 44 percent rise. Ortega is the world’s second-richest person with $76 billion and Wang is 12th with $36 billion.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index is a daily ranking of the world’s richest people that’s updated every business day. It uses prices at the market close in New York to derive the value of publicly traded assets. Thursday’s list doesn’t reflect after-hours trading.

Read more here.

Jade Helm conspiracy theories

Have you heard of Operation Jade Helm? Dan Lamothe writes in the Washington Post,

The mission is vast both geographically and strategically: Elite service members from all four branches of the U.S. military will launch an operation this summer in which they will operate covertly among the U.S. public and travel from state to state in military aircraft. Texas, Utah and a section of southern California are labeled as hostile territory, and New Mexico isn’t much friendlier.

That’s the scheme for Jade Helm 15, a new Special Operations exercise that runs from July 15 to Sept. 15. Army Special Operations Command announced it last week, saying the size and scope of the mission sets it apart from many other training exercises.

“The nature of warfare is always changing and U.S. Army Special Operations Command’s mission is to make certain the Army’s various Special Operations Forces are trained, equipped and organized to successfully conduct worldwide special operations in support of our nation’s interests,” Army Lt. Col. Mark Lastoria, a command spokesman, said in an e-mail. “Training exercise Jade Helm is going to assist our Special Operations Soldiers and leadership in refining the skills needed against an ever changing foreign threat.”

The exercise has prompted widespread conspiracy theories that the United States is preparing to hatch martial law.

For example, Hayley Peterson writes at Business Insider about the sudden closings of five Walmart stores:

The closures have also fueled a bizarre conspiracy theory that the US military is planning to enact martial law this summer under the guise of a Special Operations exercise called Jade Helm 15.

According to the theory — which has no apparent basis in reality — the military will use the shuttered Wal-Mart stores as "processing" facilities for Americans once martial law is hatched.

Read more here.

Comparing Walmart and Apple

Mark J. Perry asks,

Why do progressives hate Walmart for low prices and its 3% profit margin but love high-priced Apple and its 24% profit margin?

Apple's workforce is 30% women, Walmart's is 61% women. 18% of Walmart's workforce is black, while 7% of Apple's is black.
Read more here.

Target to cut thousands of jobs

Target has announced it will be cutting several thousand jobs over the next two years. In case you haven't noticed, Walmart is kicking their butt.

It's a deal!

It is commonplace for people to negotiate when buying a house or car, but how about buying every day items? Patricia J. Moser writes:

In the US and Canada, we tend to buy without considering the fact that there is an option to negotiate, whereas in other cultures there is an expectation that one does.

Beyond the business aspects of this, as Consumer Reports points out, you can negotiate everyday, for almost everything. I've negotiated down my cable rates, my phone rates, my Internet rates, just by asking how important my business was to these companies. I also ask for some type of discount when I purchase clothing (which is probably far too often!) particularly if I'm a regular customer. I ask how important it is to this store to retain my loyalty.

In regards to loyalty, I have also recently written to my bank which has both my personal and business accounts. I am always disturbed when corporations have special promotions to get "new" clients, but take their current and loyal clients for granted. Seeing one promotion which gave new customers an iPod for switching their business to the bank, I wrote an email, asking what they were going to do for existing and loyal customers.

After a couple of emails (never accept the first response) I received $200 credited to my bank account. Not bad for a 1/2 hours work.

Everything is negotiable. You just have to ask!

Read more here.

One of the things I like about Wal-Mart is that they will match prices of competitors. I keep a list of current grocery prices of Wal-Mart's competitors, because I eat lots of fresh produce. My local Wal-Mart happily matches those prices, saving me the extra trips to shop at competitors. Smart business move by Wal-Mart!

Walmart sues VISA

Did you know that VISA has charged Walmart "swipe fees" amounting to $350 billion dollars over the last nine years every time a customer pays with a credit card? Walmart has filed suit, asking $5 billion in damages.

Do you hate Walmart?

Gerard Vanderleun made a trip from Seattle to New England. Suddenly he needed a warm coat. He got this one at Walmart.

Go here to read about his shopping experience, then stay and read all the comments.