Mentions personal use of The Wal-Mart Effect.

Transcript context

…Yeah. That said, there are probably more interesting things you could buy that have more soul in the local stores merchandising that may not show up in a Walmart supply chain. There might be more meaningful personal relationships you could build with people who run the stores than you would have the opportunity to at a Walmart. I'm trying to think of all the things in a consumer experience that are better from a locally owned store. There's the fact that when you buy something or the equity that gets built from that transaction happening happens in your community, versus the equity accruing 50% of the Walton family and 50% to a bunch of public shareholders, every transaction, any business makes accrues either positive or negative equity to the business that participated or facilitated the transaction, even if that Walmart employs a bunch of local people, the equity is still being built by other shareholders. There is a lot. I think I said we could do a whole another three or four hours on discussing this. I read the book, The Wal-Mart Effect, as part of research. It's really good. It's really even-handed, really well done. It was written in 2006. It goes really deep into all of these questions, labor, impact on communities, and all sorts of stuff. I highly recommend reading. Frankly, we're not going to be able to do anywhere near as good a job discussing all that as the book does and as other forums do. But to my mind, the biggest takeaway I had from it was, if you just look at individual communities, I think you can make a pretty good argument. This is Sam's argument, and like you were saying, that Walmart is good on balance. It saves consumers money. That's super important. It provides a lot of jobs. You could argue about the quality of those jobs, but a lot of jobs that otherwise would have gotten destroyed. Discounting was going to happen. The local shops were not going to survive, the local variety stores. It could be someone that doesn't have the types of incentive programs that Walmart has. Maybe it's not enough, but they do offer the ability for part of people's pay to go into Walmart stock, and that can appreciate over time and you can decide whether to cash it out or take it in Walmart stock. There are ways to make hundreds of thousands of dollars on top of your pay by being a Walmart employee.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.