Anyone surprised by this?

Twenty-some years ago, when I began driving up to Syracuse on business a few times a year, the thruway in Upstate New York was packed with Walmart semis. 

I can't remember the exact wording, but the slogan on the side of those Walmart trucks was something about everything sold there being made in America. And then those slogans were replaced by ones touting the low prices.

Whether their products are made in America (making for American manufacturing jobs) or easy on the pocket book (making it cheaper for consumers to consume), the jury's always been out - or delivering a split verdict - on whether Walmart is a benefit for anyone not from the Walmart family.

For years, the big argument has been that when a Walmart appeared - invariably on the outskirts of town - the town center was hollowed out, the long-standing small independent businesses died, the town lost its heart, soul and character. We also learned that Walmart coached employees on how to apply for foodstamps and Medicaid, letting the taxpayers foot the bill for Walmart's low wages. 

But low prices for consumers countered all arguments. 

Still, it was hard not to get the unsettling feeling that Walmart was and is soul-crushing. 

And yet, we keep returning to the low price "fact" of life: that Walmart's:

...dominance represents the triumph of an idea that has guided much of American policy making over the past half century: that cheap consumer prices are the paramount metric of economic health, more important even than low unemployment and high wages. Indeed, Walmart’s many defenders argue that the company is a boon to poor and middle-class families, who save thousands of dollars every year shopping there. (Source: The Atlantic)

Even some progressive economists jumped on the All Hail, Walmart bandwagon, pushing the theory that low prices trump any ill effects that Walmart might also be dragging in.

Not so fast, some new research claims that "the costs Walmart imposes in the form of not only lower earnings but also higher unemployment in the wider community outweigh the savings it provides for shoppers. On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all."

One group of resesarachers (Lukas Lehner, Zachary Parolin, Clemente Pignatti, and Rafael Pintro Sschmitt) ran something akin to "the economics euqilavelent of a clinical trial for medicine." They looked at a rich set of data and came up with two groups, on who lived where a new Walmart was opening, the other of which lived Walmart-free. 

Their conclusion: In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them...

In theory, however, those people could still be better off if the money that they saved by shopping at Walmart was greater than the hit to their incomes. According to a 2005 study commissioned by Walmart itself, for example, the store saves households an average of $3,100 a year in 2024 dollars. Many economists think that estimate is generous (which isn’t surprising, given who funded the study), but even if it were accurate, Parolin and his co-authors find that the savings would be dwarfed by the lost income. They calculate that poverty increases by about 8 percent in places where a Walmart opens relative to places without one even when factoring in the most optimistic cost-savings scenarios.

There are flaws in the Parolin et al. analysis. Maybe other things were going on that caused on area to suffer economic losses. 

But anothe paper (by Justin Wiltshire) took a different approach and found "five years after Walmart enters a given county, total employment falls by about 3 percent, with most of the decline concentrated in “goods-producing establishments.”" These goods-producers were likely driven out of business by Walmart finding sources of goods (e.g., China) that could meet their low-price demands. And Walmart, having driven so many local job-producers out of business, can keep its wages down because they're the only game in town, employment-wise. 

The Biden administration has been trying to turn the tables on the belief that all that matters is lower prices for consumers by examining how mergers would impact workers. How likely is a Trump administration to keep the Biden focus on worker welfare? Guess it depends on what Elon and the tech bros want...

Recent history shows the political danger in threatening low consumer prices. The public’s reaction to the inflation of the past few years suggests that many Americans would rather be slightly poorer but have price stability than be richer but with more inflation. That will tempt policy makers to prioritize low prices above all else and embrace the companies that offer them. But if Walmart’s example reveals anything, it is that, in the long term, low prices can have costs of their own.

Is anyone surprised by any of this?