A twofer! The first part of this meme is false, he didn’t say Walmart would close stores. The 2nd part is misleading & brings up a red herring about wage theft. Nearly all of the wage theft lawsuits are decades old and have little bearing on Walmart’s current balance sheet.
▪️The first part of the meme’s claim comes from a Dec 6 interview with CNBC. McMIllion said retail theft was ‘higher than what it has historically been” and “If that’s not corrected over time, prices will be higher, and/or stores will close.”
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2022/12/06/walmart-ceo-on-rise-in-retail-theft-prices-could-go-higher-and-stores-will-close.html
▪️This spawned headlines and memes that Walmart was considering closing stores, but in context McMillon was clearly speaking generally. Walmart’s spokesman later confirmed this & said McMillion “was speaking about retail in general and not specifically about Walmart.”
https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.33399EU
▪️The $1.5B in wage theft claim comes from the Violation Tracker from Good Jobs First, a left wing advocacy group. It compiles lawsuits against companies. There are 44 lawsuits for Walmart listed under “wage and hour violations,” you can check it out here:
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/?parent=walmart&order=primary_offense&sort=desc&page=3
▪️The vast majority of the $1.5B comes from 3 lawsuits:
🔹$640M from 2008, settling 63 lawsuits over wage-and-hour violations, most of which happened years prior.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna28372433
🔹$242M from a 2016 settlement over meal and rest break violations. However, this claim dated back to a 2006 judgment of $78M, which was appealed over a decade and included post-judgement interest.
https://wjactv.com/news/local/thousands-get-early-christmas-present-from-walmart-class-action-lawsuit
🔹$152M in a 2009 class action lawsuit over violating California’s meal and rest break laws. These violations dated back to a 2001 lawsuit.
https://legalpad.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/09/in-walmart-class-action-huge-judgment-followed-by-stillquitebig-settlement.html
🔹The two other largest settlements, violating California and Nevada labor laws, totaled $86M and $85M. They were from 2009 and 2010, and also dated back to years prior. The vast majority of the smaller settlements were also before 2010.
▪️Clearly, Walmart had problems running afoul of labor laws in the early to mid 2000s. But in recent years, there’s been very few big lawsuits, and settlements aren’t even a rounding error in comparison to their $572B in revenue.
▪️But retail theft is a significant current problem, affecting not just Walmart. Retailers lost nearly $100B to organized crime in 2021. Dismissing this by pointing to an irrelevant stat on wage theft is dishonest. (Ironically this source repeats the false claim about Walmart closing stores)
https://thehill.com/homenews/3767004-walmart-ceo-stores-could-close-with-uptick-in-shoplifting/
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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