Evil Wal-Mart Uses Capitalism To Lower Food Prices
The bastards.
(Fortune Magazine)—With gas, grain, and dairy prices exploding, you’d think the biggest seller of corn flakes and Cocoa Puffs would be getting hit by rising food costs. But Wal-Mart has temporarily rolled back prices on hundreds of food items by as much as 30% this year. How? By pressuring vendors to take costs out of the supply chain.
“When our grocery suppliers bring price increases, we don’t just accept them,” says Pamela Kohn, Wal-Mart’s general merchandise manager for perishables. To be sure, Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500) isn’t the only retailer working to cut fat from the food chain, but as the largest grocer - Wal-Mart’s food and consumables revenue is nearly $100 billion - it has a disproportionate amount of leverage.
For all the flaming rhetoric about how Wal-Mart exploits poor people fanned by union activists the company sure does a lot to keep prices on goods low so that poor people can actually, you know, afford to buy them.
I mean, we wouldn’t arugala prices to get out of hand or anything.
