I hope the folks in Moon enjoy paying more for what you could have gotten at walmart for a considerably lower price! As long as their goal was to pay more for virtually everything they will use for their households in the future then congratulations!! Wow the UFCW really does help people after all! They help to facilitate americans to spend more money than they should on literally tens of thousands of products!! WAY TO GO UFCW!!! WOOHOO DRIVING INFLATION IN AMERICA!! YESSSSSSS!!!!!!!!

Me,

You are certainly correct in saying that Wal-Mart's products are generally cheaper than those of its competitors and far be it from me to criticize low income Americans for shopping at the store. However, don't you have to wonder how Wal-Mart is able to sell its products so cheaply? The answer is that Wal-Mart is an externalizing machine. In any and every way possible, Wal-Mart ensures that others pick up the tab for costs that they refuse to bare. There are myriad examples of this behavior:

In 21 of the 23 states that report the data, Wal-Mart is the top employer with workers on Medicaid and or SCHIP. In other words, taxpayers pay the cost of health care for Wal-Mart's employees, in effect subsidizing their business. Wal-Mart's abuse of the Medicaid system also gives it an unfair advantage over employers who do the right thing and provide their workers with health insurance.

In addition, Wal-Mart has received billions of dollars in subsidies from state and local governments in the form of tax breaks, infrastructure improvements, free or cheap land, and many other programs. For an in-depth analysis of Wal-Mart's abuse of taxpayer subsidies, check out this site from Good Jobs First: http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/corporate_subsidy/walmart.cfm
When Wal-Mart receives subsidies and/or refuses to pay taxes, the fact of the matter is, someone else needs to pay them.

Further, the vast majority of the products on Wal-Mart's shelves come from factories in China. Often times, these factories are sweatshops in which workers labor under horrific conditions. In one factory in particular which produces Holiday ornaments for Wal-Mart, workers are paid below the legal minimum wage in China, labor for 12 hours a day, six days a week, and handle toxic chemicals with little or no protection. There were also numerous instances of child labor at the factory. For more , check out this report by the anti-sweatshop group, The National Labor Committee: http://www.nlcnet.org/article.php?id=498. When Wal-Mart uses sweatshop labor and/or child labor, they are forcing workers to bear the cost of their unsustainable production methods rather than paying for it themselves.

Finally, despite its much vaunted PR efforts to present itself as an environmentally friendly company, Wal-Mart's business model is just not sustainable from an environmental perspective. Putting stores on the edges of towns far away from city centers forces people to drive long distances to reach them, producing emissions that we all pay for when we breath in dirty air and suffer from the effects of global warming (just look at the wildfires that are raging in California at this very moment). Further, by sourcing so much of their products from china, which has a notorious environmental record, Wal-Mart is producing even more emissions, the cost of which must be borne by all of us, but the Chinese especially.

Sure, Wal-Mart sells cheap stuff, but if people recognize that we're more than just consumers, that we're also taxpayers, workers, and citizens of planet earth, they'll realize that Wal-Mart really costs us an awful lot.