Nationalize Walmart
Walmart is the largest private-sector employer in the United States, and it’s an important source of low-cost groceries for consumers around the country. It also pays poverty wages, busts unions, and drives economic inequality. Luckily, there is an economically viable route to solving those ills: bring the megacorporation under public ownership.
Nationalizing Walmart would be a dramatic improvement on the status quo. (Mike Mozart / flickr)
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon made headlines earlier this month for urging Congress to “get a stimulus deal done.” In his comments on CNBC’s Squawk Box, he said that a new round of stimulus was important for the sake of “small and medium-sized businesses.” Larger firms, he said, had been better able to “weather the storm” of the pandemic.
He didn’t mention that Walmart itself has done a whole lot better than just “weathering the storm.” The company’s second-quarter results, published in August, showed that its e-commerce sales had gone up by a whopping 97 percent since the beginning of the pandemic. Already the largest private-sector employer in the United States, Walmart has hired half a million new “associates” this year.
All of this has added $43.2 billion to the already-massive fortune of the Walton family, which owns just under half of the company stock. To put that in perspective, the family was already making more than a combined 43 percent of all Americans before the pandemic.
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