Last week we just discussed the paper "Can Competition Ever be Fair?" (I placed a link at the right-hand side, under Books and papers), and now it's so ironic to read this
ad run by an anti-anti-supercenter group funded by
Wal-Mart.
Although it's astonishing enough to compare anti-supercenter campaigners to Nazis, here is the line that caught my eyes: "The simple fact is that when competition is suppressed and choices are limited, prices go up and business goes elsewhere." And at the end it stresses again: "
Choice is a freedom worth keeping."
In this ad, choices are refered to consumers' choices, but we can't forget that the vast majority of consumers, especially Wal-Mart's consumers, are at the same time employees, or workers. Arnsperger and De Villé argued in their paper that when competition grows more and more intense, the workers' choice set is then more and more limited. Finally (at the steady state), everyone is left with only one choice, i.e.
complete loss of freedom to choose! Moreover, even from the consumers' point of view, I wonder if Wal-Mart can really provide more choices. When Wal-Mart kills all its competitors in a community, people can only choose to buy cheap goods but with inferior quality!
Of course it's nice to pay less for the
same good. But, if the reduction in price is at the expense of the poverty suffered by people who made it and people who served you in the store, then isn't it just so cruel to even think about buying one single item in such a place?
