The largest factor in the increased standard of living for Americans in the 1990’s boom years was... Wal-Mart.
If Wal-Mart is predicting an inflation rise, we can inside of a year see all of the gains of the 1990’s and early 2000’s wiped out in the real effects on the vast majority of Americans. And Canadians, and Australians, and Brits, Irish, etc.
http://dynamist.com/articles-speeches/nyt/walmart.html
Lessons in keeping business humming, courtesy of Wal-Mart U.
By Virginia Postrel
The New York Times, February 28, 2002
Now the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the McKinsey consulting firm, reports that Wal-Mart’s impact on the economy goes further than most ever imagined. Wal-Mart’s managerial innovations contributed mightily to the big increase in American productivity in the late 1990’s, an increase most observers assumed came from high-technology companies.
The McKinsey study looks at why labor productivity shot up in the late 1990’s and how important information technology was in that acceleration.
“Surprisingly, the primary source of the productivity gains of 1995 to 1999 was not increased demand resulting from the stock market bubble, as some economists have claimed. Nor was information technology the source, though companies accelerated the pace of their I.T. investments during those years,” reports a summary of the findings published in The McKinsey Quarterly. “Rather, managerial and technological innovations in only six highly competitive industries — wholesale trade, retail trade, securities, semiconductors, computer manufacturing and telecommunications — were the most important causes.” (The journal is online at www.mckinseyquarterly.com, and the entire study is at www.mckinsey.com/knowledge/mgi/feature/index.asp.)
Competition and better management, not simply the spread of computers and the Internet, made the difference. Nowhere was that clearer than in retailing.
From 1987 to 1995, labor productivity grew an average of 1 percent a year. From 1995 to 1999, it grew 2.3 percent a year. This big jump, combined with increased employment, meant that real output per capita grew nearly 4 percent a year — an extraordinarily fast rate, comparable with those of some Asian economies during their period of economic takeoff.
A quarter of that increased productivity came from retailing. And about a sixth of the improvement in retail productivity came from general merchandise, most of it directly or indirectly from Wal-Mart.
“More than half of the productivity acceleration in the retailing of general merchandise can be explained by only two syllables: Wal-Mart,” writes Bradford C. Johnson in a McKinsey Quarterly article “The Wal-Mart Effect.” As Wal-Mart became more and more efficient, its share of the market expanded, thereby applying its efficiency to a larger portion of total purchases. And Wal-Mart’s rivals began to emulate its highly productive practices.
We need to vote O out!!