Walmart Cancels Plan To Build Stores In Poor Parts Of DC Because Of This

by Sonja Bochow | January 17, 2016 1:17 pm

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The Progressive’s incessant and unrealistic demand for $15.00 per hour minimum wage has consequences. And one of them is that a large retailer may not be able to build [2]or sustain a store in your neighborhood. The reason Walmart isn’t going to build has everything to do with Liberal fiscal policy and nothing to do with “corporate greed”. The mandatory funds, fees, wages and taxes of DC were going to be staggering and effectively prohibit profitability. And if a store isn’t profitable, it does not stay open. And if it isn’t projected to be profitable, it never gets built. Do you think DC Liberals in power are reaping the consequences of their bad policy?

Walmart abruptly announced Friday that it was abandoning a promise to build stores in Washington’s poorest neighborhoods, an agreement that had been key to the deal allowing the retailer to begin operating in the nation’s capital.

The giant retailer cited increasing costs for the new projects and disappointing performance at the three D.C. stores it opened over the past several years.

The decision to withdraw from the planned D.C. locations came as part of a broader strategic move by the nation’s largest retailer to shutter 269 of its stores around the world — but not the existing D.C. stores, the company confirmed — a plan Walmart hopes will allow it to focus on becoming a more serious player in online shopping and to improve its remaining fleet of supercenters and grocery stores.

The deal came at significant cost, however. Pushed by labor unions, a majority of the D.C. Council at first pushed back against welcoming Walmart to the city. Opponents cited Walmart’s large profits and refusal to let workers unionize, as well as its reputation for low wages.

Then on Friday, the deal was off. Walmart officials entered the mayor’s office early in the morning and apologized, saying plans and economics had changed. Large urban Walmarts were more expensive to build and less profitable to operate than expected — especially, it turned out, in the District.

So far, Moore added, the three stores Walmart has opened — one blocks from Union Station in the trendy NoMa neighborhood and two in gentrifying areas along Georgia Avenue and at Fort Totten — were underperforming and “just not anywhere close to your expectation.”

Evans said that, behind closed doors, Walmart officials were more frank about the reasons the company was downsizing. He said the company cited the District’s rising minimum wage, now at $11.50 an hour and possibly going to $15 an hour if a proposed ballot measure is successful in November. He also said a proposal for legislation requiring D.C. employers to pay into a fund for family and medical leave for employees, and another effort to require a minimum amount of hours for hourly workers were compounding costs and concerns for the retailer.

“They were saying, ‘How are we going to run the three stores we have, let alone build two more?’ ” Evans said.

“The optics of this are horrible; they are not going to build the stores east of the river, in largely African American neighborhoods? That’s horrible; you can’t do that,” Evans said. “A deal’s a deal.”

Mr. Evans, the optics ARE horrible. The optics of your terrible business strangling Liberal financial policy are horrible. Perhaps you’d have better “optics” if you understood economics and business and tried to do what you can to encourage it, instead of your pie in the sky Progressive accounting. Business exists to profit. When business profits, it hires employees who make money. When employees make money, they feed into the economy. When they feed into the economy we all benefit. But if that first step, a profitable business, does not happen, then none of the rest happens either. Learn to make your area financially attractive to business instead of financially impossible for business.

Endnotes:
  1. [Image]: https://rightwingnews1.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/WALMART-LOGO-2-e1453053657474.jpg
  2. a large retailer may not be able to build : https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/district-leaders-furious-walmart-wont-build-stores-in-poor-neighborhoods/2016/01/15/3425f5fa-bbb3-11e5-99f3-184bc379b12d_story.html

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