Costco and Wal-Mart

I should reserve my comments, until after I watch the documentary, but Fortune Magazine's Geoffrey Colvin was a bit too much for me:

The new world also makes it impossible for employers to pay people as they used to. Maybe the most important part of the new world for many Americans is the advent of a genuinely global labor market, in which workers around the world compete. Of course nobody in Mumbai can directly take the job of a retail clerk on the floor of a Wal-Mart. But a lot of labor is fungible; a given person could work in a store or factory or office. So global competition for workers in factories or info-based jobs, where work can be offshored, pushes down the pay of millions of others—bad news for Wal-Mart employees and potential employees.

A big chunk of the documentary concerns the fact that many Wal-Mart workers don’t get very good medical coverage—or any at all. Again, welcome to 2005. Everybody’s medical coverage is getting stingier because in a global economy, where U.S. workers compete with those in Datang and Wal-Mart competes for capital with every other business on earth, American companies can’t continue paying the world’s highest health-care costs. Don’t blame Wal-Mart; blame America’s inability to devise a national health plan that takes the burden off employers.

Yo Geoffrey, have you heard of Costco? It doesn't have to be the Wal-Mart way, "Costco's high-wage approach actually beats Wal-Mart at its own game on many measures".

When you can, vote with your $, choose Costco over Wal-Mart.

Costco CEO Jim Senegal has said: “We pay much better than Wal-Mart. That’s not altruism. It’s good business.”

Chief Financial Officer Richard Galanti explained: “From day one, we’ve run the company with the philosophy that if we pay better than average, provide a salary people can live on, have a positive environment and good benefits, we’ll be able to hire better people, they’ll stay longer and be more efficient.”