Wal-Mart's rainy day

The NY Daily News had an interesting story Saturday about Wal-Mart's current woes, including the recently released Wal-Mart movie and this weekend's economic conference that was supposed to demonstrate the retailer's unqualified benefit to the economy:

At a conference in Washington, Wal-Mart learned what its detractors had long suspected - that its stores aren't a beacon of prosperity.

An independent study by David Neumark, a senior fellow at the Pubic Policy Institute in California, showed a link between Wal-Mart and a 2.5% drop in workers' pay.

Another study showed a 1% rise in Wal-Mart's market share in a state was followed by a 1.5% increase in Medicare spending because the retailer insures fewer than half of its 1.6 million employees.

Of course, the Wal-Mart-funded paper demonstrates the big box's benefits but as we've mentioned before, the Neumark study, among others, gives critics serious ammunition.

Wal-Mart also defended itself from Robert Greenwald's Wal-Mart movie saying it's "error-ridden propaganda video." We look forward to Wal-Mart's refutations of the tremendous crime the store generates, associate reliance on Medicaid, a fact that its own internal memo highlights, and the deletion of overtime from computers as is alleged in a number of lawsuits throughout the country.