Wal-Mart Rules, Mom and Pop Stores Hate America

[pvn]

Common wisdom says that Wal-Mart is an evil entity, putting moms and pops all out of business all over the country. This is a good thing, not a bad one. Retail is an economic black hole. There is no direct creation or innovation there. It's all overhead. Ultimately, the only innovation possible in retail is minimization of that overhead.

The first argument against Wal-Mart (or any other big-box retailer) is that they remove money from local economies by shipping profits to the home office. But tons of profits are already being extracted from your community and shipped off every time you buy a product produced elsewhere. Wal-Mart does a double favor to the "local economy" by first minimizing the cut the manufacturer can take (by applying price pressure), then minimizes its own cut as well. If local economies are more important that non-local ones, than the most important economy of all must be the most local - my personal economy. And nobody extracts less from my personal economy than Wal-Mart.

Retail can't build your economy. You can't export it. Its effects are primarily negative. How could minimizing it be bad?