Re: [Marxism] Walmart and Costco

["Carlos A. Rivera" <cerejota@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "rrubinelli" <rrubinelli@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> re "new way of doing business":    American Apparel is currently
> involved in anti-union efforts to prevent organization of its employees.

Yes, but they have fully integrated production/distribution/retail, pay
higher salaries (which is a way to stop unions), etc. They are atypical and
hence "new".

This is the problem I have talking with you. You have no sense of the
objective. Subjectively, I would love to see all  business go to hell.
Objectively, major transitions can be predicted by observing emerging
tendencies. Shorthand for emerging is "new".

> re "US capital becoming more like European capital":  Whatever the
> wishes of the NYT, FT, etc.  just the opposite is the reality, European
> capital attempting to become more like US Reagan/Bush  or UK
> Thatcher/Major/Blair capital-- extending the work week, privatizing
> utilities and "social" production, tax breaks for corporations, and not
> last, not least-- reorganizing wage, labor, production standards along
> the line of maquilladoras, creating the "in-sourced" maquilladoras in
> the countries of central and eastern Europe.

Every time you reply to a post of mine, it becomes evidident you don't read
them. I didn't speak of a generalized tendency, but a section of capital.

> re Compensation and profits:  Not just a factor of hourly rates, or
> hourly rates and benefits, in retail, wholesale or manufacturing, but
> the "wage share" of the costs of production, the "cost share" of total
> revenues, which includes real estate, credit lines, etc.

And you need air to breathe. Thing is, and this is the open question, that
the USA's stock trading culture is averse to wages in general, because they
see them as taking away from the stock value, yet these publicly owned (or
IPO potential) companies are going against the grain of this CW.

Furthermore, *any* increase on wages, by definition, cuts into profits and
into wages for executives. If Costco, for example, paid employees what
Walmart pays them, they would approach  savings of (doing a simple
approximation) $2,150,400,000 a year, or about 16% of their gross. This is a
huge risk for a publicly traded company to take.

Why they do it? My approach is to try to answer it ideologically (ie the
caps French Turn). I do know this approach is somewhat lacking and
tentative, yet it does have some value. Nevertheless, your comments don't
serve the purpose of trying to answer this question. It is obvious that
Costco is not a unique phenomenon, and that it is different in ideology and
economic impact than Walmart. As a matter of fact, I think the NYT article,
and the recent flurry in the WSJ (I think in march there were a string of
articles) are actually attempts to undermine Costco at the stock market, and
by doing so take credibility away from their model.

As to "wage share" I am willing to bet that it is more in Costco than in
Walmart, simply because Walmart gets stuff cheaper and pays less.

So it is not a factor in exploring the open "Why", just an interesting,
albeit tautological, tagent.

> (aside re "deformation of US capital by oil industry":  speaking of
> compensation not reducing profits, oil industry is the proof-- highly
> compensate work force animating massively valued technical apparatus
> yielding a product where the cost of production, unadjusted for
> inflation is still less than $4 a barrel)

Which supports my assertion on the oil economy defoming the US capital
(another factor is the strong dependency on credit)

Of course, if you see explotation as being *only* an absolute value based on
surplus extraction, US MLB players are among the most exploited in the USA,
even if most of them are millonaires by age 30.

So exploitation can never be viewed in strictly surplus terms.

sks


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