Walmart

Plus, Philip Van Cleave's suspect defense.

On Tuesday, Walmart’s value, as reflected in its stock price, dropped by more than 10 percent. That’s nearly $31 billion. It had a bad quarter and in no small part suffered as a result of complications with its online inventory restocking system—it ran out of some items in demand and so couldn’t…

July 12 just might have been the day on which the retail sector as we have known it here in America came to its end. If not its end, surely the beginning of its end. Amazon has an estimated 54 million Prime customers in the U.S. who pay $99 per year, and millions more around the world who pay about…

Amid the closure of 150 or so Walmarts across the country, the booming Washington, D.C., region did not escape without casualties. Two planned stores in poorer parts of town, east of the Anacostia river, will not be built.

Under three different CEOs, Walmart has done all kinds of somersaults to appease left-wing critics. In 2005, Lee Scott set goals of “zero waste” and “100 percent” conversion to renewable energy. In 2009, Mike Duke, the next CEO, took on Obamacare—as an outspoken supporter of the unpopular health…

Every liberal knows that poverty breeds crime, although data are unable to show such a correlation, much less causation. This understanding of what is called the root cause of crime was best expressed in one of those Woody Allen flashbacks in which his father is defending the family maid against…

The economy might, but only might, be slowing. In March we added only 126,000 jobs, the lowest increase since December 2013, barely enough to absorb new entrants into the workforce. Almost all measures of the health of the labor market -- the unemployment rate, the number of workers jobless for…

Markets work. That’s the message from Walmart’s decision to raise its starting wage for 500,000 of its 1.3 million US employees to $10 per hour starting next year. That’s 37% above the statutory minimum of $7.25. No, the notably cost-conscious company, the largest private-sector employer in…

In 2009, Walmart, the left-wing think tank Center for American Progress, and the Service Employees International Union, wrote a pro-Obamacare letter touting “the promise of reduced health care cost increases” that would come from “health care reform.”  Walmart and friends wrote, “We are for shared…

Yesterday’s first time claims number was disappointing. Today, as Renee Dudley of Bloomberg reports, Walmart's

Labor groups might not be happy about President Obama's planned trip to a California Walmart today. But the big corporation is ecstatic. 

Occupy Wall Street was full of proto-revolutionary fervor at its founding, with a mission statement that opened:

At the corner of First and H Streets in Northwest Washington, the balloons were all set, hanging stories high in the cold morning air. The inflatable Pepsi and Mountain Dew bottles were twisting in the breeze, and a mini-hoop game was set up. There was even a marching band and Chester the Cheetos…

The D.C. Council began the year by trying to pass a minimum wage hike intended to bring to Walmart to heel. It is ending the year by pushing a minimum wage increase that would likely benefit Walmart. Such are the tangled politics and economics of the minimum wage issue.

Say you are a company that builds and operates large retail stores, selling consumer goods at desirable prices and that you have been successful across the land.  Let's call you ... oh, Walmart.

The Imperial City has ruled that it doesn't need Walmart, the nation's most popular retailer, since Washington has attained a condition of sleek prosperity whereby, according to one member of its ruling council:

Governments everywhere are on the prowl for more revenues. French president François Hollande wants to tax incomes in excess of €1 million at a 75 percent rate. Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, has jacked up VAT. Southern Europe’s finance ministers have come up with the novel…

Not long ago, New York City stopped a Walmart store from being built in its downtrodden East New York neighborhood, another defeat in the giant discounter/grocer’s six-year effort to enter the five boroughs. Small retailers and unions, in prevailing, embraced a century-old tradition of political…

The Supreme Court today unanimously dismissed a class action gender discrimination lawsuit against retail giant Walmart. The decision concluded that the suit, which claimed to represent hundreds of thousands of employees based on specific allegations of discrimination by three of the plaintiffs,…

Who’s pulling the strings on Wisconsin governor Scott Walker? Well it’s got to be someone – since obviously no Republican would act out of principle.