ABSTRACT
Similar skepticism should be applied to other numbers that have been thrown around regarding Wal-Mart's alleged negative externalities. The United Food and Commercial Workers' (UFCW) anti-Wal-Mart website, www.wakeupwalmart.com, identifies an imaginative array of costs that WalMart is supposed to impose on employees, communities, and governments/taxpayers. But without making any attempt to challenge the UFCW's numbers-and even exaggerating them by treating some cost elements that should be one-time (e.g., subsidies for opening a store) as recurring costs-the figures themselves do not amount to even one-half of the conservative estimate of benefits to customers. Similar conclusions apply to most other attempts to total up the costs that Wal-Mart imposes on society. Yes, those costs are hard to estimate precisely, as Fishman emphasizes; but we can say conclusively that those costs are much smaller than their associated benefits. In other words, we can (and should) acknowledge that Wal-Mart expands the size of the economic pie available to society.
