Okay, I’ve moved this up from when I planned to post it because:

- A lot of people are covering it.
- I want to glom some traffic from them.
- Not necessarily in that order.

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ANSWER TO QUESTION: It’s part of a much bigger problem for what still is, but may not be for much longer, the world’s most successful retailer.

Simply put, Wal-Mart has lost its way. The utterly predictable Young fiasco is a symptom of the company’s larger problem.

Mr. Young’s company was hired by Wal-Mart in February (HT Debbie Schlussel) to “help promote Wal-Mart through interviews, speeches and editorials.”

For those who missed it, here’s what Young said to a newspaper that led to his “step(ping) down from his position as head of an outside support group”:

Young, once a close associate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., said his decision came after a report in the Los Angeles Sentinel, which he said was misread and misinterpreted.

In an interview, Young was asked whether he was concerned that Wal-Mart causes smaller, mom-and-pop stores to close.

“Well, I think they should; they ran the ‘mom and pop’ stores out of my neighborhood,” the paper quoted Young as saying. “But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs; very few black people own these stores.”

Young said he decided to end his involvement with Working Families for Wal-Mart after he started getting calls about the story.

“Things that are matter-of-fact in Atlanta, in the New York and Los Angeles environment, tend to be a lot more volatile,” he said.

He said working with the group also was “taking more of my time than I thought.”

Young is Exhbit B on how Dr. King’s civil-rights movement has become a money-grubbing, bigoted caricature of its former self after his death (Exhibit A is Jesse Jackson). Someone needs to tell me why I shouldn’t translate the second bolded paragraph above as follows “In Atlanta, it’s okay to be a black racist.”

But back to Wal-Mart. At some recent point, it decided to try to make nice with enemies who have no interest in reciprocating. So in addition to hiring the now out-of-here Young, it has:

• Softened its shoplifting policies (third item at link).

• Taken on “Lefty Apologist for Islamo-Fascism” Harriet Hentges (Schlussel’s apt description in a different post) as “Director of Stakeholder Engagement.”

• Most recently, trumpeted a pay-increase policy with accompanying pay caps that appear to be disincentives for higher earners.

• Pledged to be so green that it will become “a company that runs entirely on renewable energy and produces zero net waste.”

Now you could try to build a case that each of these decisions, especially the last, makes long-run business sense, but I think the company’s “See, we’re not such bad folks after all” air betrays the opposite. It’s clear to me that the suits at headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas think that gestures like these will placate their enemies. They are wrong: Nothing short of across-the-board unionization will be enough for some; nothing short of a serious drop in the company’s business fortunes will satisfy most of the others.

Wal-Mart shareholders (remember them, the ones company management supposedly works for?) had best hope that the Young embarrassment and the reaction to the pay-package revisions cause a serious rethink.

The rest of us need to root for the company to come to its senses as well. At least one outfit thinks that the company’s hiring record has been exemplary (from the USAT link on Young’s hiring) — “Last year, Wal-Mart was named one of the 30 Best Companies for Diversity by Black Enterprise magazine.”

More important to our pocketbooks, the economy needs the company’s legendary cost-cutting ways to continue. An independent study by private firm Global Insight, a privately held economic analysis company, found that:

Wal-Mart saved each American household, on average, ound that the expansion of Wal-Mart over the 1985 to 2004 period can be associated with a cumulative decline of 9.1% in food-at-home prices, a 4.2% decline in commodities (goods) prices, and a 3.1% decline in overall consumer prices as measured by the Consumer Price Index-All Items, which includes both goods and services.

According to the USAT link on Young’s hiring, that meant $2,329 in 2004 to the average American household.

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UPDATE: Ace has been on this. Others (pro- and anti-Wal-Marters included): No More Mister, The News Blog, Wonkette, Demagogue, American Street, Shakespeare’s Sister, Same Facts, Facing South, National Review’s The Corner, QandO (scroll to update)

UPDATE 2: The New York Times’ version of the story (probably requires registration) has a different quote from Young on Atlanta’s culture: “I was speaking in the context of Atlanta, and that does not work in New York or Los Angeles.” Now how does THAT happen?

Surprise — An economic pick-me-up for a Friday afternoon (HT Techdirt):

Looking at data gathered from a variety of sources, including company press releases, newsletters and reports, which still don’t cover all possible call center jobs, 62 percent of call center jobs are located in the U.S. and 6 percent in the United Kingdom. Canada and India each have 5 percent of the total market. “The myth is that all of the contact center jobs are going to India, but the truth is that that is not the case,” Butler said.

The reason for the misperception is that the press, local chambers of commerce, and companies themselves announce when call centers are closed, according to Butler. But the press doesn’t notice so much when one opens, in part because sometimes companies don’t say anything for fear of giving their competitors strategic information. “When a small center call center closes, it’s big news,” Butler said.

Fifty-two percent of all call centers opened between 2002 and 2006 are located in the U.S., Butler said. Another 16 percent were opened in the U.K. and 12 percent in the Philippines. Only 6 percent were opened in India.

On the other hand, the U.S. also leads the world in the percentage of call centers closed in the past five years, with three quarters of the shuttered total. The U.K. is next at 16 percent. Yet many of these are reopened in other U.S. locations to take advantage of lower prevailing wages, tax incentives, a better technology infrastructure or some combination of factors, according to Butler.

The net effect of the closures and openings in the last four years has been more than 183,000 new call center jobs, with about 25 percent of those in the U.S., according to Butler.

25% of 183,000 is about 46,000 new call-center jobs in the US in the past 4 years. That’s not a lot, and it appears to be a lot less than the growth in the rest of the workforce during that time.

But you would think from press accounts that call-center outsourcing is doing to US call-center employment what direct-dialing long-distance calls did to telephone operators. Not so.

Maybe the problem is that too many people at US-based call centers either can’t speak English fluently, or are recent immigrants who sound like they are from somewhere else.

The legendary professor needs only the following four excerpted paragraphs from his August 9 column to do it:

There are decent people, without a selfish hidden agenda, who support increases in minimum wages as a means to help low-skilled workers, and there are other decent people, with the identical goal, who strongly oppose increases in the minimum wage. So the question is: How can people who share the same goals, helping low-skilled workers, come up with polar opposite means that produce polar opposite results?

It all depends on one’s initial premise. It would do us some good to make our initial premises explicit and check them against reality. One initial premise is that an employer needs a certain number of workers to accomplish a given task. That being the case, increasing the minimum wage simply means that all low-skilled workers will enjoy a higher salary and employers will have lower profits and/or customers will pay higher prices. With this vision of how the world operates, the logic of increasing the minimum wage as a means of helping low-skilled workers is impeccable.

Another initial premise is that there is no fixed number of workers necessary to accomplish a given task. Employers might be able to substitute capital for labor such as using dishwashing machines instead of dishwashers, automatic elevators instead of elevator operators, self-service gasoline stations rather than full-service gasoline stations, online reservations rather than reservation clerks or relocating their operation overseas. People who share this initial premise can still have concern for the welfare of low-skilled workers but argue that increasing minimum wages will cause unemployment for some of them and deny job opportunities for others. Given their initial premise, the logic of their argument is also impeccable.

Thus, the question to decide is which initial premise best describes how the world operates. Is it the one that says there’s a fixed number of workers necessary to perform a given task, or the one that says employers have flexibility in the mix of workers and capital they use and where in the world they can choose to manufacture? I think the latter description more properly describes how the world operates.

The only question remains is how quickly employers can change their mix of labor and capital in response to minimum-wage law changes and remain competitive. Perhaps 60 years ago the answer would have been “gradually, at best.” Today’s answer is anything but that. If minumum wages are increased above what market conditions dictate a given job is worth, employers can react quickly to mechanize, outsource, close facilities, or otherwise make the necessary adaptations. That’s not “good” or “bad”; it just is, as Williams said, “how the world operates.”

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UPDATE: Porkopolis, with a small assist from Rich Lowry at National Review, was all over the capital-labor substitution issue earlier this year as it relates to the few remaining high-labor content sectors in agriculture.

Germany in 2005: 686,000 births (down 2.8% from 2004; half as many in the early 1960s; and at 8.6 per 1,000 inhabitants, the lowest in the Europe); 830,000 deaths, and big problems:

The birth rate is exceptionally low in the former East Germany, where the city of Chemnitz is thought to have the lowest birth rate in the world.

Economists say Europe’s population decline threatens to damage economic growth for decades.

Those German kids will have quite a problem addressing this when they reach adulthood.

Free Links:

• I glossed over this in my AM Post on Wednesday (5th item at link), but the Dell battery recall is yet another big black eye for the company that in its heyday was run by a guy (Akio Morita) who wrote co-authored an in-your-face business book essay called “The Japan That Can Say No.” (The book of the same title was solely authored by Shintaro Ishihara). That company, Sony, has since turned into the gang that can’t shoot straight. The battery recal may cost Sony as much as $430 million. Posts on last year’s rootkit disaster, where Sony’s CD copy-protection scheme caused computers to become vulnerable to viruses and malware, are here, here, and here.

• Wrong Place, Wrong Time:
  

  A man attempting to rob City Pawn decided that wasn’t such a good idea when he discovered the clerk at the shop happened to be putting away a gun at the time.

  Dumb luck you might call it, the owner of the shop here happened to be putting his guns in the glass case right as the robbers busted in. So he turned the tables on them.

  ….. A few minutes after he opened his store some unwelcome customers walked in; three men intent on robbing the place.

  ….. Marinos says they, “pulled out the gun, cocked it, pointed it at me.”

  Strange coincidence, right then, Bill was pulling out his guns for sale and putting them in the case. He raised the one in his hand and pointed right back at the burglar.

  Marinos says the lead robber swore, “and ran out the door.”

  He caught the robbers completely off-guard. One hardly made it over the threshold of the door before he was spun around and headed back out.

  No word on whether Marinos’ gun was actually loaded.

• How much of this isn’t getting caught? (HT Large Bill) –
  

  If there’s one thing Donovan Riley apparently learned during his time in Chicago, it was “Vote early and often.”

  Riley, 69, the former CEO of the University of Illinois Medical Center and a former law professor at Loyola University, is running for a state senate seat in Milwaukee.

  On Nov. 7, 2000, the day of the big election between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Riley appeared at the polling place in Oconomowac, Wis., where he had registered to vote just the day before, voting records show. His ex-wife owned a home there.

  “Then he drove down to Chicago where he was already registered and he voted again,” said Michael Crooks, a Wisconsin attorney who filed a complaint against Riley with Wisconsin election officials. “This is about as blatant as it gets.”

  Large Bill points to the usual failure to report Riley’s party affiliation (If you have to ask, you haven’t been paying attention; for newbies, it’s Democrat).

  Riley got caught because he was running for office (there has to be a stronger word than chutzpah for this). How many thousands of people who don’t aspire to office but are nevertheless politically active (and ethically challenged) are engaged in this? It’s long past time for a cross-check and scrubbing of interstate and intrastate voter-registration databases, with prosecutions for those proven to have voted in multiple jurisdictions.

• The SEC’s recently announced Sarbanes Oxley breaks for small companies (found first at Ohio Society of CPAs web site) are mostly deferrals, and not eliminations, of onerous requirements that shouldn’t exist, and that will either cause more smaller companies to stay private, force them to look overseas for public-equity funding, or both. The fact that newly-public companies can wait a bit until their first “full SarBox” annual cycle begins is the one genuine improvement, but nowhere near enough.

• If you would like to know exactly what earmark/pork projects have been slated for your area – A left-leaning foundation (HT Instapundit sans link) has posted a great US map (HT Porkopolis) that can show you just that. It’s good to see that controlling earmarks/pork has at least some bipartisan appeal.

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UPDATE: The first item above for Sony was corrected to reflect that Morita co-wrote a essay called “The Japan That Can Say No,” but was not the author of the book by the same name. Thanks to commenter Joel at Far Outliers for the correction.

I’m using this link because it is the only one I have found that answers the question of where these men found their inspiration during their ordeal:

Fishermen rescued after 9 months adrift
8,000 km from home
Thursday, August 17, 2006

Three Mexican fishermen who disappeared in the Pacific Ocean nine months ago have been rescued nearly 8,000 kilometres from their home, saying they survived by eating seagulls, drinking rainwater and reading the Bible.

A Taiwanese tuna boat scooped the men out of the water about halfway between Hawaii and Australia on Aug. 9. They had drifted all the way from San Blas, a fishing village about 160 kilometres north of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where they were last seen in late October or early November, 2005.

Fishermen in San Blas, a hamlet of about 8,000 people, are celebrating the men’s astonishing survival. “God is so great that he helped them all the time. Everybody is excited. They are surprised. They don’t know how it happened that they are alive,” Antonio Aguayo, a sport fishing guide in San Blas, said in a telephone interview yesterday.

“Nobody has ever been lost for so long and been alive to tell about it.”

“Not even Christopher Columbus stayed on the ocean so long,” Mr. Aguayo said.

Salvador Ordonez Vasques, Jesus Eduardo Vidana Lopez and Lucio Rendon Bacerra left San Blas on a short shark-fishing trip on Oct. 25, according to Mr. Aguayo. They took an eight-metre fibreglass boat.

Mr. Aguayo said the men took only enough fuel for a few days and unexpectedly ran into a storm. They may have used up their fuel travelling in the wrong direction, thinking they were headed back to shore, according to Mr. Aguayo.

The men’s families concluded they had perished at sea.

“Once one week went by, two weeks, a month, three months, we all lost hope that they would be found alive,” said Raul Rendon Perez, Mr. Rendon’s uncle. He received the joyous news on Tuesday morning at the family ranch, where his nephew has lived for 15 years.

“That kind of life in the high seas, without food or water, you can’t last more than a month,” said Saul Ordonez Ceja, cousin to both Mr. Rendon Bacerra, 27, and Mr. Ordonez Vasquez, 37. “It was a miracle.”

As the months passed at sea, the men’s boat drifted farther and father west, until they reached the waters north of Baker Island — between the Marshall Islands and Kiribati, and about 8,000 kilometres from the Mexican fishing village they left.

Crew members aboard a Taiwanese trawler spotted the men’s small boat and realized they were alive, said Eugene Muller, manager of Koo’s Fishing Company Ltd.

“They seemed to be in very good health, given what they just went through,” Mr. Muller said in an interview from Majuro, the capital city of the Marshall Islands. “Other than being very hungry and having lost a lot of weight, our crew said they didn’t need any medical attention.”

The survivors told a Mexican radio station that it rained nearly every day of their ordeal, providing them with fresh water to drink. One of the men had a watch that kept track of the days. They passed time by reading a copy of the Bible one of the men brought along.

“We ate raw fish, ducks and seagulls. We took down any bird that landed on our boat and we ate it like that, raw,” Mr. Vidana, 27, said from aboard the trawler. He said they frequently saw ships during their months at sea, but were lucky to be picked up because they were asleep when trawler’s crew saw them.

“We never lost hope,” Mr. Vidana said. “They passed us by, but we kept on seeing them. Every week or so, sometimes we’d go a month without seeing one, but we always saw them so we never lost hope.”

Some reports said five fishermen were originally aboard the Mexican boat, but only three survived. Others said the men had only been at sea for three months. Friends and relatives of the men gave the National Post varying reports of when they had set out, saying it was in late October or early November, 2005. They agreed only three men were on board.

Both of their boat’s 200-horsepower outboard motors were disabled.

….. “What details we have are from the Mexican fishermen through our Chinese crew,” Mr. Muller explained. “Some of the details are murky right now.”

The Mexican government is flying an official to the Marshall Islands to greet the men. The tuna boat is expected to be at sea for another 10 days to two weeks before returning to Majuro.

Meanwhile, celebrations in Mexico are already underway. Dozens of Mexican newspapers carried stories of the men’s tale.

Mr. Ordonez Ceja described his cousins as “adventurers” who are still bachelors. Both are hard workers, he said. The family is planning a party and Roman Catholic Mass to mark the rescued fishermen’s return.

“I lived so sad,” Francisca Perez, Mr. Rendon’s grandmother, told the Televisa news station.

“Now that my grandson is alive, I just want him to come home.”