> there's one big difference, though. To shop at Costco you have to buy twice as much (plus typically pay membership fees). That step could be too steep for the people most living hand-to-mouth, even though it would save them money within weeks. So there could be sample bias here too.
See the article Why Can’t Walmart Be More Like Costco?[0] for more on this.
You can often sift through McArdle's post to find the Yglesias or Salmon post she's citing and just read that instead. Here, the analysis seems to boil down to "sure, Walmart could pay every worker $3000/yr more and have Costco's margins, but who cares about a paltry $3000?".
The rest of her argument appears to be "I don't know if that would work for Walmart". Neither do I, but "I don't know" isn't a persuasive argument. :)
Did you even read her article? She gives a very clear reason.
Walmart sells 140k skus, sorted on shelves and available in small quantities, and has lots of cashiers so you can get in and out reasonably quickly. Costco sells 4k skus, mostly in bulk, and forces you to wait 20 minutes to leave the store.
You know what? You're absolutely right. I went down a little wormhole of McArdle-vs-Other-People link following, watched 12(!) minutes of her and Dean Baker going at it on video about whether the fed can reasonably call asset bubbles, and lost my place; I had a different McArdle post in my other window when I wrote this.
The irony is, I was particularly poorly served by the advice I offered here, since skipping straight to Yglesias totally screwed me up.
That's clearly one of the reasons she gives, but I wouldn't call it a clear reason. It doesn't make the point she cares about, as she herself says. Her claim (approximately) is "Costco's way may work for Costco but it wouldn't work here, because numbers and business". But people used to argue the same about how it would never work for Costco either.
It's hard for people to make the comparisons between brands, sizes, so on and so forth. Australia recently passed legislation requiring supermarkets to list the price-per-unit-weight/volume alongside the product price. So on a food item, you'll see the price for the product, and also the price per 100 grams.
It means things are directly comparable across brands and sizes ("how does this 117g portion compare to this 270g one?"). It's a fantastic bit of legislation.
Britain also has this kind of legislation. But e.g. Tesco often tries to play around it, by listing, say, different kinds of apples sometimes by piece, sometimes by kg.
I'm not sure it's a law though (I doubt it, at least it's not federal, as it's not in all stores). I imagine it could just as easily have been market pressure, as the supermarkets began to offer their own brands of products for cheaper than premium, it made sense to offer direct comparisons with as much information as possible.
Thanks for that link. I read it and tried for an embarrassingly long time to write a coherent reply, but apparently can't do it. Megan Mcardle's blend of ideology and snark is like reverse catnip to me. If I were a cat, or something. Fortunately it's still gorgeously sunny here; I'm gonna go outside and atone for my foolishness by being happy.
I had no idea that the question Why can't Walmart treat its workers better, since Costco has proved it possible was not only a thing, but mature enough in the lifecycle of thingness for Mcardle to write an entire piece about how much it annoys her. I just arrived at it from observation in the stores. Well, that plus an article or two about Costco.
See the article Why Can’t Walmart Be More Like Costco?[0] for more on this.
0: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/26/why-can-t-w...