[eru]

> We know that from observing evidence such as how much the government pays out in welfare to Wal-Mart employees.

That's a weird metric. If tomorrow Wal-Mart laid off all employees and replaced them with robots, they would surely be worse off, but by your metric Wal-Mart would look less evil?

> Customers continue shopping there because human beings are typically incapable of accepting a short-term loss (higher price) for a long-term gain (product lasts more than three uses).

Groceries typically only last one use.

[plagiarist]

I mean, I could tell you are disingenuous from the get-go, so it is not surprising you would take an off-the-cuff metric which is accurate right now and invent a strawman scenario where I might continue to use it beyond a point where it makes sense.

Likewise, I would not use my flippant 3 times metric regarding durability to cover the quality of produce.

[eru]

Well, feel free to propose a different metric for seeing how Wal-Mart is evil. And instead of Wal-Mart firing all employees, we can have a look at the more plausible scenario of Aldi vs Wal-Mart. Aldi runs a different labour model: their shifts are much more intense but pay more. Their model can't and doesn't utilise the kind of older and less fit people that Wal-Mart employs.

You have to look at the counterfactual of what these people would do, if Wal-Mart weren't around. You seem to implicitly assume that they'd be getting higher paying jobs somewhere else (so they wouldn't have to rely on welfare)? If so, what's stopping those people from switching to these better jobs right now, even while Wal-Mart is still around?

And sure, let's disregard how many times you can eat your groceries. That was a cheap shot. However I think quality vs price trade-off is something customers have to make for themselves anyway. Who am I to judge their choices?