WalMart helps the poor in the same way that the factories in 1820's Britain helped the poor. Working fourteen hours a day from the age of five is still preferable to starving to death, so in this direct sense a sweatshop helps the poor.

WalMart and the Industrial Revolution are double faced beasts. They destroy existing social and economical patterns by making the people whose lives it ravages an offer they can't refuse.


More in general, living wages for Americans are evaporating. The gentle middle class America of the 1950s is no longer. In its place, America has turned itself into some sort of Brazil. With an enormously unequal income distribution, little social mobility, gated communties, violence. It is not unthinkable that the middle class in America will go the way of that of Argentina, and simply evaporate.