Here’s Charles Courtemanche and Art Carden:
We estimate the impacts of Wal-Mart and warehouse club retailers on height-adjusted body weight and overweight and obesity status, finding robust evidence that non-grocery selling Wal-Marts reduce weight while grocery-selling Wal-Marts and warehouse clubs either reduce weight or have no effect. The effects appear strongest for women, minorities, urban residents, and the poor. We then examine the effects of these retailers on exercise, food and alcohol consumption, smoking, and eating out at restaurants in order to explain the results for weight. Most notably, the evidence suggests that all three types of stores increase consumption of fruits and vegetables while reducing consumption of foods high in fat. This is consistent with the thesis that Wal-Mart increases real incomes through its policy of "Every Day Low Prices," making healthy food more affordable, as opposed to the thesis that cheap food prices make us eat more.
Of course, not everyone likes Wal-Mart.
Is there a selection bias here? People who tend to shop more groceries tend to eat at home more than outside. Which natural lends to greater control over the quality and nutrition content.
Haven’t we had enough of WalMart bashing? Why don’t these people get a life?
“Is there a selection bias here? People who tend to shop more groceries tend to eat at home more than outside. Which natural lends to greater control over the quality and nutrition content.”
If you look at the cited excerpt, you’ll note that people who shopped at Walmarts that did not have groceries lost weight. The idea being that they saved money on other things, and chose to spend more, all things being equal, on fruits and vegetables.
In other words, fatty bad for you food can be an inferior good, and people substitute fruits and vegetables when they have more money and junk food when they have less. Note that the argument implies that too much of an emphasis on organic fruits and vegetables, if they raise the prices, can be bad for health because too many people will switch from cheap fruits and vegetables to junk food rather than staying with more expensive organic produce.
When I read this, I thought “damn, that makes sense”. Back in the day (10-15 years ago), I used to do most of my grocery shopping at Costco. The main driver of that was the 2 gallons of milk deal, because grocery stores weren’t matching that. I drink a lot of nonfat milk. It’s my way of making up for not being a smoker or heavy drinker. I now do most of my grocery shopping at a local Ralphs. Costco is a 10 mile round trip and is always very crowded, even in the mornings when business members get their special hour.
But when I go to Costco occasionally, I load up on frozen fruit, fresh fruit, vegetables, etc. Their stuff is generally much better quality than the grocery store. Bananas for example… At Costco, I can usually find a nice bunch that’s still green and needs a week to get ripe. At Ralphs, they’re almost always yellow, too ripe for my tastes, and two days away from going bad. The other thing that Costco and Sams Club have is diet food in bulk at significant discount over Ralphs. When I focus on eating right, it’s not just difficult when shopping at Ralph’s, it’s expensive.
Time saved could be important too. If I have to drive to fewer stores and spend less time waiting at the cashiers, then I’ll have more time to do other things, like exercise. As long as those other things burn more calories than driving multiple places, there’s part of the weightloss explanation.
It could go the other way too. People could spend more time watching tv. But, it looks like the data suggests the former.
I’ve slimmed down since I started shopping at Walmart. It all has to do with the long walk from the parking lot to the store. I live in a town of about 80,000 and about 40,000 cars are parked in the lot every time I go.
“The only way that Walmart’s promotion of organic food could result in low-income shoppers choosing junk food over fresh produce is if they ONLY sold organic food, which they never will. There will always be less expensive produce options.”
Sarah,
Besides noting that you did not appear to read the paper at all before dismissing the research as based on little real evidence, I’d like to offer another point.
The “only way?” Really? You don’t think that promotion of organic food as “safer” and “more healthy” could make some low-income shoppers somewhere believe that regular produce is less healthy and thus less likely to purchase it? You don’t think that someone out there could decide to, instead of buying 2 pounds of regular apples, buy 1 pound of organic apples and 1 pound of junk food for a negative return on healthfulness? I certainly wouldn’t guarantee that these things would happen, but they seem within the realm of possibility.
What happened to all the comments on this post? I could have sworn that earlier today there was a very interesting series of about 30 comments here, now it’s down to just 11.
Big corporations, mom and pop stores, and farmers markets are all equally deserving of veneration, when they are not taking government handouts. It’s just that big corporations do more good than any mom and pop store or farmer’s market because… they’re bigger. More voluntary transactions = greater welfare.
Was it ever absolutely certain Kathy G was the blogger Tyler was talking about?
OK, I did a first pass on the actual paper.
It looks to me like it says that counties where women self-report that they’re less obese are very slightly more likely to get a new WalMart.
There is no evidence provided that the women who claim they’re less obese actually shop at WalMart, only that there are more WalMarts in counties where they say they weigh a bit less compared to their claimed height.
While changes in diet tend to have slow results — you gradually gain or lose weight on a new diet — the results shown are immediate. The small weight loss happens precisely when the new WalMart opens. For SuperWalMarts the result gets smaller with time, for price clubs it gets larger.
The paper includes a bewildering variety of mixed hypotheses, together with claims for indirect data that might affect them. Very unclear whether they tested the hypotheses that matter. For example, they note that people tend to lose weight when they’re recently unemployed, and they asked whether new Walmarts resulted in higher unemployment, but it looks to me like their data doesn’t show that — it doesn’t test single counties monthly, it tests them yearly and you can estimate percentage unemployment after new Walmarts open by looking at one county the month before, another county during, a third county the month after, etc.
Here is something I didn’t understand from a quick read, that maybe somebody else might read more carefully and explain to us all?
“Including county trends increases the standard errors considerably while slightly reducing the magnitudes for Wal-mart and Super Wal-Mart and causing the sign of the coefficient on warehouse clubs to become positive. In these estimates, all coefficients are statistically insignificant. Note that county trends explain 58%, 57%, and 54% of the variation in Wal-marts, Super Wal-marts and warehouse clubs remaining after controlling for fixed county effects and the other regressors in the baseline model. Moreover, county effects and trends, along with the other regressors, explain 95%, 88%, and 96% of the total variation in per capita Wal-Marts, Super Wal-Marts, and warehouse clubs. Therefore we suspect that the inclusion of county trends eliminates too much of the meaningful variation in the variables of interest to accurately identify their effects in these models. In any case, for all three types of stores the baseline estimates are well within the 95% confidence intervals of the estimated coefficients from regressions that include county trends. We therefore cannot conclude that the baseline fixed effect estimators are inconsistent. Because we find no evidence that our baseline estimates are inaccurate, we emply the county fixed effects estimation strategy throughout the rest of the paper.”
I sort of thought I understood that, but I could be wrong. Maybe it isn’t as damning as it looks?
I’m not much of an economist, nutritionist, activist, environmentalist… so what I say may have very little substantive value in this thread.
If you are really all that concerned with the truth, not some nice theory packaged up in cute statistics, get two cameras. Take one to walmart and photograph the first 24 people you see. Take one to Whole Foods, Central Market, a Farmer’s Market etc.
Compare the pictures. Even take the time to ask the people about their health and well being.
There is no comparison. There is no debate.
I think it is of the utmost importance for people to understand that weight gain is something that can be overcome even if everyone in your family has yet to defeat it.
Rex, the authors published a serious statistical study. They looked at information from surveys filled out by over a million people. They found that when a new WalMart opens, it tends to be in a place where the women weigh a few ounces less than usual and the men a little bit more than usual, after they correct for many other factors that have larger effects.
They conclude from this that WalMart makes people healthier, and they come up with many hypothetical reasons why WalMart might make people healthier.
They found that new WalMarts tend to start up in counties where — other things equal — the women weigh a little less, particularly the poor women. The populations in those counties eat slightly more fresh fruits and vegetables than other counties and very slightly less fat, even when it’s a WalMart that doesn’t sell fruits or vegetables and does sell fatty canned meats and fatty canned soups etc. They conclude from this that people who shop at WalMart have more money left over to buy food, and they choose to buy fruits and vegetables with their extra money.
But to reach this conclusion they assumed that new WalMarts are put into counties at random. Do you believe that?
While I think you’re right that rich people are generally healthier than poor people, do you believe that WalMart makes poor people healthier? Do you believe that poor people who spend money at WalMart use their savings to buy fresh fruits and vegetables?
J Thomas:
I wasn’t discussing the research. I was discussing what Adam was saying about it being “obvious” first hand that Walmart is unhealthy. I see nothing of the the kind. The research itself is another issue, and I refrained from discussing it because I don’t have time to look at it to any great depth.
Social class isn’t inflexible. If you are working class, it is quite possible to advance if you are both lucky and smart. And part of the first step in being upwardly mobile is adopting the preferred lifestyle choices of the upper class. Educating yourself about how you live and eat is part of you establishing valuable social capital.
John Dewey, yes, I’ve read about WalMart. I don’t know how much of it to believe.
This idea that a giant top-down organization can get economy of scale is not new. The central planners who set the quotas and force everybody else to be efficient. It’s an old story.
Comparing against previous examples, I suspect that the central innovation is not economy of scale. The more important thing is that they promote managers who would otherwise be proles, who feel no sense of entitlement. And those managers are willing to be utterly ruthless in carrying out their orders. Unlike in other large organizations they don’t skim, they don’t take bribes or kickbacks. And that makes the difference.
The system fails when those managers become corrupt.
Not sure how working together and partnering with transportation companies can be any different from using the resources of “giant middlemen”. What’s the difference?
In my mind, thre might be a significant difference between paying somebody to do services — when he gets economy of scale because of his multiple customers — versus selling your product to a single large customer who resells them to small customers.
The fact that few such partnerships have evolved indicates to me that profit-seeking wholesalers provide significant value to small retail businesses.
The infrastructure has changed, and might allow easier information retrieval. Too soon to say what’s possible. In the short run the most important thing may be that the big companies have tremendous economy of scale at lobbying the government. That could be decisive.
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