Need to read - 9/14

George Will has a masterpiece of a column this week regarding the left's disdain for Wal-Mart. Some excerpts:

"A woman pushing a shopping cart with a stoical 3-year-old along for the ride, has a chip on her shoulder about the size of this 141,000 square-foot Wal-Mart. She applied for a job when the store opened in January and was turned down because, she said, the person doing the hiring 'had an attitude.' [From later in the column: 'More than 25,000 people applied for the 325 openings.'] So why is the woman shopping here anyway? She looks at the questioner as though he is dimwitted and directs his attention to the low prices of the DVDs on the rack next to her. Sensibly, she compartmentalizes her moods and her money."

and

"A McKinsey company study concluded that Wal-Mart accounted for 13 percent of the nation's productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s, which probably made Wal-Mart about as important as the Federal Reserve in holding down inflation. By lowering consumer prices, Wal-Mart costs about 50 retail jobs among competitors for every 100 jobs Wal-Mart creates. Wal-Mart and its effects save shoppers more than $200 billion a year, dwarfing such government programs as food stamps ($28.6 billion) and the earned-income tax credit ($34.6 billion)."