Thank you for the insights. I visited some relatives in the Midwest and went into a large Walmart store in a small town early in the morning, at opening time (epidemic hours). There was a handful of customers—not many at all. Maybe five of us.
But there were many employees. Seeing their rows of vehicles, there were probably around 50 of them there at one time.
I worked in a large supermarket for my first job as a teenager nearly 50 years ago. That busy supermarket in a larger city employed maybe about one-tenth the number of employees. It paid less, too, considering the difference between now and then, job markets and standards, if you can imagine that. It paid less than the minimum wage at the time, until the manager was caught.
All of the companies sell Chinese and other foreign products except for a very few outliers that have extremely high prices on items for sale and inventories sorely lacking in variety. There are also items sold in Walmart, that are not from China. Walmart is only an ever-visible target for contempt.
Walmart put out an “Urgent” request to all vendors, inventors and entrepreneurs to bring to them any product made in the US. They were panicked when Trump stopped being beaten around by China. Plus, you just know that the Walton family have and continue to speak to Xi. Personally.
They saw the Trump writing on the wall. But when November 4th came around they retracted their open bids for all made in the US products. It was business as usual for them now.