I have a sense of the absurd. You wouldn't blame a plastics company in china for the price of a subway sandwich in America
by any normal leap unless you knew the larger picture of how they play into the issue.. just wouldn't seem normal. Walmart
imports the vast majority of it's product from china - a market with which one cannot compete on a cost level and win unless your cost level is lower than theirs. Basic, simple economics. The fact that a walmart uses that method of competing local players out of their own market causes ripples in economics that aren't apparent on their surface or immediately unless you understand that offshoring and outsourcing begets the same. You also have to see that a company the size of Walmart sets precident and by competition forces competitors to do the same thing to try to stay in business themselves. And Car companies buy product from companies that normally are not considered "automotive manufacturers." Thus, Walmart could affect the issue by precident, by example, by force of competition that causes a supplier of the automaker to lose standing or close, etc.
The problem of your "absurd" example is that it isn't "absurd". Walmart dictates price to its suppliers. And if walmart doesn't like the price of a supplier, they can kill the supplier as with Rubbermaid. If Rubbermaid supplies another manufacturer, then ripples flow through the market.
Simple cause and effect. And alot of vendors that sell to walmart also deal with vendors that sell product and raw materials to auto manufacturers, aircraft manufacturers, etc. There are too many ways Walmart's vast influence could play into this closing. You dismiss it as impossible. I didn't say they had anything to do with it directly. I merely offer that their actions could as easily be in part responsible just as HP and IBM outsourcing forced other computer support, manufacturers and suppliers to outsource causing a larger footprint of impact across the marketplace than one might suspect immediately. If you have a small plastics company in Kokomo, Indiana that supplies planter pots to Walmart and computer case faceplates to a computer company, what happens to the computer company when Walmart puts that plastics company out of business? That's absurd, right. Afterall, what affect could a plastics company have on a computer manufacturer... How much cloth is in the interior of a car and who makes it? How much plastic? How much silica? How many computer components? How much wire?
How much carpet and who supplies that? ...
As afore mentioned, if walmart subverts the market and gets by with it, why shouldn't the auto maker.. I don't dismiss the possible impact. I also don't look at your lack of attentiveness to such fine points as some grand conspiracy and lack of sophistication.. maybe lack of common sense and or experience; but, nobody's perfect. On the other hand, I guess things you hadn't considered might make you look at an opponent as whacked till you start thinking. Or you may just use such a charge as a rhetorical device in absence of any substantive or qualitatively useful argument. Things that make you go "hmmmm".
And I don't look at your lack of manners as anything other than a lack of common sense and experience..........Of course common courtesy is not a strong suit of many members of gen X.........
I suggest you look a bit closer at the impact over-regulation and union demands have made on the costs of doing business before you blame Americans for trying to make their dollar strtch as far as it can go and the companies that are trying to help them accomplish that.