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The entire big box economy is a big honking subsidy to people with cars living in the suburbs by the poor, the singles, the seniors, the urban, the cyclists.
It only works because of the highways and the parking lots and the infrastructure paid for by everyone (road taxes do not cover the cost of the roads) and enjoyed by the drivers. The companies charge twice as much for small packages as big ones because they can; the purchasers without cars and access to the big boxes, the ability to drive between the Walmart and the Costco and the Price Club, don't have a choice.
Read on for Treehugger's reasons. Is bulk buying bad after all?
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Does Buying in Bulk Save Money, or is it a False Economy?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 27 2017, @04:26AM
Unemployment is a poor measure of how desperate the situation is getting because employment is the first thing most people take care of, when they are unemployed. It's like using starvation as a measure of wealth. It doesn't take much wealth to to where starvation isn't a factor. Similarly, it takes a certain amount of effort and ability to get employed. Past that, you don't have an idea of how well the worker is doing.
Further, there are a host of confounding factors. A key one is migration. If someone moves out of Puerto Rico to get a job in New York state, they count as not unemployed whether or not one includes them in the study population. But they had to undergo the tribulation of migrating and finding a job outside of Puerto Rico.
A universal, one-size-fits-all minimum wage is destructive to the poorer, but lower cost parts of a region. For example, if Puerto Rico were subject to a $15 per hour US-wide minimum wage, I think it'd destroy a good portion of what economy is left. Manufacture, tourism, finance, etc are all things that compare poorly as it is between Puerto Rico and either its neighbors or the US mainland. Higher labor costs won't make that better since they're competing with parties either not subject to minimum wage (non-US locals) or which already have an income distribution well over minimum wage (Florida and rest of US mainland, resulting in a decline in Puerto Rico's cheaper wage advantage over those places).
We would see yet more migration elsewhere until the reduced pool of labor fell into balance with the new, much lower demand for labor.