Good intentions. They’re great for road paving, but how much do they count for in things that really matter, like helping the less fortunate?
We have things like charity in this country, which exists to help people. But we also have businesses in this country — like Walmart — that exist to make a profit off of people — including poor people.
But which is helping people more?
Now, Americans are pretty generous. We gave $592 billion to charity last year. That’s on top of all those stupid taxes taken from us.
But what was the benefit from that? And it’s not like every charity even checks if things work. For every dollar that bought a can of food for the hungry, there’s a dollar that bought a gala, a brochure, a consultant, and a warm, fuzzy feeling. That’s because people give money based on intentions, not results. Charity is not like a business where if you fail at your goal, you go out of business. In fact, if you really fail to help and things get even worse, you can use how bad things are to raise even more money.
Still, let’s look at what are some of the best charities in the U.S. for helping the poor. Take Feeding America, the biggest charity in the country by revenue. And it’s good at its job: a network of more than 200 food banks and 60,000 pantries, soup kitchens, and shelters that handed out 5.7 billion meals last year to some 46 million people. Because it runs on donated and rescued food instead of buying it retail, it squeezes every dollar donated to it — by its own math, a buck becomes at least ten meals.
That’s the ceiling. Feeding the American poor done about as well as it’s ever been done — and it runs on about $5 billion a year, most of that not even cash but the value of donated food.
Now, let’s look at Walmart. It’s the largest private employer in the country. It puts 2.1 million people to work. The average hourly associate makes north of eighteen dollars an hour. Also, about three out of four of its salaried store managers — people now clearing six figures — started out hourly, pushing carts and stocking shelves. It’s not just a job, but for a lot of people it’s a ladder with the bottom rung low enough for anyone to reach it.
Then there’s the other thing Walmart does, the thing it’s actually famous for: Figuring out how to make everything super cheap.
