hh on Nostr: Oh, absolutely. My thesis is that in a free market, with excellent business people at ...

Oh, absolutely. My thesis is that in a free market, with excellent business people at its helm, Walmart would be a large regional grocer in the US. Maybe.

To become the behemoth it is, though, its leadership must necessarily excel not at business, i.e., at providing consumers with what they want at the cost they want it, but at regulatory arbitrage. In the process, it coopted itself.

It's not by chance that most of the news stories involving megacorps like Walmart or Amazon are always political in nature, and so are the PR stories they spin out for public consumption, as a form to pressure politicians and regulators in their favor ("think about the jobs", "think about the taxes", etc)