Surprisingly, the usually demure alderman voted against Da Mayor's stated wish. Doesn't happen that often. As I blogged about when I first heard the proposal, or soon after, the national retailers need to continuously expand in order to satisfy their Wall Street masters, and juice their quarterly earning reports. No growth means stagnation. Companies like Wal-Mart have pretty much saturated the rural part of the US, thus have to expand into urban environments next. So, all of their bitching aside, and after the lawsuit is settled (either way), Wal-Mart and Blockbuster, and Best Buy, and similar stores will be opening in a neighborhood near you. And if they have to pay their employees a couple of thousand more dollars a year, I think it won't cause any bankruptcy filings.
Brief survey of related news articles in my RSS reader:
BBC: Chicago backs higher minimum wage
Chicago's city council approves a measure forcing major retailers to pay an increased minimum wage.
NYT: Chicago Orders Big Box Stores to Raise Wageoooh, so much money. If one worked 40 hours a week, every week, including holidays, that's almost $20,000 a year, before taxes are taken out (so, subtract about a third for payroll tax, social security, etc.), or around $13,000 a year. Lots of fun living on that in Chicago. Quick glance at the rental market - studio apartment in less desirable neighborhood, in the range of $450 a month, plus utilities. God forbid you have kids. Anyway, I think Wal-Mart can afford paying the extra dollar or two, per a cursory glance at their financials, including revenue of $321,000,000,000 last year, and gross profit of $75,260,000,000.
A groundbreaking measure requires stores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot to pay $10 an hour by 2010.
Tribune: 'Big-box' wage law passes
Aldermen defy mayor, anger retailersIn rare and open defiance of Mayor Richard Daley, the City Council Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a measure that will require big retailers to pay a higher minimum wage than most other Chicago employers.
Tribune: Wal-Mart focus on close-in suburbs
Passage of city bill requiring big-box stores to pay `living wage' likely to cause retail giant to turn to strategy of ringing city with SupercentersThe world's largest retailer suffered a blow on Wednesday when Chicago aldermen passed a bill that requires big-box stores, including Wal-Mart, to pay a so-called living wage. The ordinance could curb Wal-Mart's appetite to build stores in the city limits.
note the qualifier, could....
Steve Gilliard: Pay us fairly
...Now, people are wondering how you live in Chicago on $7.25 an hour, because you can't.
Walmart is being targeted because it is a shitty corporate citizen. It treats its workers poorly. Walmart hasn't come to New York because the unions made it clear they would run a unionization drive at any store they built.
When people do case studies about Walmart in the future, it's inability to adapt to the demands of urban America will be it's downfall.
Eric Zorn: Real fear is that higher pay won't be disaster ... But that's not what they're really afraid of.
What they're really afraid of is that their dire predictions won't come true.
They're afraid that the ordinance will pass as expected Wednesday, possibly by a veto-proof two-thirds majority of the aldermen, go into effect later this year and prove popular and generally beneficial.
Big stores will not close. In fact, new big-box behemoths will open in hard-luck neighborhoods. These stores will make money for their owners and provide a decent buck to their employees. Employment rates and municipal tax receipts will rise.
