Last month, first lady Michelle Obama continued her push for fighting obesity in the United States through her Let’s Move campaign. She partnered with what is the world’s largest retailer, and has now become the largest grocery store chain in the nation…Walmart.
“No family should have to choose between food that is healthy for them and food they can afford,” Bill Simon – the CEO of U.S. Wal-Mart stores said in a statement at the time.
But Wal-Mart’s venture into healthy foods might be a little bit like Phillip-Morris sponsoring anti-smoking public service announcements. That’s especially true when you consider a recent study, which indicates that people tend to get fatter when a new Wal-Mart Super Center opens up in their town.
Economists from North Carolina tracked health and population data between 1996 and 2005. During that time, more than 1,500 Walmart Super Centers opened up in the U.S.
The researchers discovered that if you figured one Walmart Super Center serves 100,000 people, each of those people would gain an average of 1.5 pounds. The study also showed the opening of a Walmart boosts the obesity rate by 2.3%. That means at least two out of 100 people would become obese after a Walmart Super Center opens.
One of the researchers in the study was Charles Courtemanche from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He realizes that there are a lot of factors at play in this study.
The obvious explanation is that cheap food is usually unhealthy food. Plus, when food is cheap, people might buy more and potentially eat more.
Stop using these!
But Courtemanche said while his study consisted of many types of controls and tests, more research would need to be done to determine the effect of factors like people becoming lazier because they buy more DVDs and video games from Wal-Mart.
I’m sure that the presence of all those motorized shopping scooters doesn’t help matters much either. For crying out loud – at least get a little exercise while you pick up Doritos!
Either way – the researchers did not intend for the study to bring about a ban on Wal-Mart stores.
“We don’t want people to look at this and immediately say Walmart is evil. We want people to realize this is one of many things that are going on, and maybe some are good and some are bad,” Courtemanche said.
The study on Wal-Mart and obesity will be published in the March issue of the Journal of Urban Economics.
Michelle Obama praised Wal-Mart for taking the steps to make healthier food more affordable for American families. She claims the move “has the potential to transform the marketplace.” That’s because Wal-Mart will also pressure its suppliers to make their brands healthier.
But it may be about more than just getting customers healthy. Andrea Thomas, Senior VP of sustainability at Wal-Mart explained that more affordable healthy foods would be made possible by making things more efficient. For example – offering more produce from local farms reduces shipping costs.
A business analyst told Bloomberg News that it’s all about the bottom line. “Let’s call it what it is – an expense cutting program,” said Brian Sozzzi of Wall Street Strategies in New York. “I am not trying to discount what they are doing here, but 51 percent of their sales are tied to grocery, and inflation is climbing in the category. If they can reduce costs here and drive higher volume through share gains, it’s a nice formula.”
Whether or not the formula will work is yet to be determined. We already know that Wal-Mart’s push to sell organic food products didn’t go over so well with it’s customer base.
Will the recent decision to make groceries in general healthier and more affordable make for a slimmer America? We’ll have to keep our eyes on the bathroom scales to find out.
Watch an interview with Andrea Thomas from Wal-Mart below. Underneath that is a very “interesting” opinion piece about fat people at Walmart. One has under 200 views one has more than 60,000. I’ll let you guess which is which.
Image Credit: Just_[von}Bernard
+Kasey Steinbrinck is a former TV news producer and newspaper reporter who is now the lead blogger for Check Advantage. The online printer of cheap checks also offers more articles on personal finances in its Check Education section. Contact Kasey if you’d like free content created for your website or blog.
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