"Impact on the economy"

The ad shows us Gramps flying off to visit his daughter and grandkids. The voice over reads the giant print:

Walmart saves the average family $3,100 a year, no matter where you shop.

And at the bottom of the screen it says

Based on Walmart's impact on the economy

Now, what does that mean? Are they telling us that Walmart depresses the local economy and drives prices down everywhere? (And if so, are they taking into account the job loss and depressed salaries as well?) And not just the local economy, but the economy of the whole country, "no matter where"? That would be a massive impact, indeed.

Actually, what they're doing is lying. I know, what a shock. The study by global Insight

talks about measuring the “cumulative price impact” of Wal-Mart since 1985. If the average American family has saved $3,100 over that time, that’s about $129 a year, not $3,100.

And that's assuming, which you really can't, that Walmart is actually responsible for the entire "savings". As Jim Ledbetter says,

the study also measured the impact on prices of many things that have little to do with Wal-Mart: energy costs, population growth, and unemployment. As I read the study, those factors combined are responsible for 89 percent of price variation. Wal-Mart and other factors are crumbs by comparison.

Ledbetter adds a rider on the whole concept that this is even a good thing:

And so if you believe that Wal-Mart’s lowering of prices is “good for the economy”—that’s how CNBC framed the discussion on Wednesday—it follows that the much larger downward pressures on prices are even better. Unemployment, in particular, seems to be very good at lowering prices. So if we like prices when 10 percent of Americans aren’t working, we would love them if 25 percent of Americans weren’t working! Clearly there is a problem with this line of thinking, and I think it’s evident to a junior high-school student: Lower prices are helpful to consumers, but they are only one piece of a larger economic pie. They are not, in and of themselves, the only economic good, and indeed if prices get too low—at Wal-Mart or anywhere else—it almost certainly means that something else is out of whack. (In Wal-Mart’s case, infamously low wages, perhaps, but that’s another article.)

Go over and read Ledbetter's whole article - he has some nice things to say about CNBC in general. And by nice, I mean critical.