De Blasio: Amazon is no Walmart. Mayor says Walmart made efforts to undermine labor unions.

Crain's New York Business reports on favoring one business over another :

Some big corporations are better than others, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday.

That was how the Democrat reconciled his opposition to letting Walmart set up shop in New York City with his enthusiasm for Amazon's decision this month to come to Long Island City.

As public advocate and a Gracie Mansion aspirant, de Blasio called the Arkansas-based retailer a "Trojan horse" that would wipe out small businesses if allowed to open a store in the five boroughs and would erode the city's middle class with its anti-union ethos.

But on his weekly "Ask the Mayor" segment on WNYC Friday, he maintained that Amazon, also known for outcompeting small storefront retailers and combating labor organization in its warehouses and Whole Foods stores, is a better breed of behemoth.


"I'm going to ask all New Yorkers and particularly my fellow progressives to look carefully at what's similar and what's different here," de Blasio said. "Whatever you like or dislike about Amazon, Walmart is an entirely different universe, in terms of the systematic efforts that they have undertaken to not only to undermine labor, small businesses, the environment, American workers—and obviously the politics of the Walton family add to it."

The mayor did not elaborate to explain his claims. Reports have shown Amazon does work systematically to blunt unionization drives, and studies have found online shopping has deleterious effects on the environment. And many blame Amazon's popularity for the epidemic of retail vacancies in New York City and across the nation. And Walmart in the 2000s and earlier this decade generated intense opposition from unions and workers' rights groups for the way it treated and paid employees and actions taken to stop them from organizing. That opposition continues, but have abated as Walmart has raised pay and taken other steps to improve its reputation amid disappointing sales and polling data about its public image.

Comrade De Blasio wants to prevent consumers from low prices. The foundation of the rent-seeking society all socialists want....