I mean, from Walmart's perspective yeah absolutely that's what it is. But consumers aren't profiting from their home towns being utterly decimated financially. Legislators at a local level aren't really either. I suppose legislators at a state and national level might be kind of but they still end up with a shittier world.

The overarching motivation isn't so much about profiteering as being suckers and subscribing to the idea that corporate America has our best interests in mind. If workers and local municipalities were focused on maximizing their own value, rather than being good little cooperative serfs and sellouts, we wouldn't have this issue.

Convenience and intellectual laziness got us here.

I think a lot of what we're feeling now is just the result of misplaced leftover cold war era anti-communist anxiety ironically resulting in the withering of a less centrally orchestrated American economy in favor of consolidation. It's just that said consolidation ended up handing everything to oligarchs instead of to some collective representation of workers. In either case, you get the same issue of the people who decide on policy being fully detached from both the needs of the people they ostensibly serve as well as the actual effectiveness of the measures they enact.