The Price of Low Prices

I have never in my life come across an article defending Walmart and it's somewhat questionable practice of provinding the lowest possible prices. Although my opinion about Walmart remains unchanged, I found the Article "The New Colossus" by Jay Nordlinger extremely enlightening. I never considered the good Walmart does: it is the largest employer in both the United States and Mexico, providing jobs to those who need it. One aspect of the Walmart corporation that I'd never considered was that even though they provide rock bottom prices for Americans at the cost paying pennies an hour for foreign labor, they "are the store for countless people who live paycheck to paycheck, wanting an needing decent products at decent prices". What I found interesting about this article was that although it talked about how good low prices are for Americans and their standard of living, Nordlinger failed to even touch on what horrible conditions people work in to make these low prices happen. As a college student, I do appreciate a low prices but, but I definately don't appreciate my money going towards something I don't support. I felt this article was extremely one-sided and didn't even bother to mention the other, uglier, side of things.
I found "Harnessing the Power of Consumers" extremely intersting and more comforting. Although I was aware of the fact that we as consumers have the most power in controlling sweatshop labor by not supporting it, I'd wondered what boycotting sweatshop products would do to those working in a sweatshop. Like the "Help is on the Way,Dude" cartoon illustrated, I feared that taking away demand for their jobs would lead to their demise, I didn't know what would happen after that. I love Ed Finn's theroy that even though it's going to get worse before it gets better, it will get better. The only thing I wonder is: how long will it take to get better? How many people will starve before conditions improve? It's easy for us, several continents away from it all to look the other way while this happens, but will they be willing to go through this process for years before the light at the end of the tunnel appears?