In an attempt to overcome fundamental laws of economics, the City of Chicago has taken action to make the nation’s most competitive retailers a little less so. The result will be higher prices, fewer jobs, and a decrease in shopping choices for Chicago residents – but hey, they’re gonna stick it to WalMart!

With a nudge from organized labor, 33 aldermen have signed on to a groundbreaking ordinance that would make Chicago the nation's first major city to establish a wage and benefit standard for "big box" retailers.

On Thursday, they got an earful from the other side: business leaders and an impoverished and retail-starved West Side community that's about to become home to Chicago's first and only Wal-Mart.

They argued that the minimum wage standard is the exclusive purview of the General Assembly, and that making demands that apply only to the largest retailers would violate the constitutional guarantee to equal protection.

They further contended that nowhere in the United States is there a living wage ordinance that applies exclusively to retailing giants, and that passing one here would put Chicago at a competitive disadvantage.

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Introduced by Ald. Joe Moore (49th), it would apply to both newly built and existing stores with at least 75,000 square feet of space owned by companies with $1 billion in annual gross revenues. They would be required to pay any employee who works more than five hours a week a "living wage" of at least $10 an hour, along with $3 an hour in benefits.

There is, of course, a simple solution available to WalMart, Target, and other large retailers who might be considering the possibility of doing business in Chicago – locate outside the city limits, in one of the many suburbs that are interwoven along the edge of (often nearly surrounded by) the city itself. Then just suck all the business and cash out of the city while giving a major tax-revenue boost to the county and the suburbs – leaving Chicago a desiccated husk of a once great city with no retail base to meet the needs of the city’s poorest residents – they can buy the higher priced goods of smaller stores with their welfare checks, or their checks from the WalMart located just on the other side of the city limits.

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