03.25.08

The Walmart Plague: how it spread

Posted in Daily life at 10:24 am by LeisureGuy

Good video showing how the infection spread. More info here.

from blog.kiwitobes.com posted with vodpod

6 Comments »

  1. Steve said,

    25 March 2008 at 7:29 pm

    In a free market system, people get what they want and at the price they are prepared to pay. Wal-Mart is a success because it resonates (very effectively) with modern values of overconsumption, greed, and materialism. Wal-Mart is a symptom, not the disease.

    Of course, one might argue that companies like Wal-Mart are complicit in fomenting these social trends through their sophisticated marketing techniques, but in the end, the choice to shop there or not is up to each one of us.

  2. Zaine Ridling said,

    25 March 2008 at 8:41 pm

    [Steve]: …the choice to shop there or not is up to each one of us.
    ________________________________________________
    Good points, Steve, but not in my small Missouri town, where the nearest big store is 105 miles away in any direction. We have two other grocery stores, but their prices are so high, they almost double Wal-Mart’s in staples (potatoes, bread, rice, milk). Economically I don’t have a choice in my case because I wouldn’t have enough money left over to eat until the next paycheck. (This is the persistent gripe against Microsoft — I have to “buy” Windows on a retail PC whether I want it or not. I run GNU/Linux, but unless I build my own systems, $150-$400 of the PC costs go to Microsoft right off the top.)

    Wal-Mart is a cult and a disease, and would it kill them to buy American once in a while? Oh that’s right, in a “global” economy, I’m supposed to shutup about corporate profits.

  3. LeisureGuy said,

    25 March 2008 at 8:55 pm

    Wal-Mart has killed the economy of many small towns, destroying local businesses and moving people into low-paying jobs with inadequate benefits and then cutting those by converting jobs to part-time, meanwhile sucking up all the profits for transfer away from the town. And their anti-union activities are intolerable as well as illegal.

  4. Zaine Ridling said,

    25 March 2008 at 9:00 pm

    Here’s how nice the Wal-Mart people are.

  5. Steve said,

    26 March 2008 at 5:02 am

    To Zaine and Leisureguy:

    I’m no Wal-Mart fan, and in fact rarely go there…at the store level it is a chaotic shark-like feeding frenzy, with stock blocking the aisles, and merchandise being strewn about by careless shoppers who seem to think they are at a bazaar. Most of the merchandise is from China,which I try to support as little as possible because of its often-suspect quality, not to mention that country’s human-right record.

    BUT……

    Michael, when you say that Wal-Mart has destroyed local businesses, it sounds like they came into town in the middle of the night, bought up all the local stores and then next day they were the only place in town to shop - I’m sure that’s not the case. I assume that before Wal-Mart there were local businesses supplying the needs of the townspeople. So in reality, what happened is that people were attracted to Wal-Mart because of its low prices and larger selection, eventually shifting their buying habits away from the local stores that ultimately couldn’t compete and went out of business. The consumer made the decision to put those stores out of business, not Wal-Mart!

    And Zaine, you make an excellent point that you shop at Wal-Mart because they offer such low competitive prices that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to get the same value at the local grocery stores. Isn’t that a good thing? It seems to me that people are attracted to Wal-Mart by two things: Need or Greed. If Wal-Mart is able to leverage its huge purchasing volume to secure better prices from suppliers and pass these on to consumers who need to feed their families, why is this a bad thing? The greed issue is an entirely different one, and not likely to be solved as a blog response.

    That Wal-Mart is a poor corporate citizen appears to be a consensus among its detractors. Up here they recently closed a large store in a rural area when it looked like it might be unionized. But, the law upheld that Wal-Mart was within its rights…as any of its competitors would be if they chose to do so. For Wal-Mart, keeping unions out, low wages, health-insurance claw-backs, etc. are all part of its competitive advantage in keeping prices low.

    The answer is unfortunately simple: When Wal-Mart shows up in your town…don’t shop there…keep patronizing your local merchants. But in a democracy, shoppers, like voters, “vote with their feet”.

  6. LeisureGuy said,

    26 March 2008 at 6:46 am

    Their union-busting activities in the US would be illegal except that the NLRB is totally GOP run these days. Also, in a democracy people can support zoning restrictions that disallow Wal-Mart, as some communities have done (and then Wal-Mart tries to buy an election, and gets caught).

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