I hate Wal Mart, because I cook for either myself or myself and another person. Good luck getting food cheap for two. Also, in my neck of the woods, Wal-Mart choked out ALL of the other grocery stores - around 5, 3 years ago. Stores that had buy-one-get-one free deals and better, tastier produce. Actually, I hate Wal-Mart for that too, their produce is bland and stupid.
Other than that, I don’t particularly care if they are an evil empire of greed and voodoo.
YES!
Nothing says comfort like a shirt made from the nimble little hands of a six year old; made in a sweat shop in some third world country that I’ve never even heard of.
When I was living in California, the only place we could afford to buy food was at Walmart (other than produce). Two of us were living on a grand total of 17,000 a year. I didn’t really like Walmart, as they didn’t carry half the brands I wanted, but I dealt with it. My husband worked at one for a brief time. He made far more than I did at any retail job I ever had. His only complaint was that there was a creepy cult of Sam Walton that they spread through their employees.
I like Target better now that I have more money. And it’s closer. And better lit. But I don’t think Walmart is evil. It just is.
I’m not Wal-Mart’s biggest fan. However, I grew up in rural East Texas in the era before Wal-Mart and old age hasn’t erased all of those memories yet. In other words, let me share some “not-so-good-old-days” stories that a lot of nostalgists seem to forget. I used to live about 20 miles from a town of over 20,000 people, so this wasn’t just some cross-roads, general store, town.
Most business were open 9-5 MF. Did you have a job that kept you working until 5-6 or later? Toooooo bad. The most vivid memory I have regarding this was making a special trip to town on Friday night to get an oil filter for a Chevy pickup. There was only one parts store in town open until 9. Guess what? They’re out of stock. So, on Saturday morning, another trip to the other parts store in town that’s only open until noon.
I remember right after I graduated from high school, I wanted to listen to music besides Country & Western. So, I read Stero Review for a few months and decided I should buy myself some decent stereo equipment. I had one choice for a retail outlet. They only carried 2-3 home stereo receivers and a few speakers. None of them were set up for listening. But, they would be happy to order the receiver I wanted from Houston. “It will be here on the bus next week.”
I learned to appreciate that attitude when I went with a friend to the only gun store in town. As we walked in, I heard the store owner tell a customer that he didn’t carry whatever the customer wanted and the customer could either take what he had in stock or do without.
A hundred years earlier, Sears & Roebuck brought retail to the sticks with their catalogue. By the time I was a young adult, that service had regressed until it was unbearable. I bought myself a good Canon camera (I had to drive to another town to get it). The Sears catalog had a telephoto lens I wanted. So, I went to the Sears store in town. “You’ll have to order that from the catalog. That’s catalog sales only.” So, I drive home and call them on the phone. Can they ship it to my house? Nooooooo. They’ll have to ship it to the store. So, I have to drive back to town to pick it up. Except, they can’t tell me when it will arrive. And they won’t call me when it arrives. So, after a week or so, I have to call them every day, “Is my lens there yet?”
Wal-Mart and the Internet changed all of that. Those little mom and pop businesses that everyone likes to lament, some of them really sucked, but the rural customer had no choice but to endure them. Now, these businesses actually have to provide the service that Wal-Mart doesn’t or they go out of business.
I’m not saying that Wal-Mart hasn’t done some damage to the retail landscape, but the customer’s life wasn’t all peaches and cream back in the good-old-days either.
I get tired of the Walmart is evil crap, because they do what all the other companies do. Downtown Portage always blames other places for the fact they have no business. They have yet to figure out you need to sell what people want. They also think saying they can order you something will be good enough, when you can buy it that day in an hour some where’s else. The city has always fought any place going in that wasn’t already in the town. the result was do to this everybody went to Madison to shop. The stores that eventually came in were outside the city limits, which have now been included in the city limits. The down town businesses pay the employees minimum wage with no insurance, and some look for kids under 16 so they can pay lower than the standard minimum wage to them. Yet Walmart is the bad place, not the down town. A couple restaurants sell soda, and they wanted the parks department to remove the soda machines from the public restroom area by a parking lot. They thought people should have to walk around town to go into their restaurant to buy a soda. This mentality is why they don’t have business and Walmart does, but they blame Walmart for their problems. They lost their customers years before a Walmart showed up.
This post seems silly when I provided direct comparisons of Kohl’s & Targets that both keep their stores much cleaner and organized and on anything but noname items are just as cheap or especially with Kohl’s for clothes cheaper.
Walmarts are visibly dirty, the aisles are cluttered and difficult to navigate and the shelves far more disorganized. You brought up the odd straw-man of marble floors and chandeliers.
Jim
We have a similar problem in my town. A lot of the downtown stores are run by semi-retired people who want something to do. So we’ve got a men’s wear store that caters to men in their 70s, a quilting-supply store, a shop that sells geek collectibles like those little miniatures and Magic: The Gathering, and other micro-niche places. We do have a few good restaurants, but that’s about it for places anyone would want to go. The one independent hardware store went out of business right after Home Depot and Lowe’s came to town. Fortunately, we have Target, so we don’t have to go that far to get the stuff we want.
Robin
I put Wal-Mart just one step above K-Mart for the shopping experience. The floors are usually dirty, the shelves are piled high and the aisles are crammed with piles of merchandise, and the lighting feels like 40-watt bulbs hanging from the ceiling. It gives off the feeling of darkness, clutter and dirt - a depressing experience.
I don’t care how the store is decorated. When I shop, I want to find what I need, and I want to know how much I’m paying for it before I go to the cashier. Half the time, the tags on the shelves don’t match the products, and I think I’m getting a good price when I’m not. And don’t give me the business about having to check for myself. If Wal-Mart is paying people to stock shelves and the products don’t match the shelf tags, their people are lazy or sloppy. This isn’t the only Wal-Mart that seems to have this problem.
So I take my business to Giant, which is locally based, or Target, which is a hell of a lot nicer, and where the prices are just as good, if not better, than Wal-Mart.
Robin
Well, a floor would be nice–my parents’ local Wal-mart only has bare concrete. That really makes the place feel dinghy. (Genghis Bob, thanks for reminding me of K-Mart. Wal-Mart is nicer, but that’s not saying much.)
I avoid most department stores–they tend to have a little bit of everything, but a lousy selection of all of it. That said, there are some I don’t mind (Wal-Mart isn’t on this list), but for some things I will always go elsewhere.
Maybe they are, but since I was talking about places I’ve been to, it doesn’t do me any good to talk about Target or Kohl’s or any other chain that doesn’t exist (AFAIK) in my country. There are other big box chain stores here, and they are no cleaner or better lit than the Walmart, according to my equally subjective direct comparison. Maybe it’s because the Walmarts here are nicer? Who knows.
Were you really under the mistaken impression that I was talking LITERALLY about marble floors and chandeliers and the Palace at Versailles, or are you just looking for something to be offended by and a chance to use fancy terms like “straw man”?
Never had that problem. Then again, I can’t remember the last time I had that problem ANYWHERE.
Damn right! They have the little fingers that can delicately weave the 300 ct cotton into just the right form fitting XL tank top that I desire. Don’t forget, the sweat keeps the humidity levels up and the cotton softer.
I live in the same city as Rick, and I can answer that.
It’s because the Zellers here is pathetic. I’m surprised they stay in business.
For example, I once checked out an order using Zeller’s self-serve checkout. Item after item came up priced wrong. (Higher, of course.) Lucky for me, I remembered what the prices should have been and caught the errors. After repeatedly calling someone over to override it with the correct price, the sales clerk just ended up staying there and fixing the price of anything I told her was wrong. Something was very very wrong with that system and it was cheating people. She didn’t seem to care or was surprised by that.
The one and only time I caught a mis-scan of the price at Wal-mart, after confirming I was right, they gave me the item for free. (A whole case of Gatorade). That is Wal-mart’s policy.
Wal-mart, more than other retailers, seems to actually care about selling you stuff. Everything they do is designed to sell you stuff. Stores like Zellers just don’t seem to give a shit.
It seems to me people are criticizing Wal-mart for things that are not unique to Wal-mart. Dirty stores, unorganized shelves, items made in sweatshops. What big retailer doesn’t have some stores with these problems? With thousands of outlets there are bound to occur in any of the big chains.
I live pretty near downtown, beside a mall. There is no retail in my neighbourhood because of the mall. So everything I need to buy - groceries, wine, fast food, anything at alll - requires me to go into the mall. This annoys the hell out of me because there is no such thing as a “quick” trip to the mall - buying a single thing at the grocery store in the mall is a minimum half-hour time commitment.
But I can deal with severely limited retail options in my neighbourhood that result from the mall. The thing I cannot deal with is the severely limited retail options in the mall that result from the Wal-Mart in the mall.
Specifically, the mall no longer has a drugstore or a bookstore. They both closed because of folks buying drugs and books at Wal-Mart. Now, even if I didn’t have anything against Wal-Mart, I still wouldn’t buy drugstore items there for the same reason I don’t like to buy a bag of milk at the grocery store. There is no such thing as a quick trip to Wal-Mart. And if I have a headache or cold or whatever, the last thing I want to do is navigate that humongous, disorienting place just for a bottle of NyQuil. (Note that this very thing happened to me a few weeks ago; I woke up with a brutal head cold and there was nowhere to go for relief, except into the mouth of the beast. This did not help my head cold.)
I hate “shopping” and I live next to a mall. So anything that requires me to spend more time in there than is necessary will not get done. I am not going to wander around browsing Wal-Mart for hours, under any circumstances. No doubt they would agree I am not their target market. So I have no trouble objecting to the fact that they have made my life measurably more difficult, by ensuring I have to walk miles in the cold to buy medicine for my aching body.
In my area, there are lots of other retailers that don’t have these problems. The Wal-Mart in my area does. So I don’t go there.
Every other Wal-Mart in the country could be pristine (chandeliers and marble, don’tchaknow), and I still wouldn’t go to the one in my area. Because of the dirt and dinginess. In that store.
Or, to put it another way: 100% of the Wal-Mart stores *I’ve * been in have been dark and dingy.
Didn’t they get bought out? I thought they weren’t Canadian anymore either. (But I could be quite wrong)
Oh yeah - and they suck. Prices are not as good as Walmart, the selection of children’s clothes is pathetic (unless you want to dress your child in ALL-POOH-BEAR-ALL-THE-TIME) the children’s shoes are non-existant, and the mutant badgers spend much more time in my Zellers store than they do in the Walmart.
Our local Walmart is clean and usually in good shape. The one annoying thing is they never update the tag information for prices. There are currently some items that have had less in them for almost two years and the tags still have the old weight.
What is the town’s latest idea for improving business. They want to build a tourist center at a nice park to look like a paddle wheeler. For Christ’s sake rebuild the nice little stone building that was downtown until you ripped it down to only have bathrooms there. Don’t ruin the park with a fucking eyesore.
I’ll go there for stuff I can’t find anywhere else, but they are dingy, they blackmail their suppliers in to lowering costs (and hence quality), force artists to release ‘clean’ versions of albums for them, and (especially with electronics) you may get a lower-quality model XY-22 of something from them that isn’t exactly the same as an XY-22 you would get anywhere else.
You know, maybe I’m just lucky, but the I have three WalMarts all within 20 minutes of where I live - and they’re all clean, well-lit, and nice to shop at. I used to have a Kmart within 5 minutes - and it was nice. I have a Target within a couple minutes - it’s nice. I have two Kohl’s which are both nice. Kohl’s is expensive, but nice.
I guess I just don’t see the horribleness of WalMart. I’ve got a Jewel that until they were just remodeled really would make our WalMart look like the Palace of Versailles in comparison.
Besides - I can’t find jeans that fit at any other store.
I like it too. On the first page of the boycott thread I asked why people hate Wal-Mart so much; it really is sort of a myth that they treat their workers like shit. I cited this Atlantic Monthly article which reported the following:
But for pages after that, people ignored my post and kept saying, “Wal-Mart treats their workers like shit.” Sorry, but that’s not what I hear. I’ll need some more evidence before I stop going there.
BTW, I know that treating your workers better than the competition =/= treating them well. But you can’t really blame Wal-Mart for not being hugely more generous than their competitors. After all, it is competition, and the best way to lose is by driving up costs. Given that, I’d say Wal-Mart is doing okay by their employees.