Stayed in a closet with roommates and kept my zipper up.
And worked 70+ h/week. I think a lot of these low-wage jobs make it hard to work a second. Irregular hours sink a lot of people who have more earning potential. Also makes it hard for them to take classes.
Absolutely ! Because legal equals moral !
Congrats on getting through all that. But many Walmartians probably only have but the one job (maybe family life doesn’t allow for more than 1), and between the rent, the car payment, gas, insurance, food, utilities, clothes, etc. I suspect that most don’t have a lot of money for investment.
Huh…I thought legal = legal. I didn’t know we were talking about morality.
[QUOTE=BobLibDem]
There is no law requiring you to return a fifty dollar bill that you see someone drop and walk away unknowing. You’re perfectly within your rights to keep it for yourself rather than catch up to them and return it. Of course, being on solid legal ground doesn’t make you less of an asshole.
[/QUOTE]
Um…well, yeah. That’s true. So, if you tell me that someone who picked up a $50 and walked away with it is an asshole then that’s a valid opinion. I’m glad we cleared that up, Bob.
Uhuh. Again, glad we cleared that up…you don’t like Wal-Mart (neither do I, especially). So, what we should do is not shop there. And, well, I don’t. How about you, Bob?
If someone tells me that Costco’s model is obviously superior to Wal-Mart’s and attempts to use their employee retention and compensation model as an example of that, which is what I was responding too, then I’m going to point out what I did. It’s hardly the ‘invisible hand of the free market’, which was a strawman on your part and basically a standard Liberal/Lefty throwaway line that’s supposed to simply win any argument dealing with economics, markets or any of that nasty Capitalism stuff.
You must have some swanky Costcos where you live. The ones where I shop… well, it isn’t *quite *wall-to-wall plumber’s cracks and flip-flops, but it ain’t exactly the crowd at Sotheby’s either.
You raise an interesting point. I have only known (personally) one person who chose disability when i felt he could work. An inlaw, he’s a complete douche that could never hold a job because of his personality. And it makes me think there really is something wrong with him. I have always sort of resented what i saw as his unwillingness to work, but in that light maybe he really does need it.
Now, his insistance on continued procreation…
Really? If you see someone drop a $50 and walk away unknowing, you think it’s perfectly fine to pick it up yourself and keep it rather than giving it back to the guy who dropped it? Apparently our moral Venn diagrams do not intersect.
According to this 9 year old article the average Costco shopper made $74,000 a year. I have seen more recent numbers indicating that the number has gone up to $85,000 a year.
This is not a coincidence. Costco locates its stores in affluent neighborhoods to keep the riff raff out.
The difference is the dropped $50 is the property of the original person. The money Walmart earns belongs to Walmart.
If I see a person give a homeless person a fifty dollar bill, should I condemn that person or praise him? After all fifty dollars might feed that person for a couple of days, but they still need shelter, clothes, and medical attention. Why should the rest of society have to suffer because that jerk only gave the beggar fifty dollars and now we have to subsidize him for the rest.
First of all, I was simply stating that it’s a terrible thing to do to watch someone drop a $50 and not return it to them if you can do so. Just a little moral compass calibration.
“The money Walmart earns belongs to Walmart”. You’re leaving out some pieces of the equation. I would rather say “The wealth that Walmart employees create for the stockholders should be shared in a fair and equitable manner”. Paying employees slave wages simply because the job market allows it and having a health plan that consists of referring employees to Medicare is not an equitable manner.
Costco shoppers’ average incomes are higher than normal because small business owners shop there. You’d see the same thing if you found figures for Sam’s Club or BJ’s.
[QUOTE=BobLibDem]
First of all, I was simply stating that it’s a terrible thing to do to watch someone drop a $50 and not return it to them if you can do so. Just a little moral compass calibration.
[/QUOTE]
Which, ironically, you failed to grasp and completely mis-read. So, I’m failing to see the point to that little digression if you weren’t going to bother reading what I wrote and just assumed you knew my ‘moral compass calibration’ already. 
So, when I agreed it would be a dick move and that it was a valid opinion to hold, you just wanted to disregard that and state what my ‘moral compass calibration’ was based on your own assumptions anyway. So, again, what was the point of that little digression? I mean, granted, I think all this moral stuff is a load of horseshit, and your little calibration experiment was just a digression from the discussion, but why ask me and then disregard the answer? Seems even more pointless than, well, the pointlessness of the question in the first place.
How is it a subsidy to Wal-Mart? I mentioned this in the other thread, but it bears repeating because of this fundamental misunderstanding of the way a free society works.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that a person needs $10/hr to meet what we would agree are his basic expenses (food, shelter, health care, etc.). I go into business and interview a job applicant whose skills and education level will allow him to be worth $6/hr on the open market (Let’s also assume that when he tries to look for other jobs, he is told $6/hr).
So, society has a problem here with this individual. He needs $4 more per hour than he can get at a job on the market. So who should pay the difference? I say that the taxpayers who have made the collective choice to help the less fortunate should be the ones that pay.
If I decide to hire this guy, why is it now MY responsibility to take care of his charity? I didn’t adopt him, I just offered him a job at the fair market wage. In what universe would the taxpayers be subsidizing me?
My only answer to that would be this idea that if a business owner hires someone then he is de facto assuming all responsibility for the needs of the employee. That’s an awesome responsibility that has heretofore never been adopted in this country. Why should I have to pay a “living wage” to someone when the work he gives me doesn’t merit that pay?
I find this line of thought puzzling as it usually comes from folks who want a single payer health care system, in which case every company would get a “subsidy”.
The flaw in that reasoning is that it is somehow the responsibilities of companies to pay for health care insurance for it’s employees. As you must know, the US is pretty much the only industrialized nation where this assumption is made. By historical accident, most Americans got their health insurance through their employers, but it needn’t be that way-- and it SHOULDN’T be that way. Employers don’t provide food, clothing or housing for their employees, so why should they provide heath care insurance?
If Walmart went private tomorrow, it would still have stockholders. Stockholders own the company, whether it is private or public. Without stockholders there is no company, hence no employees.
It is pretty a fundamental principle of law that the cost of doing business should be on industry. If Wal-Mart employees are all on public assistance, then Wal-Mart is putting part of the cost of its business on the taxpayer.
This is particularly true in Wal-Mart’s case because it squeezes out other retailers who pay better and provide better benefits.
Or retirement savings? Seems to me that there’s a huge number of people investing billions of dollars who are somehow stealing from the working man in order to fund their retirements. Never mind that a lot of them ARE that working man that we’re talking about.
So what? I would too, if I owned a retail business. Less riff-raff due to placing my store in an affluent area means less theft, less need for security, and I can price my items higher because affluent people have more to spend, and are usually unwilling to drive across town to get a slightly cheaper price.
Sam’s just has a slightly different business model- it looks like Sam’s Clubs are in poor areas, but that’s just because there seems to be a 3-4:1 ratio of Sams’ Clubs to Costcos in every town I’ve been in. The Houston area has 5 Costco stores and 20 Sam’s Clubs, and Dallas/Ft Worth has 7 Costcos and 24 Sams’ Clubs.
Sam’s Clubs seem to run the gamut between poor and rich, while Costcos seem to concentrate on the upper middle class market, which like I said earlier, makes perfect sense, especially if you’re going to have a limited number of stores.