Two recent articles: this Mall-Wart “disclosure” article is laughable and in addition, a study by Penn State indicated that the presence of a Mall-Wart store adversely affected poverty rates.
Two words.
Cheap Crap.
According to a study done by (I believe) the University of Iowa, they also negatively effect smaller retailers for a thirty mile radius, so if a Wal-Mart moves to your town, say goodbye to the enterprising small business owners. Same thing if they move to a neighboring town.
If I can say so, though, I’m rather surprised to see you feel this way about Wal-Mart.
Don’t know whay you would say that. I’ve made no secret of my Mall-Wart hatred in previous threads, and refuse to shop there.
I’m sorry. Their garden centre was literally the only place I could find a pair of large philodendrons for my bookcases. Everywhere else I looked only had “pothos ivy” which keep dying because I don’t get enough light in my living room. If I could’ve gotten them anywhere else, I would have, but I’m not patient enough to grow out the little $2 ones they have at Home Depot. And I looked everywhere but the specialty florists.
I do shop at the Wal-Mart grocery store because 1) they don’t use shopper cards, and 2) the other grocery stores around me are like 1.5-2x as expensive and/or have no selection and are always packed. Other than food which I have to have to stay alive, I pretty much avoid Wal-Mart as much as possible. I can understand why people shop there though. It’s hard to argue with a lot of the prices when you’re already on a super-tight budget. I usually save up for what I really want (and won’t break within a week) but most people go for the instant gratification/cheap and fast route. IMO.
Is there any data on the income level of most Wal-Mart shoppers? My guess is that the groups they affect the most are also their most frequent customers. Funny how the exploited come right into the lair without being asked, even.
Well, I work at a Walmart, as the overnight stocker in the freezer section. So far, it hasn’t been all that bad of a job, and certainly is a lot better than jobs I have had with smaller retailers - the pay & benefits are better, and the managment is much less annoying - at the most of the smaller places I have worked at, you always had a manager/owner always around, while at Wallyworld the managers pretty much leave me alone (I think the cold scares them away 
) and let me get done with my work.
While I have seen my share of cow-orkers, stupid customers (though not many at night), the only Walmart specific complaint is the stupid “Walmart Cheer” thing they make us do at the daily meeting where they go over the day’s sales figures and whatnot. The rest is stuff that would happen at any other retail place.
I should mention that I am a part-time student during the day; I only plan on working at Walmart for a couple years. Still, it pays the bills, and the other jobs that would fit my schedule are worse (like fast food :shudders:) and pay less.
So please support Walmart - I like my job, and don’t want to have to find a new one right now.
Ha! I haven’t been able to find cheaper, decent furniture anywhere else. I’m sorry - the same-looking dresser at Wal-Mart for $96.50 is at Taft for $250. I bought a linen closet last weekend, $67.50. And they’re pretty good quality…the dresser in particular is beautiful.
That’s all I buy there, is furniture. I don’t consider myself poor, but most furniture is ridiculously expensive. I don’t care about fancy-smancy I want things that are pretty durable and still look decent, and Wal-Mart stuff seems to be made for kids to kick it.
I can’t afford the prices in the furniture stores. 
If I could, I would.
danceswithcats your link sends me to something I have to subscribe to. I ain’t that anxious to find out what this disclosure study is.
When a DVD is first released, Wal*Mart almost always has the cheapest price. I head there first, now, if there’s a DVD I must own and they carry it.
I prefer to shop at Target for household sundries. The people who shop at the Target closest to me seem to be a bit more civilized and less, er, gross than the people who shop at the Wal*Mart closest to me.
I’d go to Ikea–and about a dozen other places–for cheap furniture before I’d go to Wal*Mart. I do, however, have the luxury of having an Ikea five minutes from my house, so that probably makes a huge difference.
Finally, I didn’t see a disclosure article in the OP’s first link. Where, exactly, should I be looking?
I go to Best Buy for my new movies - they always give you 25 % off purchase price if you buy it day of release.
But this reminds me of another feature Wal-Mart has - really old, obscure DVDs for $5.99 sometimes.
Which of course actually doesn’t prove at all that WalMart adversely affects poverty rates. All it does is show a statistically significant correlation between poverty rate changes and the addition of WalMarts to the county.
One could trivially argue that counties that are poor performers WRT poverty are more willing to invite and approve a WalMart than counties that are high performers. WalMarts are perceived as good things for the poor (providing low cost merch) and good things for the county, providing tax revenues that might otherwise be lacking.
Stores don’t just pop up wherever WalMart wants them, they are scrutinized by law makers and officials, zoning, infrastructure issues have to be hammered out, it’s complicated. A regression analysis is not enough to come to a firm conclusion about an issue as complex as this. Is it a data point? Absolutely.
I can shop there and piss off both liberals and conservatives. I get some sort of perverse pleasure out of it. Besides the prices are cheap.
I shop at Wal-Mart because they have more stuff for less money.
If the OP wishes me to stop, I’ll be happy to: just agree to refund to me the difference in price between Wal-Mart and whatever other venue the OP wishes me to use, and I’ll switch immediately.
Not willing to do that? Then I’m not willing to switch.
Evil’s cheap.
Personally, I don’t want to support business practices I dislike, obviously others don’t mind.
If for no other reason than it drives people who say idiotic things like “Mall-Wart is Satan Spawn-why continue to support this evil enterprise?” crazy…
I do have to point out the advantages of having a WalMart in the county I live in. We have a local weekly that will print anything and everything that goes on. Before WallyWorld showed up, it was mostly boring stuff like who got stopped for speeding, DUI, no tail lights and such. Post WallyWorld, I get who shoplifted at WalMart that week, who wrote a bad check at WallyWorld that week, who gets "banned from WalMart" (how low can you sink! banned from the WallyWorld!) in Magistrate Court for shoplifting/bad check writing (or as the local likes to call bad check writing “Deposit Account Fraud”). Also, we get arrests at the WallyWorld of people who possess various illegal substances and apparently like to snort/shoot and/or light up said illegal substances while shoplifting. My own personal all time favorite is the guy that got arrested for shoplifting/public drunk for poppin’ open a six pack while he was shopping/shoplifting at the WallyWorld. I mean, the local weekly has gotten a lot more interesting thanks to WalMart.
So, see, having a Super WallyWorld can up the entertainment value in a rural area as well as giving us cheap stuff at cheap prices.
Really, swampbear? Dude, if I sent you a self-addressed, stamped envelope, do you think you could send me a copy of that paper? It sounds like something out of Colonial-era America. I bet it would be a hoot to read.
[sub]Banned from Wal*Mart? That’s low.[/sub]
Hey, you have the same job I used to have (overnight stocker in freezer section)! Your experiences seem to be better than mine, though. Hope you don’t get ridiculed by your managers for not being able to drive (“well, if you’re too crazy to drive, maybe you’re too crazy to work here”), or get denied personal days scheduled a month in advance at the last minute, or get a talking-to from the store manager for your lack of enthusiasm (the Walmart cheer gave me the fucking heebie-jeebies). Also hope you don’t get locked in the store overnight, forced to work overtime without pay, or made to handle dangerous chemicals without protection (none of which ever happened to me, but have happened to other Walmart workers).
I can understand buying stuff there if you have no other option than to shop at Walmart, or if the price difference is SO drastic (like Anaamika’s example, though there are other places to get cheap furniture–I bought a TV stand at Target the other day for $20 and the dressers there are around $80) but I really can’t stand people who rationalize shopping there because they save maybe a quarter or something. I only pay a little more for my groceries at the local Giant Eagle and I feel so much better about it. And the way I see it, things like furniture and DVDs and clothing are luxuries, not necessary to survival, so I’m willing to pay a little more. I buy maybe one full-priced CD, book, or DVD a month, so when I do, I prefer to shop ethically.
I am so glad I now live in a place where there’s more places to shop than Walmart. I would have to take two buses to get to the closest Walmart now! The safety of distance…
Well, I can drive, so I doubt I will be ridiculed for not being able too. As a geek without much of a life, I doubt I will have any reason to schedule a personal day in the first place; and since the managment barely ever bothers me, I doubt they will even notice my lack of ethusiasm.
As for getting locked in overnight, well I work in a 24 hour store, so that is impossible. Though there is the slight possibilty someone might block the freezer door from openning while I am in there. :eek: Fortunatly, I pretty cold tolerant. And the management is particularly anal about not having employees work off the clock at my store - if they see you even pushing in a stray shopping cart from the parking lot, they will make you fill out a time adjustment sheet. Guess they don’t want the bad press other Wallyworlds have gotten.
And for a humerous story; the Walmart that I work at closed their old store, and opened a new Supercenter about 2 months after I got a job there. Now, all the local radio stations didn’t let Walmart buy advertisements for the Grand Openning, claiming that Walmart destroyed local business and stifled competetion, and so on. What makes this really funny is that all the local radio stations are owned by Clearchannel. :smack: 