IF I opened up any kind of shop, it probably wouldn’t be a fabric and sewing shop. And I wouldn’t do it here in Fort Worth, I know of several shops of that sort that are thriving here. However, out in the little towns that are scattered around the state, the old shops have closed up, because their customers would just get their fabrics and craft supplies at WalMart during the weekly shopping trips. I have absolutely NO interest in commuting to a small town for two hours each way. But there used to be small fabric shops in those small towns, which were driven out of business by WalMart. And now WalMart has gone out of the fabric and country crafting business, and instead they’re focusing more on Martha Stewart type crafts.
While people don’t do much serious clothes-sewing any more, there are a lot of people who do various fabric crafts, and they will spend some serious money on fabric. WalMart had a lot of cheap fabric, but they also had some fabric that was of decent quality.
One business practice of Walmart that I like is their hours - in my hometown, they are the only store of any type or size that’s open between midnight and 6am. That’s been a lifesaver (well, really damn helpful, anyway) a couple of times but I can’t imagine those hours are profitable for them.
That’s when their stockers work, so they’d have the lights on and employees in the store regardless. Put one of those employees on a register (I imagine that they only have one register open at those hours) and there’s no reason not to stay open then and pick up the occasional sale.
I wonder if anyone has done similar studies of what happens when Wal-Mart opens in urban and suburban areas – you know, where that majority of the population of the USA lives?
In SE Michigan, Wal-Mart is an option for me, but one that I choose not to exercise. It’s not driven Kroger, Meijer, Sears, Marshall Field’s, Jo-Ann’s (for you fabric people), Hobby Lobby, etc., out of business. We have (excuse the expression) shit-tons of options.
Why do I not go to Wal-Mart? Prices are virtually the same as anywhere else (who cares about a few cents?), and (in my area at least) they’re dingy stores filled with people I prefer not to be around (I guess the ones who care about a few cents).
Note: I’ve been to nice Wal-Marts. I have a very nice Wal-Mart right around the corner from my current location. The butcher will even cut parts off of the primal that I want. It’s not dingy because we’re in an exclusive neighborhood, and it’s not full of dingy people because they just don’t live here. (I still don’t go there, because they charge me three pesos to validate the stupid pay-parking they have here, whereas the Commercial Mexicana validates for free.)
Edit: back home, I do go to Sam’s (part of Wal-Mart for the two people out there that don’t know that). Can’t buy better beef, unless you have a butcher shop. Also I can’t blame Wal-Mart on the dearth of butcher shops in my area. They’ve been gone since long before Wal-Mart was ever in Michigan.
Even around here (town of about 30,000 people), for years Jo-Ann’s was the anchor store of the Gallatin Valley Mall. It’s still there, too: The only reason it’s not the anchor any more is that they put in a Barnes and Noble that’s even bigger.
I love this town… Where else would you find a craft shop and a bookstore as the anchor stores for a mall?
It’s higher on some few things and lower on others, but overall about the same. But I almost never shop at Target while I’m at Walmart every week or so. Why do I do that? Well, because there’s a Walmart 10 minutes from my house, and the nearest Target is 2 hours away.
For the record, I’ve never been in a dingy, icky Walmart, or heard anyone who worked there mention any sort of treatment any worse than what I’ve experienced working for small independent local businesses. Shitty pay, shitty attitudes toward the staff, shitty benefits, cutting hours to make sure nobody gets overtime and try to cut people out of benefit eligibility…sounds like my job at the vet clinic, frankly.
I have nothing against WalMarts as individual stores. I shop in them regularly. I just don’t want to be in a situation where going to WalMart becomes my only option.
It’s nice that there are places where WalMart has competition. But competition to WalMart is not a thriving and growing business. Competition to WalMart is a business in decline.
Here’s some information from the Wikipedia entry on Kroger: “Kroger had a number of stores in the Western Pennsylvania region, encompassing Pittsburgh and surrounding areas until the early 1980s … Kroger also experienced a similar withdrawal from Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1989 … In northeastern Ohio, Kroger had a plant in Solon, Ohio, which is a suburb of Cleveland, until the mid-1980s. When that plant shut down, Kroger closed its northeastern Ohio stores in the Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown areas … Kroger stores existed in various Florida markets from the 1960s until 1986, when the chain decided to exit the state … Kroger also had some presence in the Milwaukee area in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, when it exited … Kroger had about 50 stores in St. Louis until it left the market in 1986, saying that its stores were unprofitable … in 1988 Kroger announced it would leave the Charlotte market and put its stores up for sale … Kroger closed almost all of its northern Michigan stores in the 1980s and 1990s … Kroger exited the competitive San Antonio, Texas, market in mid-1993 … Although Kroger has long operated stores in the Huntsville-Decatur area of northern Alabama (as a southern extension of its Nashville, Tennessee, region), it has not operated in the state’s largest market, Birmingham, since the early 1970s”
And this is from an article that describes Kroger as WalMart’s strongest competitor.
Civic fathers can be pro- or anti-development, depending on the regime currently in power. I have watched our local City Council put up numerous roadblocks to prevent Wal-Mart from building a superstore (they already have a “narrow-aisle” standard store.)
Yes, the Council can’t single out a particular business to prohibit them from existing legally, but in reality, they can write laws and zoning codes that are narrowly tailored to apply to only one business or owner, like the “big box” ordinance that could never apply to 100% of any businesses within a 50 mile radius.
In this case, they made a requirement that any big box store had to provide the City Council with an economic study before the plans were even considered. The study had to be paid for by the big box company, but the consulting firm was to be chosen by the city (this was under a very liberal, “green-thinking” regime). The study cost Wal-Mart $43,000.
Guess what? The biased consulting firm the city chose supplied a report that said that the community would be much better off if Wal-Mart expanded. The report said that sales would increase for most nearby businesses, and only one grocery store was likely to go out of business (leaving the same number of grocery stores as before, not less).
So the City Council, determined to limit Wal-Mart anyway, and led by the “everything Wal-Mart does is bad” faction, withheld the proper zoning permits until Wal-Mart downsized their projected store footage by 1/3, removed the tire and lube shop from the plans and required them to pay for road upgrades.
So don’t tell me that the local authorities are powerless. “city councils don’t, per se, have the right to vote whether person x can open business y.” In effect, yes, they do, and they use movies like the one cited herein to bolster their position by showing it at local churches.
OK, 63 lawsuits settled by December 2008. At least a couple of dozen more that weren't settled at that time , including one settled a year later involving 87,000 people. (and no idea of how many were settled before 2008, or how many Walmart lost at trial).For the heck of it, lets just say that those 85 or so other lawsuits averaged 10,000 people each - that's 850,000 people plus the 87,000 brings us to 935,000. And they probably did average more than 10,000 people each - an individual suit by against Walmart for unpaid overtime by an hourly worker will go nowhere, so they pretty much have to be class actions. That is a large number of people even in the context of Walmart.
You’ve get a large number of settlements in lawsuits alleging that huge numbers of people were not paid for all of the time they worked, spread across the country and it becomes impossible to believe that it was just a matter of a few individual store managers violating company policy. Maybe the Waltons or other people at headquarters didn’t know, but it is just too many cases, too spread out to believe that all of these managers (a minimum of 42, since we know it was 42 states, but there were probably a few hundred stores involved) independently came up with the idea to have people work unpaid overtime and that no one above the store manager level noticed any of it until lawsuits were filed. At the very least, headquarters failed to do an effective job of enforcing its own claimed policy of compliance with the law.
Look retail jobs are horrible jobs and people aren’t treated well , but there’s a big difference between being kept at part-time hours so that you are not eligible for benefits, working short-staffed because the manager didn’t schedule enough people in order to keep payroll down, being paid minimum wage and every other sort of completely legal nastiness, and being paid for 40 hours when you actually worked 60, discriminating on the basis or sex and certain attempts to interfere with union organizing/elections. I suspect most low-paying jobs ( retail or otherwise ) engage in the legal nastiness , but most larger companies try to stay away from the illegal ones. Walmart either doesn’t try , or does a really bad job of it.
So I watched - and enjoyed - the P&T episode. It is, indeed, much more balanced that the doc I mentioned; ‘Bullshit’ made it clear that they’re not WalMart apologists, just that other retailers are (nearly) as bad, which is something I had contemplated after viewing the film.
Anyway, I think, like most things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Well, maybe slightly skewed toward WalMart being evil.
I’ve seen both the walmart docu and the Penn and Teller episode. I have to say, early on I tended to agree with Penn and Teller, but the Walmart and Recycling episodes made me completely stop watching the show.
The walmart episode has next to no facts, and tries to win you over by showing a black mom who is happy she can provide for her kids with her $8/hr job. They then go on to say, “Don’t you WANT single mom to be able to feed her kids?” It’s almost a joke, because you know that Penn and Teller are MUCH TOO SMART to think that that is a reasonable argument. No one against Walmart’s business practices thinks that single moms don’t deserve a crap job to scrape a living by to support her kids. People who question Walmart’s business practices think that overall Walmart does more harm than good.
Then they also use emotional imagery about the guy who doesn’t want Walmart to come to his small town, and they call him a nostalgic old idiot, and then make fun of him if I remember correctly, for being a successful or middle class person (as if he is so bored with his mediocre life he just seeked out Walmart as an enemy or something).
I don’t believe the show addressed at all that Walmart gets huge subsidies from idiot politicians, then leaves humongous buildings behind that are completely un-useable for anything else but a super Walmart… the show did not address any of the Movie’s factual complaints whatsoever, and used the strawman argument that people are only against Walmart because they have a fetish for mom and pops. Horrible, horrible and completely stupid waste of a show.
They also seemed to either ignore, or handwave away that some people simply are AGAINST SLAVE LABOR. I believe they mentioned that it is next to impossible to not by products made by Chinese or Bangladeshi slaves. While this is true, that doesn’t mean people have to LIKE this fact. And some people WANT TO CHANGE IT.
(The Recycling episode is also horrible, because again they don’t even address the issues the Proponents of the idea they are against, actually say.)
Not at all true. See this site, from a woman who “studies and explores how communities reuse empty big box buildings.” It’s actually kind of interesting to see how these buildings have been repurposed.
When I was younger, I worked a job in a rural area. My hours were constantly being cut, and I was told in no uncertain terms that I could not go over X hours because that would mean they would have to provide benefits, and that was expensive, yadda yadda yadda. My only pay raises were when minimum wage was increased, because I had to be paid that amount, of course. I worked there for over 4 years, because there weren’t a lot of options in my area.
Several years later, I got a job at the new WalMart Super Center, making $2+ over minimum wage. We were told in no uncertain terms to NOT work off the clock, don’t even do anything that might be mistaken for work if we are off the clock. Within a month of hiring on, I got a raise due to my performance. I was treated well, so I have no complaints on that score. My only real gripe was the position-specific training, which was very generalized and not too helpful. (Thankfully I had previously worked at Sears, and they had very good training, even down to product-specific education). Even when it came to scheduling, they were incredibly flexible and would work with me on what I needed.
For a job that requires zero education to obtain, I can’t really see much to complain about… and, hell, I met my wife while working there!
Nowadays, I do still shop there, because the prices can not be beat (in this area). WalMart has no real price competition, and the difference in prices makes it work the 14 mile drive I have to get there from home. My only real complaint is the quality of their produce- for that, I shop elsewhere.
The Super Center I mentioned in my previous post replaced the old small-store Wal Mart and was built on the opposite end of town. The old building has been repurposed into a city-operated water park and indoor recreation center. It look great and is incredibly popular with the locals!
