What you want to do is check in with the liberal, social misfits of the SDMB to balance out the incredible insight provided in Walmart: The Hight Cost of Low Price.
Yes… THAT’S the way to roll on this one.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/secrets/wmchina.html Walmart has made it clear that they want less and less vendors. That way they are dependent on Walmart and can be manipulated. Walmart long ago made it clear to suppliers they would move operations to China if they wanted to do business with them. They practically have their own city.
I don’t find their prices all that great. They have a few advertised specials that are hard to beat, but you can shop around and get better deals on lots of their stuff. It makes it easy for me to have my own personal boycott.
Y’all don’t understand how the unpaid overtime thing works. My wife used to work there a few years ago and and she worked unpaid overtime.
You go in for an 8 hour shift. They give you 10 hours of work. If you don’t get the work done in 8 hours you get written up. If you get written up enough you can be fired. They never say work this unpaid overtime or we’ll fire you. They say get this 10 hours of work done in 8 hours or we’ll fire you because you’ve been written up before.
The solution to this of course is to hire more workers but that cuts into their bottom line. Managers get bonuses if they keep payrolls down. Wal-Mart empowers their managers to be jerks.
Now they say get 10 hours of work done in 8 hours or be fired and if you work off the clock you’ll be fired also. It just encourages people to better hide working off the clock. The real solution would be to hire more people.
Also, here in NY they only pay about $8/hr about the same that they pay in rural areas. That’s great pay in a rural area. And in rural areas I’ve had good service from Wal-Mart. But here, $8/hr is a starvation wage. Some how I don’t think they get the best workers by offering such a low wage. It’s hard to get help there and the store is messy and dirty.
I’m a cheap ass. I used to love Wal-Mart. Everything was so cheap. But then things got cheaper and cheaper. There is a point where something becomes so cheap that it’s quality is effected. And I believe Wal-Mart has reached that point. I won’t shop there anymore because the items just aren’t worth it. As cheap as they are I need stuff that doesn’t break after 1 or 2 uses.
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Since basically EVERYBODY has ignored my previous instructions to return this thread to the general questions asked, I’m moving the thread to Great Debates.
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They don’t. VERY few items are 20% to 50% more for the same item at Wal*Mart. They frequently have similar cheaply-made Chinese crap for 50% less, though.
I was looking for a goose to cook at Christmas a few years back. I checked prices at a number of grocery stores and my daughter said to check WalMart. I had her check there (since I won’t shop in a WalMart), and their price per pound was DOUBLE the Albertson’s down the street.
Just because a book or a pair of jeans is marked 20% off of list at a Wal*Mart doesn’t mean it would have been full price at any other store.
This “always cheaper” line is a complete fabrication.
I don’t think Wal-Mart has ever used “always cheaper” as a slogan. The closest I can find is “Always lower prices. Always.”
But that’s standard puffery and has been used by stores since forever.
It’s hard to remember today when Macy’s is considered upscale that it once advertised itself based on having the lowest prices and it and Gimbels went into regular price wars. The difference is that Macy’s - at least its flagship store - always had a range of much more expensive items as well. They varied in the quality of the goods.
The rest of your point escapes me. Wal-Mart relentlessly badgers suppliers to lower wholesale prices. True. Wal-Mart sells goods that are often of lower quality so that they can be sold for less. True. Wal-Mart does raise its prices, and then holds “rollback” price events. True.
Somehow I don’t see a difference between this and the practices of every other large store in America. Wal-Mart is better at them than most, most of the time. That’s also true. But you would expect that to be true for the number one store no matter what it’s name was. It was true for Macy’s a half century ago.
The question I have is: what does Wal-Mart do that none of its competitors do? That’s a serious question, because I don’t know of an answer to it. But there may be one.
I fail to see the difference between those two slogans.
Many stores say things like “we’ll match any price” or “best prices in town on Goodyear tires” or “good quality at reasonable prices” or “always 50% off retail,” and those claims don’t bother me a bit … as long as they’re true.
What bothers me about “always lower prices” is that it isn’t true. “Frequently lower prices” would be. But not always, not at all Wal*Marts, and not on all items.
This question seems to have been largely missed. The answer is that they’ve improved a little bit, but not much. The discrimination against women has ended and more employees are getting health care now, though I’m not sure how that relates to the overhaul earlier this year.
On the other hand, they are still waging total war against American manufacturers. I don’t normally shop at Walmart, but recently someone gave me a gift card so I went, determined to find some item that wasn’t made in China. I looked for an hour, but everything there is made in China or some country equally bad: clothing, garden tools, electronics, towels, curtains, pillows, kitchen stuff, …
(So I donated the gift card to my church’s food bank.)
The answer is that Wal-Mart completely refuses to work with American manufacturers at all if there’s a tiny advantage to working overseas. If the cost of an item made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh is a hundredth of a cent lower than the same item made in the USA, they’ll go to Bangladesh. Since sweatshop labor is always cheaper than labor of free people, this inevitably means that manufacturing here shuts down and moves to countries with low standards of human rights.
For a more intelligent critique than the documentary, try here. Sample:
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Has this been answered elsewhere in this thread?
Which would you rather have, something that is light and economical or flimsy and cheap?
I suspect the anti-Wal*Mart folks would love to see the single mom get a great job that pays $20 an hour with full benefits. The trouble is that there aren’t a whole lot of unskilled jobs that pay that well, and simply passing a law mandating that they do doesn’t make it so.
They mentioned on the episode that before she worked at Wal*Mart, she was unemployed and on welfare. I rather expect that if there were better-paying jobs available to her, she would have jumped on one of them, which is all to her credit.
In a sense, the anti-Wal-Martians are being a bit paternalistic. The implication seems to be that it is better to be on welfare than to demean yourself by working for a mere $8.50 an hour. I don’t see it that way. She’s supporting herself and her kids, at an honest job. Who the hell am I to look down my nose at her because she wears a blue smock during the day?
Regards,
Shodan
It’s Sam Vimes’ boots again. The lowest price might not be the cheapest product to use. If something is made so poorly that it will break or otherwise be unsuitable for use, then it’s not a good buy, no matter how low the price is. If the towels or sheets develop holes after a couple of trips through the washer and dryer, so that I have to buy new ones every month, then I’m NOT saving money. Granted, I don’t necessarily want to be able to pass sheets down to my heirs, but I do want them to last several years, not several weeks.
And I prefer to have a better product selection. WalMart apparently won’t stock things of a decent quality. It used to be a matter of pride for them to try to buy from American manufacturers whenever possible, but those days are long gone.
Point taken. I meant that the intent of the two quotes was the same. I had the quote wrong. But since the actual slogan was more damning than the way I quoted it, I’m happy to be corrected!
Personally, I have no problem with the employees at WalMart (except for the execs that set the corporate policies). If you need a job and that’s what’s available, then by golly go to work there. My problem is with WalMart itself, destroying more jobs than it creates, putting people out of work, and then claiming they’ve helped.
I will dig through my books and see what concrete examples they gave.
Do you have any cite that a) Wal-Mart completely refuses or that b) it acts differently in this regard than others?
This should be eminently provable if true.
Join the club. I’m working sixty hours a week and I don’t see an extra 50% on my paycheck.
Again, how’s Walmart different from anyone else?
I don’t think any one has accused even Walmart of having hourly workers work twenty hours of unpaid overtime per week. If you are an hourly worker, why in the world are you willing to to work 20 hours a week for free when you should be getting time and a half?
I’m not. I’m salaried. No overtime.
If you mean that lots of employers expect their salaried employees to work more than 40 hours a week without paying overtime, that is of course absolutely true. But it’s also true that if you’re properly classified as overtime-exempt, your employer isn’t required to pay overtime. Walmart is accused of not paying hourly employees for all of the hours they work and has in some cases been found liable for the unpaid wages after a trial and settled a number of other cases. That’s how Walmart is different , and while I am indeed sure that Walmart is not the only offender, I am also sure that it is not common practice in the retail industry to violate the law.
I’m going to drag this issue up again. Sometimes the monoculture just means that the consumer can only pick one of a few kinds of crappy merchandise. But sometimes it means that the choices that are available, or are NOT available, impact the consumer’s health. Remember a few years back when WalMart decided not to carry the “morning after” pill? The company claimed that this was a business decision, not a moral decision, but I’ve always had a very hard time believing that. For many rural women, WalMart isn’t their pharmacy of choice, it’s the ONLY pharmacy around, not just in their closest town, but in all the towns around them. If WalMart refuses to carry a certain medication, people who need this medication in a hurry will have to travel for hours to get to a city that’s big enough to have a pharmacy that’s NOT owned by WalMart…and which might or might not carry the needed medicine. WalMart has reversed itself since then…but this is something that I remember about it, and something that I hold against it.
This idea of the “poor small business retailer” is as antiquated as the Pony Express. I can sit here at my computer and order almost any consumer good and have it shipped (overnight, if I prefer) to my home. I have a choice of any brand, quality, or price.
The idea that I need to support Mr. Smith downtown is not logical. Why should I pay for his electric bill, property tax, rental/mortgage payment, etc. when technology has allowed me to browse these goods from my home?
One caveat: What I will not do is use Mr. Smith’s store to browse an item and then come home and order it online.
Let me explain. I live in a small town. Like the majority of residents, I live here by choice. I happen to like having a place in town that carries my favorite brand of whatever, so that I can pick it up whenever I need it. I like having things like a tire shop, a hardware store, a meat market, and a wine shop here (not to mention the bookstore I liked so much that I now own it).
If I and my friends and neighbors were to drive to the nearest Wal-Mart for most of our needs, then those other stores wouldn’t be here when I wanted them. I could only get my favorite brands by ordering online and paying shipping. The historic downtown I love would be filled with vacant storefronts. My friends would lose their jobs.
A small town doesn’t have the same “screw your neighbors–what have they ever done for me?” attitude, or it doesn’t survive. Heck, last time I lived in an apartment in a city, I went over two years without meeting my neighbors next door and across the hall. Here, I pull my neighbors’ cars out of the ditch when they get stuck in the snow. They catch my horses when they get out. We watch each other’s houses when someone goes on vacation. We know each other.
The economy is bad here. Every time someone drives to a Wal-Mart, they make it worse. Every time they shop local, they build a healthier community to live in.