It may be a tad late for most of you, but think about where you spend your money after reading this article.
I think I saw the head of Dobie Gillis floating in a gallon jar of pickles at my neighborhood super center.
Tasty.
From the link provided:
Sorry but that works for me.
I still don’t understand why Vlasic thought they had to price-gouge themselves. The top brands should have more balls than that! You won’t see Nike going in there cheap, will you? I think if all the top brands would stick together, Walmart’s power would go away. Pretty scary what they have done, I especially like the part about the 30 second delivery window.
Please. Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the highest possible profit to its owners.
Really??? A company is trying to bring the highest possible profits to its owners? When in the hell did this bullshit start happening?!?!?
Oh Jesus, it’s the end!!! The terrorists have already won!!
Erm, yeah, it’s called “capitalism”.
I evidently missed the part in Consumer Ed class in high school where they explained how Wal-Mart was supposed to be working with their suppliers to bring them a fair profit, too. Silly me, I thought that was “little-c communism”.
Well, Vlasic doesn’t HAVE to sell to Wal-Mart.
I’ve spent 20 minutes in a Wal-Mart in my life, time I won’t get back. None 'round here. So, no moral quandry.
Oh, those evil bastards. Saving me money every time I shop there.
danceswithcats: listen up: as long as Walmart offers lower prices than their competitors, I will happily shop there. If you think I should spend more more on pickles just so Vlasic can make more money, than get your hand out of my pocket. You go spend your money wherever you wish; don’t tell me to waste my money to support some crazy Vlasic welfare scheme you have.
- Rick
So Bricker, it’s OK to put more Americans on the unemployment line if it saves you money? How about employing overseas child labor? Is it OK to barely pay underage children working in sweat shops if it saves you a few more cents at Wal-Mart?
Heck if unfettered capitalism is the rule, let’s just eliminate all worker safety laws, the 8-hour day, and the minimum wage.
Yeah, well.
Folks will learn after the next big war breaks out and we can’t have cheap coffee and cakes any more.
Or computer-jobs outsourcing. Or non-American consumer goods. Or we find ourselves being attacked with the same infrastructure we helped build in order to get cheap labor elsewhere…
Man, talk about your double-edged sword…Wal Mart controls so much of the market, it can fix prices by demanding they be lower, and there’s so many fringe companies desperate to sell product, they comply, but oftentimes it’s still not good enough when Wal Mart can buy cheaper from overseas.
Furthermore, Wal Mart can make millions operating on the principle that customers love the prospect of getting more for less, even if they don’t use the product they allegedly save money buying. That is SO diabolical! I may be agnostic, but I think there’s a valid point to the Bible forbidding the worship of Baal.
I understand this is a sticky wicket. I don’t enjoy paying high prices for everyday items any more than the rest of you. However, when I shop, I choose to think consciously about who I’d like to support economically.
I suppose I have the luxury a lot of people don’t have – the luxury to pay an extra $0.30 for a box of trash bags, or an extra $0.50 on a jar of peanuts. I’m lucky because I don’t have to have those extra pennies to survive.
If I have the choice between frequenting a local grocery store, and a large Super Wal-Mart, to buy my everyday items, I choose the local grocery store, hands-down, 8 days a week. I don’t support Wal-Mart because I don’t agree with their practices, and this story is just another in a long line of injustices committed by Sam Walton’s heirs-apparent.
I’ve seen small towns lose nearly every scrap of local business solely because Wal-Mart came to town. People whose businesses had been around since the late 1800s, driven under by a company who seemingly flourishes thanks to back-room dealing, cajoling and flat-out extorting their suppliers.
I’d encourage all of you to think beyond the twenty cents you’re saving on cream cheese and look inside your conscience. Is the cost of supporting a company that does these things worth the extra five bucks you save per shopping trip?
If the five bucks is that important to your monthly budget, then my apologies. But if you can live without it, and in doing so support people in your community, shouldn’t you?
Sure. I have no particular obligation to spend more of my money to keep someone in a job.
You sneer at kids working in sweat shops, do you?
As terrible as conditions in those sweat shops may be, the reality is that that labor can make a huge difference for those families… not between whether to have a PS/2 or another TV, but between living and dying, between being able to put food and desperately-needed medicine on the table. Sure, it’s ugly… but it’s BETTER than having nothing.
If we keep those dollars at home, then those kids and their families starve. I guess if you want foreign families to starve, that’s your business.
I’m all in favor of that - with the caveat that unsafe working conditions may still be an actionable tort.
And the “eight-hour day?” Sheesh. I work longer than eight hours on a typical day. In October, I rang up over 300 hours during the month. And not one dime of overtime came my way. So you’ll pardon me if I weep not for the magical eight-hour day.
- Rick
That’s exactly why I don’t shop at WalMart. It’s not worth it to me to save $100.00 a year on groceries while running companies out of business. I would rather pay a little extra. I shop at smaller businesses when I can. Our WalMart has been here for 2-3 years.
In my neighborhood we had 3 small toy stores. Two were family run, and one is a small chain. They had nice and unique toys that were not available at places like Walmart or Toys-R-Us. One specialized in children’s books. I shopped there frequently and happily paid extra to support the stores and have better quality books and toys. Two of them went out of business this year. This is a real loss to my area.
I price shopped Walmart this holiday season. The prices at Target were the same. Either WalMart is not really saving shoppers all that much or Target is matching WalMart prices. The produce at WalMart was cheap, but sad and wilty looking. Many of the clothing items clothing seemed to be of poor quality.The aisles were too close together and too tall. I think that makes the shoppers feel aggressive for some reason.
I’m sure the people in my neighborhood are still in a honeymoon phase with Walmart. It’s huge, it has so much stuff, there are big signs everywhere telling you how much money you are saving. They probably won’t notice the smaller stores disappearing until it’s too late.
Bricker, The Long Road, and Duck Duck Goose - The whole point of the article is that super-low prices come with a cost that may not be immediately apparent. If you read the whole article, you saw the part about the lock manufacturer who had to outsource a bunch of jobs to Mexico in part because of the disproportionate influence of one extraordinarily price-conscious retailer. The last paragraph summed it up for me:
Now, maybe you have the types of jobs that aren’t threatened by this type of thing. Maybe nobody you care about has a job or company that’s threatened by this type of thing. That’s fine, don’t think about this. Shop at Wal-Mart with nary a care.
The OP is asking the rest of us, the ones who give a damn, to give it some thought. We will.
But don’t you think it might be a smart thing if the unemployment rate is kept at a minimum in our country?
I don’t think I’ve ever been in a Wal Mart.
Do they have any around NY?
As a general proposition? Sure.
But in this argument, your statement represents an example of the fallacy of argumentum ad misercordiam. (I acknowledge that I also, and deliberately, offered the argumentum ad misercordiam fallacy earlier when I talked about foreign families starving).
The question is: what will it cost to keep unemployment to a minimum here? Obviously, I could hire an unemployed person as my chauffeur, thus reducing unemployment here. But I’m unwilling to take that step, even though it would reduce unemployment.
So your question has no particular rhetorical value without context. And in the context of this discussion, I don’t agree that shunning Walmart is the proper choice.
If I cared about someone who had a job as a livery driver when cars were putting horse-drawn livery drivers out of business, I wouldn’t refuse to patronize cars and businesses that used automotive means. Even though I cared for someone that would be out of a job as a result. And if I worked as a livery driver, I would seek to learn how to drive a truck, so that my labor would continue to have value.
There seems to be a sense that, once you have begun to earn a living in some way, you are entitled to continue to earn your living that way, regardless of any change in economic conditions. I don’t agree. Human labor is a commodity with a price, and different people command different prices with their different skills. If I could play basketball like Michael Jordan, or throw a fastball like Pedro Martinez, my labor would be incredibly valuable. It’s not. If I didn’t have the skills I actually have, my labor would be less valuable.
My advice for someone I cared about would be to adjust to the new economic conditions, and not expect the rest of the country to sacrifice their own economic self-interest by propping them up in careers that no longer have as much value as they once did.
- Rick