What does one have to do with the other? How about some seperation of church and thread.
Nope. Neither compassion nor conscience. In fact, I just got back from a fun night of kicking puppies and burning kittens. Good times.
As far as left/right, I may have introduced it last night and I’ll check to see whom brought it up first, but that wasn’t where I was going in the OP. I was pointing out that Wal-Mart often offers the best deal on a product. Yet I don’t see how Jesus comes into an argument of some High School kid working part time for gas money. If he’s being abused, nail Wal-Mart. I have no dealings with them other than to buy a shitload of stuff from them.
And yeah, if teachers are upset about how the union is treating them and dissatisfied with thier pay, by all means quit. Those in it for a secure job and not for the love of teaching are why Wal-Mart keeps finding workers.
I will repeat what other dopers have already said: duffer, bruce daddy et al, you need a reality check.
I had mine a couple of years ago, you see Argentina was never a really poor country, we weren’t japan or U.S.A but we were proud of the fact that in my country no one starved to death ¿How could they? We are one of the biggest food producers in the planet.
And then came the economic crisis of the year 2001.-
And people are starving to death.
I find it impressive that Bruce Daddy didn’t realize that most human beings lives in a miserable condition. I thought everyone knew.
Wal mart is only cheap for the consumer. Everyone else finds it truly expensive. And that is because Wal Mart is a capitalist corporation… but capitalist in the argentinian way. “Capitalista en las ganancias y socialista en las perdidas”. That would be “capitalist when they gain and socialist when they loose”.-
I’ve spent a total of $6.00 at WalMart. Like llama, it ooks me out. I always feel like I’ve lost half my income and IQ the moment I walk through the door.
Which is strange, I shop at Dollar Tree, which is an even more interesting clientele, with even junkier junk (great Christmas wrap, cheap, though).
I DO shop at Sam’s Club (as soon as we get a Costco in this area, I’ll switch) - primarly for cheaper gas - I figure both WalMart and all gas companies are evil, so it really doesn’t matter who you buy gas from. Liquor is also really cheap - I used to work for a liquor manufacterer and brander, I’m not worried about WalMart sucking those profits. Maybe if we can sic WalMart on the pharmacutical companies, our drug prices would be more in line with Canadas. (See, WalMart isn’t all bad - in some cases its taken riduculous profits out of things).
I find it funny that the conservatives like the PBS numbers and don’t like the Democratic Socialists of America - who seem to be sourcing their numbers from Forbes. In my alternate reality - PBS is a media organization with a liberal bias and Forbes a conservative one. But I do agree, the discrepency in the numbers probably has a lot more to do with the slice they took. Add in WalMart executive salaries and bonus, managers, the corporate staff in Bentonville, and the numbers will be much higher than if you only calculate the mean for hourly workers.
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:ndwP6y8aQJwJ:www.walmartswaronworkers.com/multimedia/reports/WalMartBasicFactsSheet10-03.pdf+average+associate+wage+walmart&hl=en
The payroll analysis reports that all hourly Wal-Mart retail workers, which includes higher paying hourly positions such as department heads and technicians, earn on average $9.13 an hour for anaverage of $16,202 dollars a year. Based on these figures, hourly employees work approximately 34hours per week on average. (Extrapolated from Dr. Richard Drogin, “A Statistical Analysis of Wal-Mart Gender Patterns” and Appendices, March 2003.)
The most common Wal-Mart jobs earn far less. This payroll analysis also reports that salesassociates, which is by far the most common job classification, earn on average $8.23 per hour for annual wages of $13,861. This is about 15 percent less than the annual average of $16,202. Basedon these figures, sales associates work approximately 32 hours per week on average. Cashiers,which is the second most common job, earn approximately $7.92 for annual wages of $11,948.
I’m curious. How do you figure that “the consumer” and “everyone else” are in fact separate entities? Is there some way that we’re allocated a role at birth? I wish I knew which I was.
I’ve been repeatedly surprised in this thread that the benefits to low wage earners of offering cheap goods are consistently overlooked. It’s all very well to say that if WalMart upped its prices by 1% it could afford to pay its employees $X more per hour, but then all the people shopping at WalMart have to pay more, and can do less with the money they have. And they’re not different people, they’re the same people. If WalMart raised all their prices tomorrow, would it be a panacea? No, because millions of people would have to get by with less. Why is this any less distressing than a wage we feel is too low? How do we decide what the balance is?
Now, I’m not saying that ethical shopping considerations aren’t a good thing - if one has the luxury of being able to pay more for the sake of ones principles, then that’s nice (it’s hard for me to believe that WalMart will respond to a loss of sales with price rises and wage rises, but that’s a different question). A lot of people don’t have this luxury, however, and these are, by and large, the same people who are earning the wages that are being complained about. The same people who will be hardest hit by a WalMart price rise, and the same people who would be hit by an earlier poster’s ludicrous suggestion that the citizens should revoke WalMart’s business charter (neatly catapulting 1.6 million people into unemployment). It just isn’t as simple as saying “this group of people are oppressed, so everyone should pay more to make them happy”. No such convenient delineation exists.
Shove it up your ass, you stereotyping bigot. I abhor what Walmart does.
Somehow you missed the sarcasm in her post. Not surprising though. She wasn’t suggesting that your little friend leave her job. She wanted to point out to your shallow brain that someone up and leaving their position isn’t realistic at all. Of course, most people have this hard time getting points across with you, so it’s not shocking.
Sam
Aren’t they one of the largest employers?
No I’m saying all the “all the right wingers” stuff, they’re not all the same.
Each and every one of them is unique and fucked up in they’re own right. 
[sub]I keed I keed[/sub]
We should make a movie with him and Brutus called…
Dumb and Duffer
<rimshot>
:d
Two parter ahead. Read at risk of sleepiness:
Sorry that I only have anecdotal evidence to work from, but here comes another one. My mother has had her own business since about '93, I think. It’s an assembly company and they’ve always worked exclusively for Wal*Mart. They put together for them pretty much anything that can be… bicycles, gym-type equipment, that cheaply made particle board furniture, baby furniture (usually for displays and the like), but mostly Lawn and Garden articles. More grills, swings and other items that you can hardly shake a stick at. She’s had as many as twelve stores, ranging all over Texas (because she’s willing to go almost anywhere despite distance) and even two in Oklahoma. That is, if I have all my facts correct. Add in what I’ve said about my dad and I have two different perspectives, one inside and one out.
Well, in terms of actual pressure from the home office, there’s been several incidents, on pretty much a yearly basis, that (at least) my mother’s small company has faced. It seems that they have some sort of big annual meeting in Bentonville annually. All store managers nationwide must attend or there are dire consequences, like being busted back from manager to a cart pusher. Which only happened once in the areas as far I know, so I don’t think that’s epidemic, but it’s a really huge drop in salary when there could be other, less drastic, options. And of course, on a smaller scale, this is standard across the board. Anyway, that tangent aside, when these conventions (whatever they’re called) take place, they typically decide to cut budgets. My mom is usually a casualty. Not because of poor quality work, unreliability or anything else. Because no matter what she is personally, she takes her work ethic to incredible extremes.
Continued.
Sorry. 
Next and final installment:
So why do they do it? For reasons that are applicable all the rest of the time. They review their budget, see this exorbitant amount being paid to outside assemblers, weight that against how many folks they remember standing around doing nothing and decide that “in house” is the only way to go. Therefore a store-wide policy is said that companies like my mothers will be completely cut out. Doesn’t matter if that now means untrained employees will be putting together the tryke your little one rides and can, after this, fall apart (due to lack of knowledge) and seriously hurt them. Many lawsuits have been filed, and plenty of times paid out, to those harmed and their families. Or that they’ll in turn have to pay a full-time “associate” benefits unlike those on the outside, who don’t get mileage or an hourly wage. Of course, a lot of times they circumvent this particular problem by only staffing within the part-time range, which means they don’t gotta offer them anything extra. And this seems to be typical (or at least true of all the regular and Super Centers we’ve come into contact with).
This is so prevalent that my mother has taken to planning for her unemployment from for several months out of the year. She always wonders if this will be her last year for working with/for them. Then, when she’s inevitably called back, it begins as a trickle, but ends with a huge amount of so much business that she can hardly keep up or handle it all. Although she tries and promptly too. Even when they give her little to no notice (hey, I’ve been putting together twenty riding in lawnmowers, in the cold, little light to see and on a parking lot because they have no special designated area for assembly, with a deadline, at up until 2:00 in the morning – to say this wasn’t routine would be an understatement) and DEMAND service as soon as possible or hang the constant threat over her head to find someone else to do the job.
Now I understand that she doesn’t have to usually capitulate or she could try to find other folks to hire her (IE: Target, Lowes or maybe Toys ‘R’ Us, but they seem to favor a trained “in house” scenario instead), but like I intimated, she’s extremely small in scope and obviously, has a hard time retaining employees with such a difficult-to-deal with or plan for dry spell. She does pay them well though, much better than Wal*Mart, but still. And this IS constantly something she’ll have to look forward to. Such a pain in everyone’s ass. Last of all, besides that reason why for the push, every dollar saved adds more to each manager, and both district and regional, yearly (quarterly? bi-annual? I’m not sure which all) bonus(es). What’s coming out of the employee’s check is making it into the Powers That Be’s pockets. And those amounts ain’t nothing to sneeze and would be considered pretty good money no matter where you work.
Just one perspective out of many.
(Maybe I should made that three. :eek: But this probably constitutes short for me. Yes, I had them pre-prepared in Word, then separated. What??)
Bravo, Estilicon. I couldn’t agree more, or have said it better.
Or single parents trying to keep food on the table. Senior citizens just barely surviving on social security. College students, trying to pay for tuition so they CAN get a better job.
But of course, compassion and morals don’t matter when it comes to saving five bucks on a new stereo.
As the free marketers like to say, “a corporation’s only responsibility is to make money for its shareholders.” Compassions and morals don’t factor into it.
Which is why I remain morally superior to the free marketers.
I assume Michael Moore will be directing?
Are you kidding? With MM’s powers of film manipulation he might make you two idiots look good.
I say we farm the work out to even sven…
Sam
This has turned out to be a fairly interesting thread, and I’ve learned some things about Wally World’s business practices that I might not have gotten around to finding out otherwise.
Personally, I use Wal*Mart for basically three types of purchases: small electronic stuff I might for some obsure reason need for outside of ‘normal’ business hours; 15-packs of ‘Pop Weaver’ Microwave popcorn ($2.99, can’t beat it) and occasional ATM withdrawals (my local bank has a machine inside the store). That’s about it. I’ll freely admit that I’m currently in an economic situation where I don’t feel forced to buy the absolute cheapest crap I can get possibly find, so I don’t spend much time there otherwise.
OTOH, although there have certainly been some shady biz practices outlined here, I don’t find them compelling enough to motivate me to a hard boycott of Wal*Mart’s goods. For one thing, I somehow doubt that any big chain’s record is entirely free of blemish; for another, if Wally World is truly evil, my hundred bucks or so in purchases per year does not nag my conscience quite enough to reduce them to zero; for a third, if I really want to get cranked up over big-box, category-killer chains, I prefer to reserve my rage for Home depot and Lowe’s, for what they’ve done to local hardware stores. At least in my area, you can buy food, clothes and all the other crap WM sells at plenty of other places. Just try and get hardware or lumber anywhere else than the Big Two, however.
Lastly, although I agree that their anti-union stance, mistreatment of employees and support for sweatshop labor are pretty reprehensible, and like others I can’t stand the general ambiance, noise and color shceme, I don’t believe that running them out of business is necessarily the best answer. Sufficient to minimise my patronage of their establishment, and if the spirit moves, send clear, literal messages to their management that I might consider shopping ther more often if they cleaned up their act. YMMV.