I think Wal-mart has slowly over the years put the nails in its own coffin. Consider the mom and pop businesses that had to close because of the big box at the edge of town. Consider the unfair labour practices, promises to the employees that aren’t kept, the need to ensure factories in America get shut down so that Chinese inferior products can riddle the shelves, so that people can keep coming back to buy crap. At some point having a lot of “stuff” because it’s “cheap” just doesn’t cut it anymore. People are worthy of better.
Wal-Mart also made a big mistake with diluting what they do best and introduce a grocery line. People simply don’t want to buy a general merchandise item where they buy Milk.
Their over-stock? or do you mean the stock-market? Either way, I’d never invest here. Companies that diversify their product lines have to do them with a lot of care, Wal-mart is this big heaving giant that thinks they can be one stop shopping for everything. Only when people want CHEAP products do they shop here. If they want Quality they go elsewhere. If you’re a discerning food shopper, Wal-Mart is the last place you want to go, unless you’re looking for Honey Boo Boo sized Cheetos.
I meant in the stock market. If you’re certain they blew their business plan, it would be foolish not to short the stock. But if you’re really not so certain, then maybe you shouldn’t post in a manner that makes you appear you are. No?
Is there really any evidence that WalMart carries a significant number of products that aren’t exactly the same as what you get elsewhere? My understanding is that WalMart’s business model isn’t even to be the low price retailer. They lure you with a few low price items, maybe even loss leaders, but then figure you’ll buy more stuff while you are there.
Or another way to look at it is that Walmarts annual net income of $15 billion divided by 1.5 million employees comes to $10,000 a year per employee.
Just out of curiousity, why does Target not get as much hate?
A reporter once asked Jonas Salk, “Now that you’ve created a vaccine for Polio, who has the Patent?” To which Salk replied, “There is no patent. It belongs to the people. Could you patent the sun?”
Salk’s passion for medicine and compassion for people is why we don’t have Polio. Not profits.
Tesla had very much the same character, and he is why we have the alternating current system.
Do you think Einstein made his discoveries in pursuit of profit? What about Darwin? Or Dawkins?
It goes both ways. But, I assure you passion is always more important than profit. Even in your examples.
Every smart retailer tries to bring customers in with a few low cost items, but Walmart likes to obliterate companies that have higher cost margins since these companies produce in the US and have higher labour costs and cut into their bottom line. Just ask Rubbermaid or Electrohome
Ergo Walmart goes and ferrets out the sweat shop workers in Beijing to produce a lot more and a lot cheaper than ever at home.
If Americans are upset at the number of jobs that have gone to China, they only have to look at that Gosh darn good ol store from Arkansas who made it happen with impunity. By pressing the venders to get their prices lower than rock bottom, they’re forced to go overseas.
So Walmart won’t go away this year, or even next year. But 5 years out Walmart simply won’t have the staying power it once had
According to Salk biographer Jane Smith, as reported by Robert Cook-Deegan, “lawyers from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis had looked into patenting the Salk Vaccine and concluded that it could not be patented because of prior art – that it would not be considered a patentable invention by standards of the day.”
Also, it says that each new supercenter provides roughly 300 new jobs. How many of those jobs are associates compared to upper management? I’ve honestly looked and can’t find it. But I’m willing to bet that it’s pretty damn close to half of their workforce.
The basic necessities to survive in this country should be subsidized by the government if the individual is struggling. I believe every person has an inherent passion to learn and succeed in life, but after much struggling and failure sometimes people give up. But if we get it straight from the start this will not happen nearly as much.
If he used his income to fund more experiments, then yes, it was. Money isn’t an end in itself to anyone, it’s a means, something we use to obtain security, comfort, or in Tesla’s case, to pursue passions.
Yikes, this thread has gone an entirely different direction than I’ve hoped. You guys read it as an anti-Walmart thread, which misses the point. I only use Walmart as the most conspicious example of the trend of our economy, but I don’t think Walmart in and of itself is the breadth of the problem.
More generally, I’m saying an economy in which labor is treated the same as a chinese widget - use whatever methods you can to make it as cheap as possible - leads to an economy that stagnates because no one has the economic power to keep it going.
The comparison to Henry Ford increasing his workers wages on the basis that it would improve the economy by having more people able to buy his product is much closer to what I was going for.
When we treat workers as a cost to be slashed any way possible - by exploiting every weakness in the law to deny them pay and benefits, to keep them from having any power in the relationship, to make them as poor, weak, and subservient as powerful to the people they work for, we eventually strangle the economy because it’s those average workers having some economic power that ultimately drives the economy. We’ve mistreated our workforce, made them powerless and dependent, which has resulted in a cashing in by the wealthy, as evidenced by the flat wages for decades and major shift in control of the wealth in this country.
I’m saying that policy has finally come home to roost. We were able to enrich the super rich at the cost of everyone else for a while based on the previous strength of our economy (a looting of sorts), and then our ability to stave off collapse for maybe another half decade to a decade through borrowing. Now we’re coming to realize that this economic downturn is actually the new normal. Our borrowing to cover our loss in economic power masked the issue, but we can’t mask it anymore. There are super rich who control almost all of the wealth, and there’s the rest of us, who have less economic power and freedom than anyone in the US since before WW2.
We’re coming to find that this isn’t a sound way to run an economy. It’s no use to have a warehouse full of widgets if the entire economy has disempowered the average person to the point where they can’t even afford to purchase these widgets. We eventually have a few scrooge mcducks sitting on a giant pile of cash with no one to sell to.
This thread isn’t meant to be a “is Walmart a bad company? How do they compare to others?” type of thread. This thread already assumes that their tactics have worked and have spread to other parts of the industry and indeed other industries. It’s meant to be a “is running an economy in a way best exemplified by the way Walmart work a good way to run an economy?” thread.
Right, but passion trumps profit. Anyone can understand that money is a means to an end. But, it’s disingenous to say it’s about the money when it in fact is not.
I’m willing to say yes, it is a good way to run an economy. You are looking at it from a very narrow point in time and drawing a conclusion about what it will be like 10 years from now.
Personally, I think Walmart has certainly changed our economy, it ushered in an era of low costs, bringing goods and services to communities that didn’t have those things before. And in the short we see a lot of negatives.
But now there is a trend moving away from Walmart and its practices. A company (like Target) that can create a brand where it pays its employees better is able to charge slightly more, and eat into market share.
And there is a trend away from buying shit from China. There is a market for products that are made in the US, and cost slightly more. If anything, we can thank Walmart for being a whipping boy, and encouraging people to think about their purchases.
Instead of the government stepping in and declaring a higher minimum wage, or capping CEO pay, or forcing benefits, consumers can vote with their wallets to shop where employees are treated slightly better. In my opinion, what’s what we’re seeing now. Inevitably it will be market forces that get Walmart to shift their practices.
I’m not setting up some kind of lecture here, but your post #67 seemed to suggest that some people are driven by passion, and other, lesser lights are driven by mere profits. I just wished to suggest that the two aren’t as exclusive as you made out.
As you noted, Tesla used his profits to carry out more experiments, to satisfy his intellectual curiosity. William Randolph Hearst used his to build a castle and stuff it full of works of art. Neither sought profits for their own sake, because no one does that. Money is just colored paper, or numbers on a balance sheet. It’s a medium of exchange.
In general terms, there’s certainly a case to be made for this position. However, attempting to deduce any specific consequences from this about the current state of the US economy and labor policies as a whole would require a hell of a lot more sophisticated economic analysis and supporting data than we’ve seen in this thread so far.
Especially if the only actual data point inspiring your hypothesis is a short-term drop in sales and share prices for Wal-Mart.
