Ouch! Maybe you’re right, maybe I’m guilty of my own…
…oh wait, I see we agree after all. Kinda softens the sting of your insult when you concede in the very next sentence. Thanks!
Um, just a nitpick.
MsWas is a male. I realize the name might be misleading, but he’s definitely a guy.
Nah, go ahead and assume I still want you to do your little duck dance. I explained in the next paragraph exactly why I made my comments. I wouldn’t change a thing about what I’ve stated in this thread. :wally
Nocturne thanks for the heads up. I thought that mswas might bother to show back up in his own thread to debate the issue but he seems to be busy starting ninja gramma threads. IMO the boy needs to settle down and bitch about one thing at a time. :dubious:
Which movies and which CDs? I’ve gotten The Shield and Sopranos. There was no editing in either series from the broadcast versions. The Shield even has deleted scenes that weren’t shown on broadcast tv.
I love it. I tried to put that in as my location, but it won’t fit.
Read Elmwoods post, he gets it.
As far as the Ninja Gramma thread, it was started BEFORE this one. The reason I didn’t respond prior to this, was that I was posting when I was already late for a dinner engagement, and my girlfriend knocked out the power to my computer, so I didn’t feel like retyping a post that had already made me late as it was.
I like communes of all types, I think they are neat.
I utilize corporations including Wal Mart and Target, though not often for those two. The one I use the most is McDonald’s, as far as storefronts go. I buy Coca Cola and such regularly.
I’d be more apt to call myself a ‘collectivist’ than a communist. I like the free-market personally, and i recognize that in the reality of a free-market big ugly superstores are going to exist, at least in this current incarnation. Sometimes they have what I need that I can’t get elsewhere. That’s one of the reasons I live in NYC, so I don’t have to be subjected to that boring sameness, that infests most of this nation.
There really isn’t much of a debate here. No, not all corporations are the same, I can get behind aesthetic concerns of Target vs Wal Mart more than I can singling out Wal Mart for damaging small town economies, because a K Mart does it, a Target does it. I think it is a matter of culture, rather than the particular corporation. I don’t see corporations disappearing, however, I think that there will be an increasing tendency toward making it a pleasant shopping experience, and we’ll see more of a “pier 1” store philosophy in these big superstores, where the big superstores might start trying to make themselves a pleasant environment rather than a chaotic warehouse. However, I doubt they’ll disappear anytime soon. My point was very simply about the singling out of particular corporations for hate, rather than looking at the whole culture.
Personally I am upset at Starbucks because I had a coffee shop I really liked that had live music, and was a hangout for kids that was put out of business by a Starbucks down the street. The monied adults would rather go to Starbucks because they didn’t want to be surrounded by the kids at the coffee shop, so the coffee shop slowly began alienating what customers it DID have, because it wanted to compete with Starbucks for the people who went to Starbucks instead of to their coffee shop. It was a really ugly and stupid affair. However, I don’t single out Starbucks as being any more or less evil than say McDonald’s, Wal Mart, Target or Best Buy. Hell, in New York Sonic Groove, a record store that specialized in techno closed it’s doors, and there are very few techno record specialty shops left in New York, and they’ve all taken a hit, I’ve watched many close, and scale back their business over my time here, but Virgin Megastore is just fine.
In short, I have a lot of reasons to hate specific corporations, and while all corporations are not the same, their differences are not large enough for me personally to care that much about them. While I have time and again recommended my friends work at Starbucks that I personally loathe, because they pay better and offer medical right out of the gate, I would prefer a world where a small business could handle the load of their workers, and I don’t think that it’s impossible for that world to exist.
I don’t work for big corporations because I don’t like working for an organization that clearly does not give a fuck about me. I’ll subcontract with one, but I will not be fully employed by one. So as I said, I like working with/for my friends.
And I am distinctly male, as Nocturne said.
Erek
It sounds like the issue in that particular case was the poor decision of the small owner. I admit I don’t know if they could have supported themselves by targeting the demographic that stayed with them, but by cutting off what customer base they did have in order to get back the people who left sounds like shooting themselves in the foot, which Starbucks really didn’t have anything to do with.
Yeah, lots of people don’t like associating with those they feel are lower class. Not as many mind when a big-box store opens that’s targeted at people who have more money.
Well when the S.S. Starbucks is shooting across the bow of your sloop, certainly a well manage ship could find some way to hide in the shoals or something certainly. I don’t disagree that mismanagement was a factor. However, it was initiated by the creation of that Starbucks, and was a long road downhill, it didn’t happen over night. It was toward the end when they began to be antagonitic to their customer base because their customer base was loyal, but didn’t have much money, and didn’t spend lots of money. I can also see their point of how the punks and hippies at the coffee shop might alienate the yuppy business crowd. Also, Starbucks had the better location. They were both across the street from the train station, but the Starbucks was literally across the street from the DOOR of the train station, whereas the other coffee shop was at the other end of the block. That 200 yards of inconvenience probably had a lot to do with it. It’s too bad too because the coffee shop “Ahrre’s” fresh roasted their coffee themselves, and gave the streets a really nice roasted coffee smell. Lots of little factors go into it. It doesn’t make Starbucks any less of a parasitic infestation IMHO. 
Erek
Ah, no, there are plenty of independent shops around here that are doing quite well for themselves right next to chain shops and other direct competition. There’s room for both in the market, and frankly I really prefer most of the independent shops because they either carry products that large chain stores don’t or have a feel that’s important to where I shop. Starbucks may have decent coffee, but if I don’t like the atmosphere, why in the hell should I spend my money there?
somebody stole my bunk!
mswas well, now that you’ve come back and shared a little more I stand debunked.
My apologies for the gender mixup. I assumed a MS. Was when I saw the name.
I don’t beg forgiveness for the commune statement though. When I read the OP I really wasn’t sure exactly what you were trying to say so I lit a little fire to see if you would give me a little bit of a debate on the issue.
I then got a little distracted by fucking Pizzabrat’s ** drive-by. Not so much that it was a shot at me. I get those all the time. But if you read back through this thread you will see the ** Pizzabrat doesn’t add anything to the debate.
Looks like he/she/it (I’m sure one of the pronoun’s is right) just dropped by to throw shit at me. Musta been something I said in another thread but I don’t care enough to find out.
Glad you came back. I see your side a little better. I also agree with your statement about Elmwood. When I read it I almost followed with a “what elmwood said” mini post.
What I find most interesting about the OP is the apparent willingness to forgive and even support entities that will fuck Joe Average twelve ways for Tuesday.
When the Exxon Valdez fouled Bligh Reef and devastated the local ecology, people screamed and railed about Exxon and vowed to never do business with them again. Similar cries arose against Union Carbide after the Bhopal release of MIC which killed thousands. The older dopers remember Hooker Chemical and Love Canal.
Inasmuch as Mall-Wart simply fucks people a little bit, all the time, they get a pass from some of you. They’re giving someone else substandard working conditions, no benefits, screwing legitimate workers out of cleaning jobs by hiring illegals, etc., and you fail to see that the smiling yellow face is fapping with all his might, because what you saved at the checkout is being paid at another register-that one collecting the cost of supporting people with public assistance. (Hint:you’re paying that tab, too) How goddamn blind can you be?
If Mall-Wart was destroying the ecology or poisoning people, would you get it then? Maybe not, if you didn’t have to face the end result of your economic choices. Are you that morally bankrupt, or merely clueless? Ooh-42 cents off-let’s go shopping! :shakes head in disgust:
Err…nope. Reading too much into things again. You made a dumb, insulting comment, I called you on it. That’s all.
No, I just recognize the reality of the world in which I live. I surely could not care about my fellow man as much as a stalwart saint like yourself, but I do what I can.
I just think that the differences between Costco and Sams or Mal-Wart and Target are cosmetic at best. You seem to be fairly adept at missing the point. My point was that the problem was the culture as a whole, not the individual entities. Dig deep enough into Target, I am sure you’ll find something to be pissed off about. These sorts of things are so endemic in our culture that singling out one entity is kind of silly. To be honest, I have been inside a Wal Mart once in the last four years that I can remember, that was in Reno Nevada in the middle of the night when I really needed something for my camping trip that I had forgotten to bring. It was the only thing open, and Reno was the last city before Modoc national forest.
Personally I think hating on an entity as the source of the issue is rather silly, I want to figure out what is endemic to the whole thing, and personally I’d blame lack of community. Because we couldn’t see how much community we had with that small business owner in the past, and we lacked the economic insight to understand macro-economic relationships and still do for the most part, that we find ourselves in the situation we are in. To me the solution is to build up more ‘people’ friendly infrastructures, collectively pool our buying power and such.
As I have worked on community building initiatives around me, the thing I have discovered is a deep distrust that the average person has for the average person around them. It requires a lot of faith in humanity to allow for interdependence when it’s not an immediate necessity. Until we can solve those issues that are endemic in our culture, we are going to see the same types of imbalances that you are addressing. So to me levelling blame at Wal Mart is a feel good measure and little more. I only started this thread to bitch about that.
The only corporation I would truly single out for termination would be Monsanto, but I hear bitching about Wal Mart much more than I hear bitching about Monsanto even though Wal Mart’s transgression’s are like shoplifting next to genocide in comparison. Certainly people know about Monsanto, but you don’t see a “fuck Monsanto” thread every other day.
So you can go on boycotting Wal Mart. I’ll continue to not shop there. You can continue to hate them, and I will continue to give them little thought when I am not reading threads on the boards about them. I’ll keep on trying to change the culture I live in, and hope that it radiates out a bit, you keep on doing whatever it is you do, and hopefully some dramatic change will come about soon as a result.
However, I very rarely feel sorry for victims. As long as we are expecting some big corporation to act some way or another we’re not going to get it right. You have to take the reins if you want the stage to go your way. The internet is the ultimate organizational tool, big corporations are mostly middle men, facillitators, with the internet, we no longer need them in the same capacity we used to. When people truly grok that, then there will be significant change.
Erek
Thanks for proving my point about your uselessness in this thread