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Job

Wal-Mart: the next red scare?

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After hearing about the movie Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, I started to think about the giant chain more than I usually do. I've heard that a lot of the information in the movie is slanted and doctored or edited in a biased fashion. I'm not necessarily sticking up for Wal-Mart, but I don't think that it's widespread "popularity" is so bad. It will not utterly destroy the small-town economy. There are places where services or goods are offered that cannot be gotten at Wal-Mart but are still available at mom and pop shops. Yes, it's a simplistic way to look at things but Wal-Mart's success is not the cause of an ailing economy, but the result of it. People would not be so hellbent to find the ultimate low price if boasted better wages and lower prices across the board. At least that's part of my take on it all. Discuss.

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If people were making more money everything would just be more expensive anyway so I don't think that either way it really affects as much as we'd like to think it does

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Actually Wal Mart can, and often IS a large contibuting factor to decline in small town economies, especially when a Supercenter moves to town. Wal Mart owes little to the communities it is entrenched with and unlike a smaller, locally owned store, the profits are not recycled into the community.

This may be anecdotal, but I've lived in a couple of towns where Wal Mart Supercenters have moved in. The word "Competiton" is always thrown around and "how good it is for business" but that's a load. The local tire and mechanic shop can't compete with a 20 billion dollar company no matter how hard they try. Supercenters have Grocery stores, automotive repair and everything else, an almost self contained city. Problem is once a store like this moves in, other stores are forced to close because they can't compete. I saw it in Hibbing when I lived there and I'm watching it happen in my hometown. Small town stores close because it's not econmonic to shop there anymore.

Sure Wal Mart has great stuff at low prices... but at what cost? I end up paying for it in the end anyways watching as towns suffocate with only one central employer (which won't allow unionizing or has poor health benefits and low wages (lower for women) but this is a different story).

It's been just shy of a year since I stopped shopping at Wal Mart, and I have no plans to ever buy from them again. It's hard, sometimes I have to scour numerous businesses to find what I'm looking for, or drive 30 miles to the nearest store that does carry it.

Job said:

I've heard that a lot of the information in the movie is slanted and doctored or edited in a biased fashion.

I'm sure there are fabrications or a stretch here or there... but Wal Mart has been caught red handed treating its employees like dirt recently with the leaked memmo saying that fat employees are, in laymans terms, useless and should be fired or forced to do laborous work to lose weight so they're not a strain on the company's health care plan. Since both of the recent documentaries, pro and con Wal Mart, are have some misleading information it's good to question both motives. However personal experience and, I would say, common sense dictate that the documentary covering the negative of Wal Mart is probably much more accurate.

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Scuba Steve said:

I'm watching it happen in my hometown.

God, I hope you're kidding. Considering they just opened one of those fuckers in Baxter just this past January.

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Job said:
Discuss.

Comapring this to "the red scare" hardly suits the situation.

As for the cause being "the economy" and not Wal-Mart or whatever; that isn't anything. Why even evaluate between one or the other? I can't really judge in respect to the cause of this subject because I haven't seen the movie. Nonetheless it's possible that the movie is about the concept of "the lowest price (or cost)" as a supposed economic model, and how that is misleading. The "lowest price/cost" urge is the standard for big companies, because small actors have no say in this, and in some cases can only vie for a reasonable price in relation to certain factors, especially if they form part of cooperatives or guilds, if anything. Wal-Mart is as much an effect as it is an actor, and the issue is low costs at a great price, of which one of the sympthoms is small businessmen or local shops going out of business. That's hardly the only sympthom, though, as they involve such things as the relation of the "lowest price/cost" companies to power, the dependence of employees which have no direct influence over productivity and can only look to low prices (or raises, but those contradict cost minimization) for benefits, as well as the need to look for alternate employment and technology to fit the low cost requirements.

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myk said:

Comapring this to "the red scare" hardly suits the situation.

I was waiting for that. Good to see I'm still right about some things. Yeah, it's a loose comparison, but I see a very, very vague similarity between the two subjects. In any case, I feel that something is indeed wrong with our economy. Exactly what that something is, I'm not so sure about. If I could solve that mystery, I imagine just about any lay person could assume Greenspan's position after his retirement.

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Comiclez said:

Can you say "Walmart Doom"?


Someone made a grocery store WAD for ZDoom, I think. You could run around and run into Marines with a shopping cart. =^D

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Job said:
If I could solve that mystery, I imagine just about any lay person could assume Greenspan's position after his retirement.

If you understood Flying Spaghetti Monsterism you would already have. In any case, Alan Greenspan isn't there to solve mysteries.

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Wal-mart, its like cross creation of a k-mart/super-k and miejer or something. i know a lot of areas did'nt/don't know what a "super" all-in-one type of center is, but up here in michigan (metro detroit area) we have had them for year's and it's really nothing new in that respect. as far as "driving out" the k-mart/miejer type stores (even super target) would be like trying to teach a community how to "re-shop" there ways. we got our first wal-mart about five years ago and its really not making a dent in anything since all the others are much more convenient and attractive "shopping wise" than this out-sider of a "super-store" but i do feel for those areas that are getting screwed by them.

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I haven't seen this film yet, but I fully appreciate any efforts to stop them. It doesn't take a genius to realize that "low prices" means "low wages", and that means practicing wage slavery more efficiently than the competition, and driving local businesses who aren't so maliciously greed-oriented into the shitter. I find it disgusting, and I'm glad there's strong organization around here to fight it.

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myk said:

If you understood Flying Spaghetti Monsterism you would already have. In any case, Alan Greenspan isn't there to solve mysteries.

You're absolutely right, but he is there to help solve problems. And sometimes solving those problems requires a bit of sleuth work.

sargebaldy said:

I haven't seen this film yet, but I fully appreciate any efforts to stop them. It doesn't take a genius to realize that "low prices" means "low wages", and that means practicing wage slavery more efficiently than the competition, and driving local businesses who aren't so maliciously greed-oriented into the shitter. I find it disgusting, and I'm glad there's strong organization around here to fight it.

Well, low wages in most cases. The Wal-Mart CEO is one of the highest paid in the nation. If nothing else, that's just as unscrupulous as deliberately paying your employees questionable wages.

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From what I gathered while I was in UK Asda (a Walmart subsidiary) sure raped an ungodly amount of towns over the last years by chocking the local marketplaces.

There was this book on the subject of british food industry conglomerates, I only read an excerpt, but it really struck me, paraphrasing, it went something like "we tell ourselves that we are interested in food, but we do all our grocery shopping in one single place".

(found it, the book is called Shopped : The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets)

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Job said:

Well, low wages in most cases. The Wal-Mart CEO is one of the highest paid in the nation. If nothing else, that's just as unscrupulous as deliberately paying your employees questionable wages.

Well, that's not considered "wages", that's salary and stock options. And yes, there's a very select group of people really raking it in.

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I've been boycotting Wal-Mart for over five years now (ever since they moved a store into my area), and I'm not about to start shopping there now. Not as long as they continue their current business practices. One of my friends is also doing the same, so I know I'm not alone in this.

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supermarkets don't just make their money squeezing wages... the pressure they put on farmers is unreal. The dairy situation in the UK is especially tragic. If tesco or asda doesn't buy their milk then they have no one to sell it to. As a result, all the local dairies have been bought over (at rock bottom, bankruptcy clearout sales) by... another monopoly.

One day the large companies will own EVERYTHING. From your house to your funeral plot to your government. Just look at tesco in the UK for confirmation of this fact.

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mallis said:

One day the large companies will own EVERYTHING. From your house to your funeral plot to your government. Just look at tesco in the UK for confirmation of this fact.

Tesco is the first thing you see when the plane flies under the cloud line for landing in Heathrow Airport. Not the Eye of London, not the majesty of all the landmark historical documents, not the catchy geometrical shapes of the parks, but a big, big hangar-like structure with TESCO painted on its roof in big, red blocky letters.

edit: (also not the dildo-shaped 30 St Mary Axe)

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mallis said:

One day the large companies will own EVERYTHING. From your house to your funeral plot to your government.


Heh - they already do, including the government. (which I'm sure will get worse when Brown takes power from Blair)

Which reminds me of a news story from a few weeks back - they were building a Tesco over a railway somewhere in the Midlands I think (now if that's not corporate control then wtf is, I mean how else would they get to build something in a dangerous place like that), and surprise surprise the thing partially collapsed and fucked up train services for a while.

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mallis said:

supermarkets don't just make their money squeezing wages... the pressure they put on farmers is unreal. The dairy situation in the UK is especially tragic. If tesco or asda doesn't buy their milk then they have no one to sell it to. As a result, all the local dairies have been bought over (at rock bottom, bankruptcy clearout sales) by... another monopoly.


An anecdote given to me at work recently - apparently genuine. A store (I forget whether it was Asda or Tesco - Tesco I think - were running a local promotion. Some kind of farm produce was being sold at half price. Tesco (or whoever) does not, however, bear the brunt of this - they make the farmers supply at half the normal cost. A farmer (with others) did this but the offer was doing Tesco the power of good and so they decided to extend the promotion. The phone call went something like this:

Tesco: We are extending the promotion. You will continue to supply goods at half the normal price for another month.

Farmer: The current promotion is crippling me. I am making no profit at all. I have made a net loss over the last 2 weeks. You must understand that I cannot support a further month.

Tesco: No! you don't understand.

With no further explanation the phone was put down by the Tesco person and that farmer's deal with Tesco was immediately cancelled. The farmer has now sold his business and left farming completely.

It's not just supermarkets though. A story recently hit the business world when a hardware supplier went public about how they had been approached by one of the large DIY warehouse-type stores (I think it was Homebase). Basically the deal was - "We are setting up a new store. If you want to have an ongoing stocking arrangement with us, you will provide the initial stock for the store free." Yes ladies and gentlemen. These large stores have the muscle to demand that their suppliers give them goods for nothing to ensure a continued relationship with the store.

Who is to blame for all this? We are. Our insatiable desire for the cheapest price means we shop at these places. We pay little mind to the guy down the line who only gets a couple of pennies for the item we just paid pounds for.

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Does Tesco have it's own in-house brand like Wal-Mart does? I imagine that they, or Wal-Mart, would not be nearly as stringent to their own suppliers as they would be to independent ones. The example you gave, Enjay, was pretty atrocious.

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Danarchy said:

I've been boycotting Wal-Mart for over five years now (ever since they moved a store into my area), and I'm not about to start shopping there now. Not as long as they continue their current business practices. One of my friends is also doing the same, so I know I'm not alone in this.

We don't really have any near here (I've only actually seen a Wal-Mart a handful of times in my life) but Fred Meyer is really getting to be almost as bad, ever since they got bought out by Kroeger. Except that at Fred Meyer they manage not only to treat their employees like shit, but also have ridiculously high prices. They're actually trying to "phase out" cashiers entirely, replacing them with check-out machines. The one here wanted to expand even more, but the city council fought that, so instead they've just been reorganizing to fit as much crap in as possible in its current size.

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We have them "u check it" check outs at both kroger and farmer jacks here. there only one isle with 4 of the units. with a bar code reader/baggie carousel and atm/money taker thing for paying. they still have to be manned by a cashier at her station for the idiot who seems to screw something up doing it. sill faster going thru a regular check out in the end.

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Regen said:

We have them "u check it" check outs at both kroger and farmer jacks here. there only one isle with 4 of the units. with a bar code reader/baggie carousel and atm/money taker thing for paying. they still have to be manned by a cashier at her station for the idiot who seems to screw something up doing it. sill faster going thru a regular check out in the end.

You know, I've always wondered how those cashier-less checkout things were supposed to work or how a store would handle them. Especially if you didn't pay with a bank card. Is there just some slot you jam your bills into then? Plus I'd assume it would be monitored regardless so you wouldn't get away with accidentally scanning half the things you get. Or do they work on some other fashion?

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There is a bill acceptor for cash; more than likely, with that you'd only see the same range of problems that occur with a vending machine.

After you scan an item, you're required to put it in a bag or on the shelf next to the bags. It looks like a normal shelf, but it's actually a very precise scale that can tell if the proper item has been placed on it.

And, as always, there is usually one cashier overseeing all four self-checkout lanes.

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Yeah, that's what Home Depot has. It's actually quite convenient so long as the people in front of you know what they're doing.

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