Quote:
Originally Posted by L-Pink
Aren't you tired of limited selection and buying cheap crap that comes from china? Thank walmart.
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I like you, and please dont take this as an attack on you or your ideas. But the flaw in your arguments and has already been mentioned is that people are voting with $. If enough people felt that way, they would stop shopping there and stores would close.
Here is what i recall from my personal experience... when i was a child, i grew up in a tiny town in Alaska. Buying clothes or anything really meant mail order or driving 4hrs to Anchorage. Ones whole life revolved around wanting things that just weren't available. Music. Clothes. A fuse, a valve. A guage. Almost anything.
For much of my childhood, i remember endless discussion about fast food and big stores and why there were not more of them. For example, Anchorage at about 250,000 people had a few McDonalds at the time (3 i believe). No wallmart.
The position of Wallmart then was that it took a population of 500,000 to support one store (their belief/growth strategy at the time).
McDonalds, i remember from those who i knew owned some of the first fast food franchises in the state, wanted certain amount of car/foot traffic in front of the door and a population of at least 50,000 people.
Anyway, as you can guess, eventually Wallmart opened a store in Anchorage. Of course, there are tons of fast food places. They learned how profitable they could be in small markets and all that early thinking would seem draconian and absurd today.
I grew up outside of a town of less than 5,000 people. That town of 5,000 people now has a Wallmart, Home Depot, Costco etc. This seemed like an insane futuristic fantasy when i was little. I grew up with all the small stores, all the mom and pop stores. We always knew the families, everyone's kids always went to school together and grew up together and so on. The idea that somehow mom and pop stores are better is bullshit. They employ a handful of poorly paid people, customer service was almost always nonexistent and selection of course, was obviously next to nothing. Either you bought the spoiled fruit they had.. or you had no fruit.
In fact, with respect to customer service - people keep forgetting this is a relatively new thing. The small stores failed miserably at customer service. Yonger people have absolutely no clue how things were. There was the romanatic idea of a small town store that knew all the customers... but there was the reality that was that service sucked. Seriously... you are old enough to remember this....
Remember when every store or cafe or small business had this next the cash register?
Remember when every store or cafe or small business had something like this on the wall behind the counter?
Here is the part that no one seems to get. A town of 5,000 people now has a wallmart. This brings in 1000s of people from outside that town to spend money there. I could go on and on and on about the obvious benefits to all the truck drivers, freight managers, logistics teams, forklift drivers, shipping companies, printing companies, local banks, merchant banks, local business - restaurants, gas stations, tourist traps etc etc etc all obviously benefiting from the presence of these huge stores, but its going to fall on deaf ears.
What a Wallmart pays an employee is not directly tied to the full benefits of a small town seeing a massive rise in the number of visitors and turn over of goods - and that it means to the town.
And if no one liked Wallmart, they would stop shopping at Wallmart. There is ALWAYS a demand for alternatives. The simple truth is that the vast majority of people want the low prices of Wallmart, Target etc. If they didn't, they wouldn't be there. Wallmart is a fucking nightmare anywhere. Go to the one in Tampa on Dale Mabry (close to Kennedy) and you'll find yourself wishing you had a gun on you for protection. In fact, its scary just walking up to the front doors because of the crowd thats there. But even then, they thrive. The lowest common denominator of society is the market. The people that ONLY care about price. That is the business model. Tell a bunch of food stamp using, welfare mothers they now have to go to a little mom and pop store and pay more for a small selection and see how that goes, Obviously its not going to work.