I live in Bentonville and the walmart thing is a bit different. Yes, they are a-holes at every level but they still employ the entire NW Arkansas area with jobs. There are other companies as well: Tyson, JB Hunt, Simmons Chicken, and a few others. Mostly in food production. It’s a good area for honest work.
All of these companies treat people like dirt though. They all need to go. I’ve often said this: All businesses today need to be shut down and replaced by new people who haven’t been turned into money-hungry a-holes.
So Alice. Lets talk about Alice for a moment.
This woman is Hunter Biden in female form. She has been caught, by locals, with some very strange dealings in China - Mostly in banking. Not sure if you know this but Arvest is a bank started by Walmart. Banking rules and regulation are nil here because the Waltons control Arkansas. As the single biggest reason Arkansans aren’t eating each other they often get very special treatment around here. Everyone acknowledges that they can do whatever they want.
And they are a STRANGE bunch. Like to build things underground. It’s creepy but I’m also jealous.
Sam was a good guy. Even drove the same truck his whole life (It’s on display downtown and people still drive it). But make no mistake - his empire was built with the go-ahead and massive investment of the CCP, Norinco and built with slave labor provided by domestic Chinese labor and imported North Korean slave labor.
In the 20s we marched to defeat this. 100 years later we are marching to support it. And that’s everyone, left and right.
But yeah, The Walton family are major issues but for me to shop at Walmart in NW Arkansas is a different dynamic than anyone else. We support local grocers whenever possible but supporting Walmart here is supporting the local area.
And yes, lots of Indians here. The TATA consultancy firm is a bigger building than Walmart. They provide all the labor force for their I.T. at a fraction of of the cost.
Thank you for the insights. I visited some relatives in the Midwest and went into a large Walmart store in a small town early in the morning, at opening time (epidemic hours). There was a handful of customers—not many at all. Maybe five of us.
But there were many employees. Seeing their rows of vehicles, there were probably around 50 of them there at one time.
I worked in a large supermarket for my first job as a teenager nearly 50 years ago. That busy supermarket in a larger city employed maybe about one-tenth the number of employees. It paid less, too, considering the difference between now and then, job markets and standards, if you can imagine that. It paid less than the minimum wage at the time, until the manager was caught.
All of the companies sell Chinese and other foreign products except for a very few outliers that have extremely high prices on items for sale and inventories sorely lacking in variety. There are also items sold in Walmart, that are not from China. Walmart is only an ever-visible target for contempt.