Posted on 02/25/2014 1:20:12 PM PST by Starman417
The first time I ever saw a Wal-Mart I was a grad student getting my MBA down in Tallahassee, FL. One opened up down the road from my apartment and I was immediately taken by the big bright stores with lots of stuff and what seemed to be pretty low prices. In class I learned the secrets to Wal-Mart’s success in its niche of “Always low prices”. It demanded efficiencies from its suppliers. It became fanatical about using information technology to optimize its sourcing and distribution channels. It paid its employees the community average or sometimes slightly more, but never significantly so. And of course the company benefited tremendously from scale. At the end of the day Wal-Mart became a spectacular success because it provided the goods people wanted at the lowest prices possible.
Thus began a two decade long love affair with Wal-Mart. For most of the last twenty years I’ve spent most of my shopping dollars, particularly food, but other items as well, at Wal-Mart. It helped that, as I hate to shop, I could go there and get pretty much everything I needed in one place, from apple juice to socks to those little trees you put in your car to make it smell good.
I remember around 2003 when a friend of mine got married in Key West. I went to Wal-Mart and purchased a pair of those mesh shoes with the rubber sole that you could wear in the ocean. They cost about $7.95. I remember how amazed I was that they could manufacture that pair of shoes in China, label them, ship them across the ocean, transport them to my store where people would receive them, inventory them, display them and eventually charge me for them, and do so at a profit! Even if they paid their workers in China a penny a day I still didn’t see how they could do all of those things and still make a profit.
When my love affair with Wal-Mart began the company had 1,500 stores mostly serving rural communities across the country and generated about $25 billion a year in sales. Today they have 10,000 stores around the world and generate half a trillion dollars in revenue annually.
Like it or not, Wal-Mart has changed the face of American retail. By using the best of the free market the company has saved Americans hundreds of billions of dollars over its lifetime, savings that they might have used to can use to provide more food to their children, to give to charity to buy their kid a computer for college, or just buy another flat screen TV. By any definition Wal-Mart is an American success story.
Unfortunately however, my love affair with Wal-Mart is fading… and fast. The first injury to the relationship was when the company supported ObamaCare in an effort to increase pressure on its smaller competitors. The second was when they supported the taxing of online sales. Since those two events I’ve reduced the money I spend in Wal-Mart by well over 50%. Now I’m beginning to wonder if I need to redirect most of what’s left. According to Bloomberg, the company is considering supporting the Obama administration’s move to raise the minimum wage. While Wal-Mart knows that it would incur higher wage costs, it also knows that because of its size and efficiency it can better weather the increase than most of its competitors.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
I guess for the same reason Home Depot and Lowes do, hoping to outsell and then close down the competition.There can be only one!
Whenever I read liberal publications whining about WM employees and their lot in life, I have this vision of Walton Family "press gangs" taking innocents off the street, putting blue vests on them, and making them work at WM.
No thanks Walmart, I don't like trading in goods made by slave labor, and YES many are made by political prisoners (an entire family was placed in prison because a son took a course in college and wrote a paper that was "deemed to be seditious!") who are paid nothing for their labor. Most Chinese companies are actually owned by the Chinese military, so I don't care to help China achieve power over us by purchasing "cheap gardening tools, etc. and lastly, I resent Chinese "food products" including non-food substances like Melamine, that kill American babies, adults and pets!
BTS, those same prisoners are blood-typed to become "organ donors" when the needs or profit necessitates.
Well said.
When John D. Rockefeller created Standard Oil, which (according to the Wikipedia definition) was “...an American oil producing, transporting, refining, and marketing company...”
There were a lot of small petroleum producers, refiners and distributors who were absolutely crushed and put out of business by Standard Oil.
But Standard Oil delivered petroleum products at a far lower cost than anyone else had been able to. And that opened up the usage of petroleum products to far more people than was possible before they came on the scene.
Just like the factories that were able to make textiles on a large scale for far less cost put a huge number of people out of work who had been making textiles by hand.
And robotics developed for the auto industry put a lot of people out of work. (oh, wait...or SHOULD have put them out of work)
And so on.
Walmart isn’t perfect (I very rarely shop there myself) but people apparently buy their products. I just think one has to have a certain set of blinders on to blame Walmart for the ills they are perceived to have caused. I don’t support their stance on Obamacare, and I don’t have a problem with someone who says they won’t shop there due to that. I understand that.
But to say that Walmart should stock more expensive and less available or reliable merchandise simply because “it didn’t come from China” is wrong. Capitalism means you (as a corporation) field a product that people are willing to spend their money on. If marketing makes people believe a crappier product made in China for less money is somehow a better purchase than a better product made in the USA costing more money, who is to blame? The company that is selling it, or the people who are buying it?
It is like people who cast aspersions on people who have a lot of money.
It is all relative. There is always someone who has LESS money than you do, and can throw the same aspersions at you.
Once you start with that, where do you stop?
Como? I’m not clear how your response applies to me? And shoppers have been killing the mom and pop stores since the days of Sears and Roebuck, Montgomery Wards and large scale grocery stores and as fars as flooding the market with crap quality goods when was the last time you were in a Sears, Kmart or any one of the myriad Dollar Tree clones?
Walmart has horrible inventory control of everything now. Half the items on my shopping list end up being bought elsewhere, often for less. Trying to shop at Walmart is now a big waste of time.
Zoning? Sometimes these things are in the works for years, and parking/traffic flow is a huge consideration.
Sorry. Misread your post.
It’s okay! Lord knows I’m responsible for enough posts that deserve a good smack!
Around her Lowes and Home Depot are across from
each other in a bunch of towns.
We have a new discount store in town called
Ollies Bargain that has had unreal crowds since opening.
We have really cut down going to Wally.
Don`t think Sam would like they have become.
Thanks. I just find it odd that they are always near each other.
Have not heard of Ollie’s Bargain, but WM is vulnerable to attack from the low end.
Dollar General has cut into WM sales.
As Americans slide down the economic abyss, there will be more opportunities.
Carlyle (the most politically connected private equity outfie) is buying trailer parks.
One day I was in a department store. I had some free time so I just wandered about picking up stuff just to see where it was made. I was amazed that most was made in China, Indonesia, etc. It is not only Wal Mart nowadays.
That’s a lot of liberal propaganda.
I grew up in a little Arkansas town of 3,500 and a Walmart came in around 1975 as they did back then in small communities. First, they bought an existing, and empty, building and put the store in. Eventually they buy some land and build a bigger store and lease out the older one. By this time they had hired over 50 locals to work there.
Among the businesses we had were a Sears Cataloge store (remember those?), local clothing store, two drug stores, a NAPA store, a Western Auto and several grocery stores. To this day EVERY store I mentioned above is STILL THERE along with Walmart (except the Sears store).
And after all this time the town only grew to 5,200 people.
So does Aldi for groceries.
It is a major corporation and it wants to have butter on its bread and it turns to the government. It wants to price newcomers out of being competitive it turns to the government.
Find a corporation that doesn’t do these things now a days, its tough. Look at the Chamber of Cronies, they are all in on the act.
My guess is 3% of republicans understand your point.
)5 of rats
Now if everyone did we could eliminate the entire rat population in less than a generation.
thanks for posting.
We bought a box of cereal from Walmart yesterday, the box said 23 ounces, we took it home, placed it next to an older box, THAT box said 25 ounces, even though it was the same size!
We called the cereal manufacturer and they said they make two different boxes of cereal, one with 23 ounces, one with 25 ounces, depending on the store.
We asked if that’s because Walmart wants to sell a cheaper box, while making it seem they’re getting the same amount of cereal...she didn’t respond.
Seems totally corrupt to me, to sell two boxes that look exactly the same, while one has 23 ounces and one has 25.
I don’t trust anything from Walmart...
Ed
I soured on them when they caved to the “Go Green” movement, resulting in darkened stores and restroom facilities that were utterly useless.
I believe before WalMart included groceries they had more inventory and far more choices. I complain about this all the time! lol
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