Where was she when Home Depot forced the majority of small hardware stores out of business? Or Walgreens and CVS here in taxifornia shutting down neighborhood pharmacies? Hell wherever there is a vacant corner it seems Walgreens would put up a dinky outlet until they could glom onto a bigger property and build a bigger store leaving behind a bunch of shuttered useless buildings. Walmart is the boogeyman for what countless other businesses do.
Why do Walgreens and CVS build their stores close to each other? If you see one here, the other is next door or across the street. Just curious.
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?