Posted on 09/06/2016 10:49:30 AM PDT by PROCON
GREENSBORO, NC -- Are some Walmarts "better” than others?
We're talking good customer service. Clean stores. Stocked shelves. Short check-out times. According to a new study, yes.
Andy Reich, a Columbia University Assistant Professor of Sociology says his study has revealed not all Walmarts are created equal.
To simplify his findings, he says, White and rich neighborhoods have better Walmarts than Black and poor neighborhoods.
“People used words like ‘unorganized’, ‘nasty’ and ‘worst’ to describe stores in communities of color much more than they used those words to describe Walmarts in Whiter communities,” Reich said in a Skype interview.
He says he analyzed 35,000 Yelp reviews across 28-hundred Walmart stores in the U.S. He then used those keywords and matched them with the reviewers' race and neighborhood they live in. The data was collected between 2004 and 2015.
(Excerpt) Read more at 13newsnow.com ...
Um.....profiling.....
Worlds of difference.
I’ll say. It’s not the store. It’s the neighborhood.
It sure does. This is a poor white county of WA State. We have a poor Walmart (so being black isn’t it) from poorly stocked shelves, bad customer service and very slovenly employees and 2nd rate clothing and products, even for a Walmart. I shop there very very rarely. We have 2 stores here and Walmart is the only one that has more than just groceries. I buy non food items when I travel out of this county and mostly use internet ordering.
Having worked in a discount store in a tough area some of the factors I had noticed:
1) Shelves torn up to a much greater degree due to the high incidence of shoplifting.
2) Children not supervised who run around knocking things open, spilling, tearing open packages, etc.
3) Lazy, unmotivated help that does not go out and return the shelves to some semblance of order.
4) Homeless and junkies wandering into the store to get warm, leaving messes all about, some of which should not be mentioned here.
5) Overnight crews to put the store back in order cannot be scheduled as everyone is afraid to be there between the hours of 10PM-6AM.
Who among us doesn’t bring their “emotional support” snake shopping with them?
well in most white neighborhoods there are not bat looking thugs waiting to prey on the shoppers as they leave..
Does that mean that if I go to the fabrics department in a Walmart in a richer neighborhood, I might not have to wait two hours for somebody to measure the fabric? Or the hunting department. Might they actually have someone who can run the computer that handles hunting permits?
I haven’t been to any of the Walmart stores here in town in years. I just don’t have time to wait around for somebody to decide to do their job.
See how nature balances itself if left to its own devices.
“Has it dawned on any of these whiners that the stores that are nicer are nicer because THEY aren’t in them??”
I shouldn’t have laughed at that——but I did.
Remember Groucho saying he wouldn’t want to belong to a club that wanted him as a member? Practically the same thing.
.
Actually I think the real test is not Walmart at 6pm (which is usually working people on the way home), but Walmart at 2pm. In my town the 2pm crowd is retirees and young women with pre-school children. In a Walmart I visited in Florida a few years ago, the 2 pm crowd was clearly dominated by those on social assistance.
Same old, same old.
The food section is truly depressing. If they had an original idea, they'd probably melt.
Finally:
We have 2 Costco stores in different areas of town. They both have some different merchandise.
Better than what?
We have a couple of different Kohls in town. I don’t shop at kohls often but when I do I’ll drive further to the better Kohls. The other one has clothes all over the floor. A lot of Hispanics with loads of children. They let them run through the clothes knocking them off playing. I know one of the assistant mngrsvand she says the one is always like that. No matter how hard they work they can’t stay ahead of it. She doesn’t like working there.
On average, BINGO!
I worked for years in an “inner city” area of Los Angeles. I was once at a meeting at a police station and ventured into the local mall. I went walking during lunch and went into a Marshalls store. First thing I saw was that nearly all of the fragrance packages on display had been opened, plastic wrappings strewn about, and some bottles were half empty, presumably due to people testing/using the fragrances. I asked why they didn’t have tester bottles, and of course the answer was obvious, they would disappear. Different standards by some, not all, people in different areas. It seems to me that most of the Black Friday or Christmas Walmart stampedes, for lack of a better term, happened in the lower income areas. I always felt sorry for the residents who just wanted a nice place to shop. By the same token, I’ve been in some of the really nice department stores we used to have during a major sale and encountered some pushy people trying to get to the same thing on the rack. But I don’t remember people tearing up merchandise or becoming violent with police called, etc.
We had a black family move into our neighborhood a couple of years ago. Nice folks, keep one of the neatest yards on the street. Chatted them up at a block party and they openly admitted, almost bragged, that they moved to our neighborhood to get away from other Blacks.
Imagine that!
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