snobs will keep loosing.
Posted on 01/29/2005 9:23:51 PM PST by Former Military Chick
Here’s a shocker. I love Wal-Mart. I know it’s almost always on the receiving end of bad press. It ruins neighborhoods. It puts small businesses out of business. It wrecks the balance of trade. It pays its workers poorly and treats them mean. It makes overseas workers into slaves. That's what the news says. The truth is that Wal-Mart is a major blessing for most Americans who live close enough to one to shop there and for the people who work at them. My smart friend C.L. Werner in Omaha made the point really clearly. When a Wal-Mart opens in a town, he said, it's as if everyone in the town got a raise. That's because the stuff at Wal-Mart is so much cheaper than that same merchandise was anywhere else. This is not a trivial thing. Now, don't get me wrong. Target and Sears and K-Mart and J.C. Penney and Brooks Brothers also sell good stuff usually at bargain prices, but they do not have the same reach of stores, the same astounding prices that Wal-Mart offers every day. This makes the people who shop there richer. Price matters a lot to most people. I am sure Wal-Mart is stiff competition for the stores and supermarkets across America. I feel bad for the people who lose their stores because of Wal-Mart. But not everyone is a store owner. Everyone is a consumer, and Wal-Mart is about as good a friend as the consumer ever had.Is Wal-Mart ruining the balance of trade? Well, let me put it like this: I buy American whenever I can find it.
But there are a lot of things that are just not usually made in the USA any longer. Toasters. Hot pots. Color televisions. Underwear. Since the goods are almost always made overseas, why not buy them at the best possible price? By the way, if someone knows of a good American made toaster, please stand up and shout.
Is Wal-Mart wrecking small towns? Not the ones I see, which are mostly in North Idaho. Those towns are booming. And the closest you get to a town square is the Wal-Mart, where neighbors visit with neighbors in the aisles all day and all night, in air conditioning, out of the rain.
Is Wal-Mart impoverishing third world workers in sweat shops? Heck, no. Conditions in those places are far from ideal. But they are far better than working on the farm or begging in the streets or selling themselves into prostitution or whatever they were doing before they came to work for foreign suppliers of US stores. The gains in prosperity in the developing countries because their people can sell to America through Wal-Mart are astounding. As to the people who work at Wal-Mart, they seem to me to be bright, alert men and women who work there because it's the best they can do in their town or at their age. Plus, they seem happy. The usual clerk at Wal-Mart gives a lot better service than the clerk at Tiffany. I would like it if they were paid more, but they are in a competitive labor market. And what about those greedy stockholders? A lot of them are those same Wal-Mart clerks, many of whom got rich from their stock.
In the real world, Wal-Mart is as much of a boon to the American shopper as the Sears catalogue was long ago.
Jeer at it all you want, all you cool people, but, it's progress, big time.
They're in my local paper once or twice a week and always in the Sunday supplements
I've got a cool idea! Don't work at Wal-Mart if you don't like the wages they offer you.
How about a quick trip into Analogy Land?
Let's say you've decided you'd like a new bathroom towel. You are willing to spend no more than $X for a new towel. You swing into The Bathroom Shoppe one evening and browse the towel department. You like the selections, but you don't like the prices, because a clerk tells you, "Sorry, but we charge more than $X for our towels."
So you have two choices: You can either pay the asking price, or go without any of those towels. In the end, you opt to go without, because you're not willing to budge on your $X limit.
OK, second scenario: A Wal-Mart manager has decided he'd like a new employee. He is willing to spend no more than $Y. He begins shopping for an employee. He browses interviewees. He likes the choices, but he doesn't like the prices, because each of the interviewees tells him, "Sorry, I charge more than $Y for my labor."
So the Wal-Mart manager has two choices: He can either pay the asking price, or go without any of those interviewees. In the end, he opts to go without, because he's not willing to pay more than $Y.
Both you and the Wal-Mart manager are shoppers -- you're shopping for a towel; he's shopping for labor. You each have a maximum amount you're willing to pay.
Now, I'm sure you'll agree that there's nothing immoral about the fact that you are willing to spend only $X. Yet you find something immoral about the fact that the Wal-Mart guy is willing to spend only $Y.
If you could find a suitable towel that costs $X, you'd buy it. If the Wal-Mart manager finds suitable labor that costs $Y, he'd buy it.
The government does not demand that you pay more than you want for a towel. That would infringe your rights. The government does demand that a manager pay more than he wants for labor. That infringes his rights.
That infringement is the only "immoral" part of this whole scenario.
Great article, but dangit, while reading it I could hear his evil monotone voice in my head...
Your first post pretty well summed up my view of Wally World. I'm generally willing to pay a little more to be treated like a three-dimensional being, or at least, like a paying customer. I guess it's effite to expect a smile and "thank you" when handing over hard earned cash.
I've never understood why self-identifying conservatives are so quick to defend an Arkansas corporation whose business model depends entirely on destroying small business. Monopoly is anti-thetical to competition.
Maybe we can get Rod Dreher to take up the cause.
Good points. Another is that WalMart thrives on local tax abatements, which is just another form of corporate welfare. When the abatement expires, they move on to another location, leaving an empty, useless hulking ediface on what was good real estate.
Then do it on your own dime. I, for one, get really tired of people who measure their compassion with other people's money.
This is old, kind of, but Yes, Mr. Ben Stein, I would love to see you in the white house.
The nearest Wal-Mart to me is only a couple miles up the road, but last weekend I drove 25 miles each way to go to the nearest Super-Target just so I didn't have to put up with Wal-Mart. The other thing is that Wal-Mart seems to actively ATTRACT the clientel that it has no matter where they are. The Wal-Mart I reluctantly use is smack in the middle of a wealthy suburb, right next to some upper scale shopping districts with nothing but high-dollar houses and condos for miles around it, but it is ALWAYS full of trailer trash, hip hop gangstas, and terrorists who don't live anywhere near here.
I live in a typically clean, well off area that straddles where suburbia meets the rural, but my local Wal-Mart never fails to attract the ghetto thugs and terrorists from D.C. and Alexandria and the toothless rednecks from 50 miles away in West Virginia. It's as if they drive an hour or more just to shop at my local Wal-Mart!
Same goes for the big home centers. I prefer the old hardware store with wooden floors and the wrinkled old guy who had every part you ever need in some drawer somewhere and could tell you how to fix whatever was broken.
Ya, I'm getting old.
I saw how much you enjoyed the repost of thread on Ben's last offering to E! Online and thought you might enjoy this as well.
PING
snobs will keep loosing.
I work at WM in the midwest and the EEs I know don't hate WM. Of cousre, there are a few mgrs that need their heads screwed on straight, but you find that everywhere. There is a wide range of health ins. and benefits for FTE. PTE get less range of benefits but that's to be expected anywhere. 3rd shift and Sunday differential of $1. There is no excuse for working off the clock and if the store mgr is involved in that, it should be reported immediately upward. That is one thing that is hammered where I'm at....no working off the clock. Also, we must keep up to date on our training. As far as laying off, I don't know since I've not been laid off by them. I was laid off last year from a company after 18 yrs. I was given only hours notice and my seniority was counted for nothing.
There are EEs who probably complain about their jobs no matter if it was WM, govt jobs, factories, etc. This is my first adventure in retail and mostly what I can't stand is the stealing by customers. My other job is with a factory office and they have nothing to offer their employees.....and this is a world-wide company. So, not every job is always a good fit for every person. If I hate it bad enough, I need to quit belly-aching about it and leave it. Now that I know I won't die from leaving a job to get another.
I'm not taking a shot at you... or if I am, sorry, but on other Wal-Mart threads, I've found the anti-Wal-Mart nazis to be as passionate and irrational as the smoking nazis.
No one LOVES Wal-Mart, but I like Wal-Mart.
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