Mike Rowe’s Response to Facebook Comments on Walmart Commercial Voiceover

profoundlydisconnected.com ^ | Date: February 14, 2014

[PieterCasparzen]

The more Walmart locally sources, the more other businesses will locally source.

Its amazing to me how little most Americans understand about how manufacturing actually works. They get their impressions from the auto industry or some other big industry like Boeing when they aren’t really typical of manufacturing as a whole.

Those big factories produce 1 product day in and day out. The parts suppliers don’t operate that way. The plastics shop that produces wheel covers for GM or Toyota are running a half dozen different secondary jobs on the side to supply different customers and industries.

Bingo. It is a food chain. The largest companies buy from smaller ones, who buy from smaller ones.

This is what I keep saying, "new world order", but people are COMPLETELY clueless.

When the decision is made at the top by the top few financial elites of the world to move manufacturing to China en masse, small business will simply see their sales dry up.

Then... big companies buy up smaller companies, further consolidating control of the marketplace.

GE is a key company; they are enormous. People have no idea how much sourcing is under their control.

Due to higher productivity in the advanced countries relative to the less developed countries, it's actually cheaper to manufacture in the developed countries.

People think we can't make cheap plastic parts, for example. They think that's why so much plastic molding is done in China. But all it takes is the decision being made to do it here and do it profitably, and voila. This is proven by the large number of cheap things we do manfacture here, like styrofoam cups, etc., where the shipping doesn't work out.

Also there are tons of things that can be purchased today to make life easier for the small business that were not available years ago. It is amazing.

The real stoppers for small business are a) no sourcing from big business and b) the risks of being sued, risks of being singled out by your own government and waylayed every way imaginable from parking tickets to irs audits, one employee groped another, you didn't hire a muslim, you looked crossways at a sodomite, etc. When people see the crazy punitive stuff that goes on, they see a potential barrier to making business worthwhile. All a business owner thinks is who is going to come along and accuse my business of something, I can't defend from the trumped up accusation, so after a lot of legal expense my business goes in the cr@pper anyway.

The only businesses people think are worthwhile are ones with a fat profit margin, or ones where you can at least jack up your profit margin quite a bit.

Cuz after all, no matter how much you make, you're looking at wildly escalating prices for basics like food and real estate taxes.

[Sergio]

Lol. Great reply.

[PieterCasparzen]

Possibly. I only buy grass-fed beef with an identified origin. Unfortunately, with our government-forced decline of American agriculture it will be more and more difficult to find domestic produce. But we still need millions of Mexicans to come here and pick it, I guess.....

Right, avoid the poison that's making you sick so you need more "healthcare". So many would-be conservatives think that even if big business is killing them, they still need to support it, cuz it's the "American way" or something. No thanks, I'll stick to legitimate business.

And doing the farmwork is WONDERFUL work. It's fantastic. Nothing like real food and real work. People just believe the lie that its better to be a low-level-clerk-monkey after getting a 40k colledge edumacation in some jerky non-real major.

IMHO.

[PieterCasparzen]

Hate to tell you, but it’s customers that killed small businesses. They CHOSE to go for cheaper, lesser quality items in lieu of more expensive, better quality items.

When you're poor, ya got no choice.

I used to try to look for valvoline 5qt in small auto parts stores -they didn't carry it. what can i do. at a certain point, I just buy what I need and forget about it.

But if Walmart didnt do predatory sourcing and pricing, thousands of small stores would still be in business.

And each would have one or more private owners who were doing well, and a few managers who had decent jobs.

[cripplecreek]

I’m no fan of Walmart but I understand the value of having them sourcing here in America. Its especially true these days with all the hurdles faced by business.

There is just no such thing as a factory that produces 1 part for 1 industry.

I used to work for Astro Cap here in Michigan making fiberglass truck caps and lids. We also made LEER and Tonneau caps and lids. It used to crack me up hearing people talk about which was better when they came from the same place and the only difference was the label we stuck on them. I once bought a set of cheap wrenches and found that one of them was a top of the line Craftsman wrench.

[nascarnation]

You’re saying “solidarity forever” stops at the Hollywood city limits?

[cyclotic]

He said that when I saw the workbench in the house I ended up buying.

[cyclotic]

For the first time in 26 years of home ownership I had a contractor do a project. He gutted and remodeled a bathroom. It was nice to come home and see stuff done but I also wanted to get in and sweat some pipe.

[woodbutcher1963]

not that I recall

[minnesota_bound]

If the liberals who moan on and on about Walmart wanted them to buy locally then call for lower taxes and getting rid of the many stupid regulations. Manufacturers would spring up.

[RetiredArmy]

Well Cuz, I fully agree that this nation is in severe trouble. I keep seeing places closed down every day. In fact, down town, a bar-b-q restaurant that had been in business since the 1960s closed. Simply said we cannot afford it anymore and shut the doors. Two weeks later, the building is torn down and now a new building for something else to go up. Probably another one of those danged CASH stores. There is one every two blocks on this highway for payday loans. There are several bar-b-q places in town and they are full at lunch everyday, so it could not be lack of just people coming in. It had to be the taxes, etc. piled on him and he had enough.

[PieterCasparzen]

If the liberals who moan on and on about Walmart wanted them to buy locally then call for lower taxes and getting rid of the many stupid regulations. Manufacturers would spring up.

There's no manufacturing a product if a retailer does not choose to carry it.

I saw this thing I think on FBN or Fox, where they said that in the 1970's there were somewhere aroudn 8,000 different items (SKUs) in a typical store; today the number is about 47,000.

I always heard... for decades... it was suuuuchh a biggg deal... whenever newcomer products tried to get into supermarkets, I heard it so many times - the shelf space is soooo valuable. They "could only carry so many products". That's the excuse they used for mostly rejecting new small companies' products. Small newcomer product companies had to slug it out, using all sorts of creativity and effort to market their products to the consumer.

Nowadays, this FBN show, or whatever it was, said - we now have 17 different kinds of Colgate toothpast, 21 kinds of Crest, or some similar numbers.

[scream] duh ! Drives me nuts. Every story you ever hear from big business - mostly those that are publicly-held - is a bold-faced lie, a complete fabrication, a trick of some kind. They are full of it; they're all scammers.

All those companies want to do is push out all competition but a very few of themselves (big companies). Then they can put prices wherever they want, do whatever they want and life is easy for the execs. They all pile on new world order's bandwagon, it's disgusting.

IMHO.

[virgil283]

"frozen shrimp ...in my grocery store all come from Vietnam or India."

....yeah I see that at my grocery too. The state health department here warns not to eat shrimp from Southeast Asia because of antibiotic and fertilizer contamination, so you're right...

[woodbutcher1963]

What I have also read is that a lot of the seafood that states it is from Vietnam and other countries is in fact from China. It gets shipped into Vietnam and then repackaged product of Vietnam. This is because people will not buy it IF it says it is coming from China.

[woodbutcher1963]

What I have also read is that a lot of the seafood that states it is from Vietnam and other countries is in fact from China. It gets shipped into Vietnam and then repackaged to show product of Vietnam. This is because people will not buy it IF it says it is coming from China.

I have read they have chickens in cages over the water where the shrimp/fish are caged. Therefore, the shrimp/fish are eating the droppings from the chickens. This is why I never eat ANY seafood that is not wild. I pass on ALL farm raised seafood, especially if it not from the US, Canada or one of the Scandinavian countries