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...
And they’ve gutted entire US industries by helping take their IP and product specs over the manufactures in China...
Looks like we’re nearing a tipping point, when even someone as stupid as a MBA wakes up to the reality.
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.
Well then. The answer is simple. Shop at Amazon.
Watch out. 3 tags coming!
/sarc
/smirk
/snark
Oh nooooo,
Wal Mart uses American products, “whenever possible”.
And they would never lie like obammy now would they?
I hate Walmart because it pretty much single-handedly killed the “mom and pop” stores and flooded the market with crap quality goods. Of course, Walmart isn’t alone in doing that but I moss the local stores (not for everything) where there was a sense of community and good quality.
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.
Well Walmart Haters generally look no better.
In the 19teens they were saying the same thing about Sears and JC Penney
In each case, Walmart is happy to support left-wing, anti-free-market government policy as long as it hurts their competition more.
This is not-too-subtle corporate cronyism, and has nothing to do with free market economics.
If Walmart is going to support such leftist crap, they deserve to lose conservative consumer dollars.
Dollar General is doing a decent job of attacking WM from below.
As Americans slide down the slippery slope of the Baraqqi Depression, there is room for even more low end retail.
True, but as I proved years ago if you avoid every national retail operation with some link to some liberal/progressive/Democrat/gay/etc you will have no place to shop.
The sad fact is that big business realizes there is a fair chance of long term progressive control of our country and is attempting to buy “insurance”.
I shop at Walmart to get ammo when it’s available, and once I bought a gun there (a US made Colt M4 6920, an “assault weapon”). If they offer a good product at a good price I buy it there. The local gun shop won’t be put out of business by Walmart.
Food, I don’t buy there much. The local grocery store is closer and more convenient.
Sure, Walmart may have killed off some Mom and Pop stores, but nowadays they wouldn’t survive anyway, what with the internet, and their prices were always high in comparison to large retailers today. The times call for efficiencies of bigness to thrive.
The American consumer killed off American manufacturing: Walmart offers cheap stuff and that’s what people demand. If they wanted to keep US manufacturing going, they would have bought the stuff. How do you compete with Pakistan or China when your regulatory, labor and health care costs are so much higher? You don’t because you can’t.
To use Amazon isn’t any better, IHMO, because they’re a liberal owned operation selling the same stuff from overseas, minus the brick and mortar.
IIRC UPS is using the government regulations to hobble Fedex
My love affair with Wal Mart ended when one could go into a store with 40 check out lanes including self checkouts and only 3 lanes are open and the self checkout made for 20 items or less were broken. Or some slob with 80 items insisted he/she was the most important shopper in the world and decided to use it and the store management does nothing to prevent it.I recall our local Super K-mart was just the same before Sears holdings closed a bunch of them including that store. Wal Mart appears to be following the K-Mart model to the “T”.
I’ve become a fan of Dollar General lately.
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.
The shoppers of your community, who voluntarily took their shopping to Wal-Mart, killed the mom and pop stores.
The shoppers decided they didn't much care if mom and pop stores stayed or left. If the shoppers would have all stayed away from Wal-Mart, it would have packed up its marbles and went home.
Yes, I know Wal-Mart does some dirty business practices but forcing people to shop there isn't one of them.
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