Behold!! The cancerous growth of Wal Mart!!!

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

Yup, and while wal mart doesnt particularly take a high level of training and education... the pilot job does... yet the pay is about the same for that 20 something "kid" steering your connecting flight toward your destination at 300+ mph

nice thought eh?

I remember when I was an Intermediate EMT considering going for my EMT-P. We discovered that an 18 year old telemarketer made more money than a paramedic after about 5 years of schoolin. We were in the wrong line of work!

[tater]

We virtually never go in walmart, actually. Usually Target.

Target is less scummy, more milf, less morbid obesity

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Ducimus

...every god damn thing is made in china.

Well, not the food.

Nalley's Chili
Local grocery: $1.79
Wal-Mart: $0.88

Aspartame sweetener, 200-packet box.
LG: 4.49
WM: $2.14

5-pound ham
LG: $9.50
WM: $5.95

I just bought a pair of jeans for $8.00.

Oh, and I hope you don't own a PS3. If you do, look on the box. "May be made in Japan, Korea, Malaysia or China."

In fact every major brand-name 'American' electronic device is now made in China, including my Motorola cell phone.

@ tater: More 'milf'?

[ReallyDedPoet]

Originally Posted by tater

You seem to be unclear on the concept.

You get that from my two brief posts in the thread

[Torvald Von Mansee]

Originally Posted by tater

ObWalMart link: http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/

I'm not a walmart fan, but that was fascinating, actually. I had no idea they only got into the NE in the mid 1990s (I've been in NM for so long).

That said, it certainly doesn't bother me. The same animation for Starbucks would be cool, actually.

I always find it amusing to go into what I call the anti-Wal Mart: the Barnes & Noble in Bethesda, MD. It's the major chain bookstore closest to the wealthiest area of the best-educated county in the United States. I always have this bet w/a friend when we go there: how many hot Asian chicks, wearing tee or sweatshirts from prestigious colleges and universities, will be inside studying on their laptops? It's not a matter of IF!!!

(Hmmm...I think I may have written a post very much like this at some point in the past.)

[Torvald Von Mansee]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

Me too!

So...why do you guys seem to go to bat to defend the wealthy? Do you think they became that way by being nice? On balance, do you think they care about you?

[Torvald Von Mansee]

Originally Posted by August

Well they're a little more successful than is implied in the article you quoted. Full time is 40 hours a week, not 34. That brings an associates annual salary up to about $2500 above the poverty line.

Also a Walmart Associates job was never intended to support a family of four.

Except, of course, Wal Mart makes a point of never making anyone full time if they can avoid it so they don't have to give them benefits.

[ReallyDedPoet]

Originally Posted by tater

I'm not seeing the "keeps the money in the community" advantage vs many jobs.

Why not both, keep the jobs and the money in the community.

Studies in Iowa showed that some small towns lost up to 47% of their retail trade after 10 years of a Wal-Mart store moving in nearby in the mid 1990's. [Kenneth E. Stone, "Impact of the Wal-Mart Phenomenon on Rural Communities," 1997]

In Virginia, for example, 60 cents of every dollar spent downtown, stays downtown--compared to just six cents for every dollar spent at a big-box stores like Wal-Mart. [Rocky Mountain Institute]

[Torvald Von Mansee]

Originally Posted by tater

We virtually never go in walmart, actually. Usually Target.

Target is less scummy, more milf, less morbid obesity

CostCo is also good.

[UnderseaLcpl]

I wish I had a tumor that netted me $14 billion annually and directly provided over 2 million jobs. In fact, I bet entire nations wish they had such a thing.

As a forewarning, I should tell all of you that I'm about to go on another long-winded economics rant so I encourage those of you who are tired of such things to just skip to the next post. I feel the need to post this rant because of a longstanding and as yet unresolved argument with my business ethics professor who, coincidentally, claimed that Wal-Mart was "evil" this morning.

I have personally worked for Wal-Mart as a night-shift stockboy. I did so because I was laid off from my railroad job and I needed the cash. The recession resulted in the longest and most comprehensive layoff in US railroad history since Chinese immigrants finished building the first trans-continental network.

Many claim that Wal-Mart is a "corporation without a conscience", or as my BE professor puts it, a "corporation". To him, they are one and the same. I didn't find that to be true at all during my employment. Wal-Mart graciously offered me $8.50 per hour (75 cents above the standard wage they pay) to put cans and boxes on shelves for them. They were most reasonable in the negotiation process (asked for $9.00/hr, originally) and very fair in the way they treated me during my tenure. My supervisors were generally quite agreeable, and employee morale was about as high as it could get when you've got a bunch of people working for around $8.00/hr. Plus, they have a reasonable health insurance program. It's expensive for someone on such a low wage, but it is fairly efficient. They also have a tuition program for employees so they can get a better education. Seeing as how nobody with a half-decent education is going to work for Wal-Mart unless they are desperate, does that sound like the actions of a heartless mega-corporation?

The most common complaint about Wal-Mart's domestic operations is that the jobs don't pay enough. Really? How much is any entry-level work done at Wal-Mart worth? How much is any common idiot who can stack cans worth? I posed the question to my BE professor, who adamantly defends the position that Wal-Mart should pay federal union wages. Of course, since most Wal-Mart stores operate at a fairly low profit margin, and their main expenditure is labor costs, that would require them to raise prices. As Neal pointed out, people shop at Wal-Mart to get low prices on goods they want and need. If prices were higher, nobody would shop there, and there would be 2 million less jobs and $404 billion less dollars worth of productivity in the US.

What's more is that Wal-Mart knows it provides crappy jobs to most employees, and it compensates for that to an acceptable degree. Stores with high turnover rates are not penalized by HQ. The employee training program is designed to be easy and simple so that new employees can enter easily, and more experienced employees are free to leave. One co-worker of mine who decided to quit was told "Just stay as long as you need to." They didn't even require two weeks' notice. He quit the next day for a better-paying job at Gamestop accross the street.

Personally, I was layed off by Wal-Mart just shortly before the closure of the Sam's Club stores. Corporate had determined that there was simply too little profit at my store to justify all the extra employees that had been hired. The store was getting dangerously close to costing the company money. I was one of thirteen that was cut, though that was my own fault. I told the representatives that I did not intend to stay with Wal-Mart if the railroad recaled me, and that I did not intend to pursue career advancement in management. After all, I have a union job with the railroad, and they pay me to not work while I'm layed off. When they hire me back, I'll easily be making five times what I made at Wal-Mart. The only reason I took the job was because it payed slightly more than railroad unemployment did. In essence, I told Wal-Mart that I had no intention to work for them for the rest of my life, so they cut me. I'm not offended or disgraced in any way. The entirety of my employment and my subsequent termination was the result of a mutually beneficial transaction. They paid me to do work for them at a wage I found acceptable until they needed to cut labor costs, at which point we had an honest discussion about my worth as an employee in the future. Since I was likely to quit, they gave my job to another employee who had longer-term aspirations within the company. That's it. How that makes Wal-Mart "evil" is unbeknownst to me.

My BE professor also maintains the argument that the wages Wal-Mart pays are ".....an insult to human dignity". He was actually much more verbose with the point, and made strong arguments for what is called "stakeholder theory"(non-governmental socialism) but that was the essence of it. I disagree completely. IMO, Wal-Mart has the ethical responsibility to remain profitable, refrain from fraud, coercion, and theft, and do whatever the hell it wants to beyond that. In short, it must maintain voluntary transactions at all times. My professor feels differently. He says that Wal-Mart has a duty to provide for its' workers (more than they already do) and encourage (fiscally, of course) domestic industries that produce the goods they sell. That all sounds completely wrong to me. What my professor is suggesting is that Wal-Mart and the people who make it are somehow more liable for the welfare of society than anyone else.

I have spent many days considering his argument and reading text on the subject. As an aside, required reading for the class is A Brief History Of Globalization by Alex McGillvaray, a historian and author who also has a Master's degree in environmental science and who wrote a book about the book Silent Spring. He's also a member of the New Economics Foundation and the Institue for Social and Ethical Accountability. He's also a fierce proponent of stakeholder theory.

The argument for stakeholder theory is that all corporations must be responsible for the welfare of everyone they affect. IMO, this is complete nonsense, and it is also impossible. Corporations must, indeed, be responsible for any costs incurred upon others, including pollution-related costs, and they must adhere to mutually beneficial business transactions, but making them liable for the welfare of others is ridiculous, and again, impossible. If corporations in the US adopted this silly model, they'd be as bankrupt as our government within a year. In fact, they'd be even more bankrupt because they can't print money and they can't lean on firms that actually produce viable income.

What people like my BE proffesor see in Wal-Mart and similar firms, apparently, is a rich organization that has means to help the poor and disadvantaged, but does not do so because it is greedy and irresponsible. What I see is a so-called "educator" who has no knowledge, experience in , or appreciation of economics, bashing on a perfectly legitimate firm that billions of people approve of on a daily basis.

The other main argument againt Wal-Mart is that it exports jobs and maltreats foreign workers. It is true that Wal-Mart exports crappy jobs that have absolutely no business being in this world-leading nation, unless you consult a narrow-minded worker or union boss that has a professed interest in making their uncompetitive and therefore worthless industry viable through political action, but it is not true that Wal-Mart maltreats foreign workers. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

There was a time in the US when factory workers, especially in the textile industry, were treated to horrible working conditions and low wages. A simple reading of muckracking journalists' findings provides ample evidence of ths fact. One can even make a case for foreign workers performing outsourced jobs in the modern era as an indictment against capitalism. Workers in China's SEZ's (Special Economic Zones) make a tiny fraction of what US workers employed in the most menial jobs make.

What people like my BE professor forget, however, is that people working in these industries are a hell of a lot better off than they were when they were resorting to labor-intensive economic or subsistence agriculture. China's factory laborers may be living a crappy life by our stanards, but to them the employment is a golden chance for opportunity for themselves and their children. The same was true in the US at one time. Eventually, as their economy grows, Chinese in the SEZ's will rival or even surpass the standard of living in the US, barring more destructive influence from the Chinese Communist Party.

My BE professor is entirely ignorant of the fact that economic prosperity is a gradual process that takes generations to realize. He believes that some kind of redistribution of wealth will somehow revolutionize the welfare of humanity. In his own words; "If wealth were distributed evenly,everyone on the planet would have a $20,000 income per year. That may be true, but it completely ignores everything that generates that income. He has little appreciation for market dynamics, and even less for capitalist theory. He fails to realize that the reason the disparity of wealth in the world exists is due more to states than to companies, and that the disparity in capitalist sytems is not nearly as concerning because the standard of living is higher.

What I really see in the opinions of people like this is the opinion of a bunch of lazy, unproductive, manipulative, worthless asses who want productive people to give them stuff for free. Those people are so prevalent in the academia that it makes me want to vomit every time I write some pandering, horse$hit paper to satisfy the class requirements.

Getting back to Wal-Mart, the outrage against it is completely unjustified. Wal-Mart provides exceptional goods and service for the prices they ask. They do so by the voluntary efforts employes and their own fiscal prudence. The conditions which foreign workers experience may not be good by US standards, but it beats the hell out of life on the farm, which is precisely why there are so many of them and why they work so cheaply. Just as with domestic jobs, Wal-mart gives people a rung on the economic ladder which they can use to climb higher. It isn't a high rung, but it's better than none.

It is not Wal-Mart's responsibility to improve America's or any other country's economic lot, or pay high wages, or take a stake in the welfare of the world (though they do this to some degree anyway through charitable contributions and normal transactions.) Wal-Mart's responsibility is to remain profitable, and sell products and provide wages that are agreeable enough for people to buy their products and work in their stores, respectively. That's it, and that's all we should ever ask them to do.

Wal-Mart is not a piggy bank for socialists to raid to further their agendas. It's a legitimate business that provides a valuable framework for hundreds of millions of consumers, over 2 million employees, and thousands of international companies to operate and generate wealth within. I offer the same advice to those who bash Wal-Mart that I do to people who want federalized health care: If you're so intelligent and magnanimous, go start your own morally responsible and charitable firm; hopefully I'll at least get some good deals during your "Going Out of Business" sale.

[SteamWake]

Originally Posted by tater

more milf, less morbid obesity

Oh my gawd... dude it took me a half an hour to clean up the soda spew eruption.... Very very funny !

[Bubblehead1980]

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

I wish I had a tumor that netted me $14 billion annually and directly provided over 2 million jobs. In fact, I bet entire nations wish they had such a thing.

As a forewarning, I should tell all of you that I'm about to go on another long-winded economics rant so I encourage those of you who are tired of such things to just skip to the next post. I feel the need to post this rant because of a longstanding and as yet unresolved argument with my business ethics professor who, coincidentally, claimed that Wal-Mart was "evil" this morning.

I have personally worked for Wal-Mart as a night-shift stockboy. I did so because I was laid off from my railroad job and I needed the cash. The recession resulted in the longest and most comprehensive layoff in US railroad history since Chinese immigrants finished building the first trans-continental network.

Many claim that Wal-Mart is a "corporation without a conscience", or as my BE professor puts it, a "corporation". To him, they are one and the same. I didn't find that to be true at all during my employment. Wal-Mart graciously offered me $8.50 per hour (75 cents above the standard wage they pay) to put cans and boxes on shelves for them. They were most reasonable in the negotiation process (asked for $9.00/hr, originally) and very fair in the way they treated me during my tenure. My supervisors were generally quite agreeable, and employee morale was about as high as it could get when you've got a bunch of people working for around $8.00/hr. Plus, they have a reasonable health insurance program. It's expensive for someone on such a low wage, but it is fairly efficient. They also have a tuition program for employees so they can get a better education. Seeing as how nobody with a half-decent education is going to work for Wal-Mart unless they are desperate, does that sound like the actions of a heartless mega-corporation?

The most common complaint about Wal-Mart's domestic operations is that the jobs don't pay enough. Really? How much is any entry-level work done at Wal-Mart worth? How much is any common idiot who can stack cans worth? I posed the question to my BE professor, who adamantly defends the position that Wal-Mart should pay federal union wages. Of course, since most Wal-Mart stores operate at a fairly low profit margin, and their main expenditure is labor costs, that would require them to raise prices. As Neal pointed out, people shop at Wal-Mart to get low prices on goods they want and need. If prices were higher, nobody would shop there, and there would be 2 million less jobs and $404 billion less dollars worth of productivity in the US.

What's more is that Wal-Mart knows it provides crappy jobs to most employees, and it compensates for that to an acceptable degree. Stores with high turnover rates are not penalized by HQ. The employee training program is designed to be easy and simple so that new employees can enter easily, and more experienced employees are free to leave. One co-worker of mine who decided to quit was told "Just stay as long as you need to." They didn't even require two weeks' notice. He quit the next day for a better-paying job at Gamestop accross the street.

Personally, I was layed off by Wal-Mart just shortly before the closure of the Sam's Club stores. Corporate had determined that there was simply too little profit at my store to justify all the extra employees that had been hired. The store was getting dangerously close to costing the company money. I was one of thirteen that was cut, though that was my own fault. I told the representatives that I did not intend to stay with Wal-Mart if the railroad recaled me, and that I did not intend to pursue career advancement in management. After all, I have a union job with the railroad, and they pay me to not work while I'm layed off. When they hire me back, I'll easily be making five times what I made at Wal-Mart. The only reason I took the job was because it payed slightly more than railroad unemployment did. In essence, I told Wal-Mart that I had no intention to work for them for the rest of my life, so they cut me. I'm not offended or disgraced in any way. The entirety of my employment and my subsequent termination was the result of a mutually beneficial transaction. They paid me to do work for them at a wage I found acceptable until they needed to cut labor costs, at which point we had an honest discussion about my worth as an employee in the future. Since I was likely to quit, they gave my job to another employee who had longer-term aspirations within the company. That's it. How that makes Wal-Mart "evil" is unbeknownst to me.

My BE professor also maintains the argument that the wages Wal-Mart pays are ".....an insult to human dignity". He was actually much more verbose with the point, and made strong arguments for what is called "stakeholder theory"(non-governmental socialism) but that was the essence of it. I disagree completely. IMO, Wal-Mart has the ethical responsibility to remain profitable, refrain from fraud, coercion, and theft, and do whatever the hell it wants to beyond that. In short, it must maintain voluntary transactions at all times. My professor feels differently. He says that Wal-Mart has a duty to provide for its' workers (more than they already do) and encourage (fiscally, of course) domestic industries that produce the goods they sell. That all sounds completely wrong to me. What my professor is suggesting is that Wal-Mart and the people who make it are somehow more liable for the welfare of society than anyone else.

I have spent many days considering his argument and reading text on the subject. As an aside, required reading for the class is A Brief History Of Globalization by Alex McGillvaray, a historian and author who also has a Master's degree in environmental science and who wrote a book about the book Silent Spring. He's also a member of the New Economics Foundation and the Institue for Social and Ethical Accountability. He's also a fierce proponent of stakeholder theory.

The argument for stakeholder theory is that all corporations must be responsible for the welfare of everyone they affect. IMO, this is complete nonsense, and it is also impossible. Corporations must, indeed, be responsible for any costs incurred upon others, including pollution-related costs, and they must adhere to mutually beneficial business transactions, but making them liable for the welfare of others is ridiculous, and again, impossible. If corporations in the US adopted this silly model, they'd be as bankrupt as our government within a year. In fact, they'd be even more bankrupt because they can't print money and they can't lean on firms that actually produce viable income.

What people like my BE proffesor see in Wal-Mart and similar firms, apparently, is a rich organization that has means to help the poor and disadvantaged, but does not do so because it is greedy and irresponsible. What I see is a so-called "educator" who has no knowledge, experience in , or appreciation of economics, bashing on a perfectly legitimate firm that billions of people approve of on a daily basis.

The other main argument againt Wal-Mart is that it exports jobs and maltreats foreign workers. It is true that Wal-Mart exports crappy jobs that have absolutely no business being in this world-leading nation, unless you consult a narrow-minded worker or union boss that has a professed interest in making their uncompetitive and therefore worthless industry viable through political action, but it is not true that Wal-Mart maltreats foreign workers. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

There was a time in the US when factory workers, especially in the textile industry, were treated to horrible working conditions and low wages. A simple reading of muckracking journalists' findings provides ample evidence of ths fact. One can even make a case for foreign workers performing outsourced jobs in the modern era as an indictment against capitalism. Workers in China's SEZ's (Special Economic Zones) make a tiny fraction of what US workers employed in the most menial jobs make.

What people like my BE professor forget, however, is that people working in these industries are a hell of a lot better off than they were when they were resorting to labor-intensive economic or subsistence agriculture. China's factory laborers may be living a crappy life by our stanards, but to them the employment is a golden chance for opportunity for themselves and their children. The same was true in the US at one time. Eventually, as their economy grows, Chinese in the SEZ's will rival or even surpass the standard of living in the US, barring more destructive influence from the Chinese Communist Party.

My BE professor is entirely ignorant of the fact that economic prosperity is a gradual process that takes generations to realize. He believes that some kind of redistribution of wealth will somehow revolutionize the welfare of humanity. In his own words; "If wealth were distributed evenly,everyone on the planet would have a $20,000 income per year. That may be true, but it completely ignores everything that generates that income. He has little appreciation for market dynamics, and even less for capitalist theory. He fails to realize that the reason the disparity of wealth in the world exists is due more to states than to companies, and that the disparity in capitalist sytems is not nearly as concerning because the standard of living is higher.

What I really see in the opinions of people like this is the opinion of a bunch of lazy, unproductive, manipulative, worthless asses who want productive people to give them stuff for free. Those people are so prevalent in the academia that it makes me want to vomit every time I write some pandering, horse$hit paper to satisfy the class requirements.

Getting back to Wal-Mart, the outrage against it is completely unjustified. Wal-Mart provides exceptional goods and service for the prices they ask. They do so by the voluntary efforts employes and their own fiscal prudence. The conditions which foreign workers experience may not be good by US standards, but it beats the hell out of life on the farm, which is precisely why there are so many of them and why they work so cheaply. Just as with domestic jobs, Wal-mart gives people a rung on the economic ladder which they can use to climb higher. It isn't a high rung, but it's better than none.

It is not Wal-Mart's responsibility to improve America's or any other country's economic lot, or pay high wages, or take a stake in the welfare of the world (though they do this to some degree anyway through charitable contributions and normal transactions.) Wal-Mart's responsibility is to remain profitable, and sell products and provide wages that are agreeable enough for people to buy their products and work in their stores, respectively. That's it, and that's all we should ever ask them to do.

Wal-Mart is not a piggy bank for socialists to raid to further their agendas. It's a legitimate business that provides a valuable framework for hundreds of millions of consumers, over 2 million employees, and thousands of international companies to operate and generate wealth within. I offer the same advice to those who bash Wal-Mart that I do to people who want federalized health care: If you're so intelligent and magnanimous, go start your own morally responsible and charitable firm; hopefully I'll at least get some good deals during your "Going Out of Business" sale.

I was going to go on a long rant myself but you said it all for most part, good job man

[tater]

I simply don't buy the "staying in the community" numbers.

There is no possible way 60% stays in the community. No way. That figure is CLEARLY absurd.

$0.60 per dollar? You believe that?

Most stores mark stuff up around 100%. Meaning they buy something for $1, and sell it for $2. Maybe, they might be able to get it a little cheaper. They'd have to buy their stuff at 40% of retail, and have no other cost of sales that leaves "downtown" for them to make $0.60/$1.00.

So right off the bat I doubt that figure.

Basically, the idea is presumably that every penny not spent on product stays in town as wages for the employees, and the owners (the profit). The owners, of course, would only really spend their salary, and invest the rest, so only the owner salaries stay in town. Dunno what the excess is there, that's hard to characterize.

With WalMart, I think you'd need to sum all the wages, and other stuff that "stays downtown" for the mom and pop, AND add in the total savings for the volume of sales vs mom and pop.

Ie: The total sales of the WalMart is 10M$. The same goods, had they been sold by mom and pop would have cost maybe 12M$. So WalMart kept ~1M$ "downtown" in the hands of consumers (2M$, minus mom and pop's cost of sales).

I used to be reflexively anti-walmart, but I've moderated. Bottom line is that the only legitimate way to beat walmart is to beat them in the marketplace some how. If walmart can't do that, they deserve to fold. Frankly, they'd be in trouble now anyway, if not walmart, the internet would have creamed them (look at local bookstores).

That said, we buy as much as possible from local merchants. Those that remain have changed to higher-end stuff, and a more customer service oriented approach.

Originally Posted by Torvald Von Mansee

So...why do you guys seem to go to bat to defend the wealthy? Do you think they became that way by being nice? On balance, do you think they care about you?

What is it that you want? Presumably you want "the wealthy" to be liberated of their wealth at gunpoint? Cept of course the government's guns—and everything else—are paid for by a tiny handful of taxpayers at the top.

Neal (below) is spot on. Why should I care? Their job is the same as mine, take care of MY family. It;s not their job to help me, it's not my job to help THEM. I'll help them by being a customer only if it is in my best interest to do so.

The nice thing about people acting in self-interest is that it makes sense all around. Altruism is nonsense, and only funtions in small family sized groups, or at gunpoint (in which case it's not altruism anyway).

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Torvald Von Mansee

Except, of course, Wal Mart makes a point of never making anyone full time if they can avoid it so they don't have to give them benefits.

Not exactly sure but I bet no one is pointing a gun a people and saying " You go to work for Wal-Mart, or else". Still a free country.... for now.

Originally Posted by Torvald Von Mansee

So...why do you guys seem to go to bat to defend the wealthy? Do you think they became that way by being nice? On balance, do you think they care about you?

Why should I care "who they care about", they ain't my daddy. I defend anyone who is successful with honest work and smart thinking. That's the American Way (in case everyone already forgot).

[Buddahaid]

I can stay out of the Mall-Wart easily as there isn't one in my county. Anyway, I try to buy from the locally owned stores and find that gets harder as the years pass and they close down as the Home Depots move in. In fact Home Depot bought out a local hardware chain, remodeled the stores, and then closed them in the space of about 1-2 years. Gee, thanks Home Depot!

That said, I would rather work for Wal-Mart than flip burgers any day.