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Comment by gchucky | Hacker News Reader

Really interesting article, and kinda scary. Part of me wonders if we'll start to see small local farms having to ramp up productivity to sell to Wal-Mart and how that will affect the farms. It could end up going the way that "industrial organic" has, like Michael Pollan describes in Omnivore's Dilemma.

I do think, though, that there is some point where you have to weigh business practices against each other. Wal-Mart may be doing good by supporting local farms and bringing fresh produce to underprivileged areas, but they also decimate town economies by opening up stores and destroying the competition - not to mention how horribly they treat their workers. I've never been in a Wal-Mart (there are none around here anyway) and the local farmers market is excellent so it's not a concern for me, but other people might want to weigh their options before deciding where to shop.

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Wal-Mart doesn't destroy local businesses or stores. Consumers who choose to shop at the local Wal-Mart instead of their local businesses destroy the local stores. Consumers' obsession with price, and price alone, over everything, including quality of goods, and service, is what kills small stores.

And that's exactly why you won't find me at a Wal-Mart (and living in NYC, there aren't any here...yet)

It's really not just price. One day when I was living in the middle of San Francisco I needed a ordinary paper hole punch. An item I remembered as being relatively common. I walked down Haight street and tried the stationary store, the art store, the hardware store, walgreens, and the salvation army. The salvation army had a three hole punch, no one else had any paper punchers. I ended up spending $20 to get a device designed to punch holes in metal or something the hardware store. I really wished for a walmart that day.

Not to mention all the time you spent going from place to place.

This is so true. I experienced this living in both NYC and San Francisco. They say NYC is so great because its "the city that never sleeps" etc. Well one night I was painting my apartment and needed a hammer at around midnight. There was no way I would have gotten that. Now I live in Phoenix and I go to Wal-Mart at 11:00 PM about once a week. I love it, I don't ever want to live in a place without Wal-Mart ever again.

True, but (regardless of your stance on if drugs actually should be illegal or not) do we punish the drug dealers or the users harsher? In cases of exploiting a vice, the precedent is to punish the exploiter harsher than the exploitie. And in America unrealistically low prices seem to be more habit forming than heroin.

Not quite.

Hypothetical example: Initially a town has two shops A and B. A sells high-end goods at high-end prices. B sells low-end goods quite cheaply. Most people buy mostly from B but get their luxuries from A. Now Wal-Mart moves in. It sells low-end goods cheaper than B, and highish-end goods cheaper (but lower quality) than A. Some people are quality fanatics and continue to get their high-end goods from A, but most of A's customers care about convenience as well and therefore get Wal-Mart's highish-end goods there since they're buying their ordinary stuff there too. Result: A no longer gets enough custom to turn a profit and shuts down, and now everyone gets everything from Wal-Mart.

The low prices help, I'm sure, but I bet convenience matters more. (Single anecdotal datapoint: I am a very price-insensitive food buyer, but I get almost all my food from supermarkets simply because it's so much more convenient than going to lots of different shops, possibly discovering after buying half the ingredients for a meal that something important isn't available, etc. FWIW I'm not in the US, so it isn't Wal-Mart I'm buying from.)

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