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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

Walmart would also be the largest state in the US by population. They have 1.4 million US employees alone, and over 100 million weekly visitors. Asking why Walmart can't prevent all crime is kind of like asking why California can't prevent all crime.

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I didn't see anybody asking them to "prevent all crime". I see calls for them to return to previous crime levels, to levels similar to other stores.

100 million weekly visitors? The US only has 300 million people total.

Maybe some people go 100 times per week?

It says visitors, not visitations.

There are more international Walmarts than US Walmarts[1]. ~6k vs 4k

[1]http://www.statista.com/statistics/269405/number-of-stores-o...

Everyone does groceries probably once a week. It would at least 30% of the population goes to walmart so its not hard to imagine 100 million weekly visitors.

Walmart stores are also convenient to a lot of people. I'm not their target demographic and don't really like grocery shopping there in general. However, one is nearby and it's pretty common that I'll pop in to pick up something even though I don't generally do a "weekly grocery shopping" there.

> Everyone does groceries probably once a week.

This isn't true by a longshot. The 300m figure is every man, woman, teenager, child, and infant in America, and you only need one person per family going for a weekly grocery trip. And that's of course ignoring the people who don't do weekly groceries. On top of THAT, the 30% number doesn't seem particularly reasonable either (though that one is at least the only remotely plausible thing you've said).

The word that best describes this incredulity is "privilege".

I think the word you're looking for is "basic arithmetic literacy". This should be obvious by the fact that it turns out the 100 million figure is for worldwide visits to stores, and only something like 40% of Walmart stores are even in the US. For those of us who aren't hobbled by a desperate need to be offended, little arithmetic spot-checks like the GP comment's are actually useful (in this case, revealing that his assumption of US-only visitors was flawed).

If one were looking for that, the word would be "numeracy".

I'm aware of the word numeracy, but writing is more art than science and "arithmetic numeracy" didn't strike the ear well (and leaving out the arithmetic qualifier would de-emphasize just how basic a numeracy I was referring to).

If all you can contribute to the conversation is pretending that stylistic choices are errors, it's probably better to contribute nothing at all.

That's fairly rich, considering that this entire thread is you telling me which words I ought to be "looking for". Fine, you win. The rest of the nation is just like you: those weeks we don't shop at "Hole Foods", we instead shop at "Trader Jo's". What's this "Wal-Mart"?

According to Wal-Mart, they get 260 million visitors to their stores each week. I assume the 260 million figure includes stores outside of the United States.

According to statista[1], walmart.com does 91.6 million unique visitors per month.

According to statisticbrain[2], Wal-Mart stores (location not specified) have 100 million customers (not visits) per week.

[1] - http://www.statista.com/statistics/271450/monthly-unique-vis...

[2] - http://www.statisticbrain.com/wal-mart-company-statistics/

The 260 million dollar figure isn't for store visitors, it's for stores + websites. From walmart.com:

> Today, nearly 260 million customers visit our more than 11,500 stores under 63 banners in 28 countries and e-commerce sites in 11 countries each week.

> According to statisticbrain[2], Wal-Mart stores (location not specified) have 100 million customers (not visits) per week.

The source you cited looks like the location they're referring to is worldwide. They cite "Total Wal-mart sales annually" and that lines up with their total global revenue, so I think it's a fair assumption that their "Total numbers of customer per week" would likewise be globally.

In high school, my friends and I would visit Walmart just to walk around the store and talk. This town did not have much else to do, in the way of social activities.

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