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Comment by calvinmorrison | Hacker News Reader

i purchase a hell of a lot more stuff from Walmart than I do fine art.

What's interesting is that you don't realize how much of that stuff from Walmart had artistic processes embedded into it along the production line.

Did those shower curtains have a design? Did your sweater have a color and style? Probably so, but you never pay attention to how the world of "fine art" refracts into your daily life.

If the products were cheap, it's likely someone unpaid is responsible for the design. See, for example, the lawsuit against Zara over theft of ideas from small-time designers [1].

In any case, cheap Chinese brands do the same thing as Zara en masse (copying designs – note the "external suppliers" bit in its defense PR), and those products then end up in Walmart/on Amazon. The artists starve but you have your shower curtains and are happy with the price.

[1] https://www.grossmanllp.com/independent-artists-on-the-offen...

Even when people are paid, it’s not necessarily fair nor driving the price paid - like clothing/purse manufacturing in low income countries for high income markets.

Artists who were paid for by willing buyers, not tax payers who don't have a choice.

Your taxes subsidize walmart and you don’t have a choice either.

Yes. Everyone's gotta eat, even if Walmart refuses to pay fair wages.

And I don't like that either. Being ripped off once doesn't mean that I should be ok with being ripped off again. That doesn't offset.

I do. My aunt is a pattern designer for ... Shower curtains at Walmart. Yup she works for a supply house in NY that designs shower curtains and her main customer is walmart

So ironic I guess

Ha! That's amazing! Well I take it back for shower curtains (congrats to your aunt!). I do think the point still stands for Amazon sellers and Zara, but maybe I'm not giving Walmart enough credit.

Yes and do billion dollar corporations really need that much government subsidies? Turns out yes they do, but sure enjoy your plastic trinkets from China I guess. Hopefully you thank a tax payer that pays for the welfare and medicaid of those Walmart workers, and the local town for cheaper property taxes and utility rates at Walmart.

God knows Walmart couldn't exist with all this rampant welfare.

walmart solves a major logistical problem: provide government subsidized goods to low income neighborhoods. the government should like to give walmart money, as it is plausibly a cost-effective way to provide these goods to people who need them. the administrators of walmart are well rewarded for providing this public good.

The only thing Walmart solves is destroying local ecosystems both biological and human. Acting like the executives paying themselves exorbitant salaries is a virtue is frankly odd and deeply disgusting as a human being, I'm sure the lowly workers wished they could vote themselves higher salaries too.

Maybe if workplace democracy was enforced upon Walmart it would be an entirely different entity, likely for the better too.

I'm sure the OP intended an /s at the end of their post :)

i wished i had a pony, which is why i VOTE VERMIN SUPREME.

This is where we're at huh?

This is their brain on capitalism

I wish more intellectuals had their "brain on capitalism".

It is dismaying to find out how many American academicians take Marxism seriously - unless they stem from countries like Cuba that had the misfortune to actually let Marxist ideas rule them. It is mental fentanyl for certain kind of collectivist mind.

Give me Hayek and Buckley instead.

Which ideas constitute Marxism?

In theory? The most obvious is labor theory of value, plus false consciousness and the division of the society into exploitative class and exploited class.

In practice? For example, nationalization of businesses and collectivization in rural areas, including suppression of "kulaks".

It's possible to criticize one thing without endorsing another. Your comment reads like a response to someone criticizing what the current US administration is doing by saying "yeah but the Democrats..."

Binary thinking is analogous to quantizing an LLM to 2 bits (worse, actually). You're not going to get good results.

Most countries that tried experimenting with various systems settled on a combination of a relatively free market with a welfare system supported by taxation of the resulting economic surplus. Which indicates that this is what the population at large finds most acceptable.

do you expect that the problems walmart solves are easy? or do you think that the government could do it cheaper if they were in charge?

edit: or maybe the communities served by walmart should build their own rain ponchos and bananas locally.

Yes walmart is so cost effective huh? https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2025/12/18/how-w...

if walmart unfairly used its monopolistic position to steal from consumers, then of course i support serving justice.

is the point of this conversation just to proclaim you don't like some guys? what is your claim here? what action do you desire the collective to take? what is the rule that society should follow?

why do you expect that rule to lead to a more prosperous, thriving society?

What is cheaper?

A) The government building an entire logistical supply and warehousing chain across the country for groceries to support food welfare. Cold food, meat, spoilage & waste, a bunch of federal jobs.

B) The government gives citizens a bit of money, which they then spend at existing warehouses (with existing logistical supply chains) to buy food. Some existing warehouses will accumulate larger shares of this money, as it has more customers.

The existing warehouses in example B are called grocery stores, like Walmart.

The military is able to provide groceries nearly 20-50% cheaper than every private retailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQOXdtPBGXI

Seems like the it IS cheaper for the government to do it, odd how much better prices can be when you don't have to worry about making sure the fat cats stay fat.

You can both be right. Walmart is a valuable corporation; there are useful idiots who choose not to see that. It’s also a profitable one, which means it doesn’t need subsidies; another set of useful idiots can’t seem to see that.

> Yes and do billion dollar corporations really need that much government subsidies? Turns out yes they do, but sure enjoy your plastic trinkets from China I guess. Hopefully you thank a tax payer that pays for the welfare and medicaid of those Walmart workers, and the local town for cheaper property taxes and utility rates at Walmart.

This is not the case.

Walmart doesn't have the lowest prices because they are efficient, yes conventional wisdom might dictate that but you are forgetting wholesalers exist from which conventional retailers buy from and the margin definitely tilts towards walmart but there was a time where they could easily compete against walmart and set their prices.

Now what's happening is that walmart has these special deals (in this case with pepsi) where pepsi would literally surveil all marts and see which is selling cheaper than walmart (FoodLion did that) and then what Pepsi did was cut off all the promotional money of FoodLion and increase their wholesaler prices.

Is this legal? Hell no. It's all completely illegal but the govt. stopped enforcing the law

Then when it was released by FTC, the whole document was almost redacted and Trump signed an executive order essentially trying to stop it from going out but some journalists dug/pressured for its release.

So walmart isn't the base because they are price competitive, hell-no. It's because they set the floor & have special deals with other companies to maintain that floor artificially.

Which actually leads to small retailers/chains shutting down because they can't compete on price and this essentially leads to a monopoly of walmart where it can dictate prices & increase them and the people are forced to STILL go to them.

And all of this while being immensely govt subsidized as you say too while paying their employees peanuts.

Actually Walmart when it was launched in germany was sued quite a lot for such practices that iirc they had to take an exit. No country wants a walmart because they know that they might use their american profits (which we discovered how come from shady practices themselves) and then use it to run marts at losses until the competition dies which is still immensely bad long term for the average consumer of whole world but particularly the americans in my opinion as all other govts are more protective of such industries for this good reason and walmart fails to measure up to those standards in other countries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odhVF_xLIQA : We Uncovered the Scheme Keeping Grocery Prices High [More Perfect Union]

A lot of my points were heavily influenced by this video so I would recommend you to watch it to help understand more as well about what I am talking.

The deception of walmart actually fools a lot of people but the economical margin is actually quite low. It's the artifical floor that they set which gets unnoticed by many and this is why other retailers aren't able to compete, all of which is highly illegal but once again, the govt. stopped enforcing this law.

Walmart is an insanely profitable business that pays most of its employees well under a living wage.

Maybe we should have a structure in place that taxes companies based on how many benefits their employees claim, say five times the total amount of money claimed.

It's funny that you put it that way, b/c I have definitely spent more money on art (not even 'fine' art) that I have at Walmart over the years.

In Ireland?

I think what you think this says about you is not what it actually says about you.

You're telling me there's more to life than being a consumer?

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