To me, regardless of the truth, being "penny-pinching" given Amazon's razor thin margins seems like a good trait for the CEO.
I'm making a point to shop locally now. I've already seen what supporting Walmart has done to our country.
Have you ever shopped there? Or do you just repeat what you read all the time? Wall mart typically only exists in rural poor areas, and I doubt a drive-by HN commenter has any sense of proportion on the real issues at play. Wall-mart migh mean more competition for mom & pop stores, but they also bring reliable and affordable access to otherwise unaffordable or trans-port prohibitive goods and services to people that don't have the wallet or the access to shop at whole foods or a boutique coffee shop that charges $5/cup. The reality is that even for successful stores such as these, the owners are absent, the employees make non-living wages (corrected for rent), and the extant competitors are out of business or severely harmed. Think of all the gentrification in the mission in the past 15 years...all of those (poor) people are more fucked by hipsters and their fancy shit than anyone ever was by Walmart.
Hell, just considering regular office workers, where are you going to go to pick up new diapers in the middle of the night when your kid wakes you up screaming, following a logistics failure? Without Walmarts, the only realistic option for late-night shopping is the local 7-11.
Here in Canada, Walmart is pretty much in every city, regardless of income. The only place Walmarts don't exist is in areas where the population is too sparse, or rent is too high (e.g. downtown Toronto).
I find it hard to believe Walmart is only "in rural poor areas", unless their position is radically different in the States.
In reality, it's about the same as you describe in Canada. They're not opening stores in dinky towns of 500 people, and they're not buying expensive premium real estate, but they're almost every where between those extremes.
Living in Seattle, it is a half-hour drive to the nearest Walmart (there isn't one in Seattle, you have to go to Renton to find one.) Living in Philadelphia it was about the same. Back at my parents home, deep in central PA (aka, "Pennsyltuckey"), there were three Walmarts within 15 minutes. Medium/large sized rural towns like York PA can get two or more Walmarts. However even when a town starts to get as large as Harrisburg, access to Walmarts starts dropping.
If Walmarts were common in cities, then urban food deserts would not be a thing in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
Walmarts don't exist in places where property values are high, as a means of keeping costs low.
> If Walmarts were common in cities, then urban food deserts would not be a thing in the US
Well, no; even if they had no effect on other existing businesses, regular Walmarts would have no effect on food deserts, as they don't carry fresh food. Super Walmarts do, but those are even bigger stores, and even less likely anywhere with significant real estate costs.
But, even if we consider big box food store could well -- through competitive pressure on already marginal smaller stores -- increase the average distance/time for urban residents to reach affordable, healthy food.
Property value is definitely why Walmart (particularly Super Walmarts) doesn't move into cities. Their deal is large sprawling buildings with even larger sprawling parking lots, that isn't the sort of thing that you stick into a city. They don't seem keen on trying the "multilevel, compact, with a parking garage" or "underground complex" sort of form factor that other stores successfully employ inside of cities. I suspect this is because their margins are too tight for even that (and that form factor probably discourages buying in the sort of volume that their preferred store design encourages).
One way or the other, the Walmart:people ratio seems to be far lower in cities than in towns and suburbs. If Seattle had the same Walmart density as York PA, it would have over 30 Walmarts. Walmarts are practically the Starbucks of small-town America. (Briefly sampling a few towns in PA, it seems like for ever Walmart you can expect about two Starbucks. That's actually way fewer Starbucks than I expected, I suspect Google Maps isn't being honest here...)
They tried to put a Walmart downtown a few years ago ~2008, and they are currently trying to get approval for a Walmart in a different location that's would be on the edge of the 'official' boundaries of the downtown core.
Is it ok for me to criticise now?
They import and sell cheap shit designed to break and be replaced and disguise it as value by citing low prices.
This is just absolutely, unequivocally not true, unless your definition of "rural" and "poor" includes urban centers of cities with tens of thousands of citizens with median incomes ranging from impoverished to affluent, especially in the south.
Walmart comes in and destroys the mom&pop operations who are less pricey than "whole foods or a boutique coffee shop that charge $5/cup" but can't compete with the cheap, shabby crap made by wage-slaves in third-world sweatshops that Walmart brings in.
Your post is very San Francisco-centric. I don't think you understand or have seen what it's like to live elsewhere. "Hipsters" aren't a "problem" anywhere else I've been, anyway.
This is factually wrong. Walmart (note the spelling) follows suburbs and population centers. They may have been mostly rural one or two decades ago, but they are now most likely to be found near an intersection of freeways within 10 miles of a downtown. See http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4330486 for a map.
As for the rest of your screed... it's possible to be down on Walmart AND Whole Foods at the same time.
I have a question for you: how can you be actively evasive -- care to demonstrate by not actually answering my question? ;)
As to your last point, I am not proving witty enough to abide by your request in an amusing manner, so I will simply address your question: it is completely possible to avoid assigning blame with the active. A classic example would be, "They say...". Or compare the active "Someone made a mistake" with the passive "Mistakes were made by Steve."
Jeff Bezos is the CEO of Amazon, not walmart.
Given people better prices/more choices? I really don't get this anti-walmart sentiment everywhere.
Also, those better prices are due to the fact that Walmart's buying power means that they tell the supplier how much they will pay for the item, and leave it to the supplier to figure out how they can manufacture it and still make a profit. You can imagine the corners the supplier needs to cut to make that happen.
Source: http://localfirstaz.com/aassets-lfaz/10-shift/pie-chart-econ...
Besides what do I care if my dollar goes to some stranger down the street, in another state, or in another country? They are all human beings I don't know, and I don't particularly care about the welfare of any more than the other.
>Also, those better prices are due to the fact that Walmart's buying power means that they tell the supplier how much they will pay for the item, and leave it to the supplier to figure out how they can manufacture it and still make a profit. You can imagine the corners the supplier needs to cut to make that happen.
A pressure to be more efficient and decrease prices is a good thing. They would try to cut corners anyways, and lower prices might arguably make up for it.
What cooperation, exactly? Malaysian children being forced (perhaps not in the physical sense, but certainly in the economic sense) to work 13 hours/day for less than 1 USD so that Target can sell Kathy Lee Gifford's branded sweaters for $15? Is that really the world you want to live in? There is no cooperation here, it is exploitation pure and simple.
> [W]hat do I care if my dollar goes to some stranger down the street
Well, first of all, he lives in your neighborhood. If he is economically secure, it is less likely he will break into your house and steal your TV.
> A pressure to be more efficient and decrease prices is a good thing. They would try to cut corners anyways, and lower prices might arguably make up for it.
Great! So we have shoddily constructed, shitty products that are not meant to last more than a few months anyway, but that we believe are cheaper because the marketing machine told us that we saved 47 cents on the purchase of $foo_widget?
Real society has real people in it, not robotic automata that always act perfectly economically rationally and conform to some sort of capitalist fantasy.
And you think the worker would be better off if you didn't buy it? No they'd just be unemployed or employed at a worse job. I'm all for spreading the wealth generated by the economy more fairly, but simply removing trade doesn't actually make anyone better off.
>Well, first of all, he lives in your neighborhood. If he is economically secure, it is less likely he will break into your house and steal your TV.
The money you lose by buying more expensive local products, plus the the probability that the small amount of your money that actually goes to a local worker will make him less likely to rob, times the probability that he would rob your house specifically...
Even with absurd estimates of how likely that is, it's still cheaper just to spend the money you save on insurance than what you would gain from slightly reducing the risk of robbery.
>Great! So we have shoddily constructed, shitty products that are not meant to last more than a few months anyway, but that we believe are cheaper because the marketing machine told us that we saved 47 cents on the purchase of $foo_widget?
What are you referring to that has been reduced in quality so much it actually costs more in the long run (especially things where this is done without the consumer's knowledge or choice to buy higher quality elsewhere.)? And can you actually attribute that to Walmart specifically, and it wouldn't have happened anyways? Or even just people making irrational purchasing decisions or just having a high time preference?
As a matter of fact, I do. The world is littered with suffering due to Western economic expansion (exploitation). For evidence, see the Banana Republics [0] generated in Latin America due to large fruit producers invading under the banner of "this is better for you." Globalization has an extraordinary human cost.
> The money you lose by buying more expensive local products, plus the the probability that the small amount of your money that actually goes to a local worker will make him less likely to rob, times the probability that he would rob your house specifically...
> Even with absurd estimates of how likely that is, it's still cheaper just to spend the money you save on insurance than what you would gain from slightly reducing the risk of robbery.
Did you even look at the artifact that I submitted? 73% of the money you spend locally stays in the community, whereas 43% stays in the community if you shop big-box. Furthermore, there is more than one "guy down the street." If everyone in your neighborhood is now suddenly suffering due to money leaving the community, what does that do to your probability model?
> What are you referring to that has been reduced in quality so much it actually costs more in the long run (especially things where this is done without the consumer's knowledge or choice to buy higher quality elsewhere.)? And can you actually attribute that to Walmart specifically, and it wouldn't have happened anyways? Or even just people making irrational purchasing decisions or just having a high time preference?
Have you been to a Walmart/Kmart/Target lately? What product have you picked up there recently and thought, "Yeah, this should hold up for a while, thank goodness I saved $2.18 on it!"
Additionally, if you have a high time preference, you should definitely not shop at Walmart. Walmart is responding to competitive pressure by "implementing deep cuts in labor hours at the company’s US stores, setting in motion a "vicious circle" of understaffing, operational miscues, and lost sales that is diminishing the company’s long-term value." [1]
I don't know about you, but wandering around a 100k square foot building with nobody to help in sight sounds like a serious waste of time to me.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic [1] http://makingchangeatwalmart.org/files/2011/10/The-High-Pric...