Walmart - Good or Bad? (live in, areas, ghetto)

[Chi-town Native]

Originally Posted by nana053

I certainly do not hold middle and low income people in contempt. I grew up poor. I am pretty middle class now although not lower income anymore. I understand that people want low prices. The problem is the big picture though.

Many large corporations are anti-union and that does include Target and unfortunately has gotten worse with time. It still does not have the power Walmart has over its suppliers.

Bingo. It's all about the power Wal-Mart has over its supply chain.

It is the current reincarnation of Standard Oil as far as a business model goes, with the added weapon of keeping its dirty work offshored where American journalists have a hard time exposing it.

[MannheimMadman]

All I know is the one on Touhy and Lehigh contains the absolute worst of humanity. I had the great misfortune of shopping there yesterday, all because my fiancee needed to print photos on the spot, which, apparently, Target does not do.

In addition to being severely understaffed, when the cashier in my line was closing down and telling people to move over to another line, some beotch near the back yelled back to the cashier, "I don't care, b**ch. I'm staying."

I weep for the future.

[nana053]

Originally Posted by MannheimMadman

I had the great misfortune of shopping there yesterday, all because my fiancee needed to print photos on the spot, which, apparently, Target does not do.

Try Walgreen's pharmacy. Call ahead and see if they have the facilities. My local one here has an instant photo print that you do yourself. I am not sure if the Chicago area ones do that.

[cubssoxfan]

Anyone see Ted Koppel's CNN special on China a few years ago?
Worker at a Briggs & Stratton plant in MO lost her job because it went to China.
She is against Chinese products. She shops at Wal-Mart. Koppel points out a majority of goods she purchases at WalMart is Chinese. She has brain freeze because she wants low prices but she wants to avoid buying Chinese products. Koppel asks if America is ready for inflation that would occur if WalMart replaced chinese sourced product with American sourced product.
It is a double edged sword. Have cheap goods and stretch your buying power or have more expensive goods and erode your buying power. But the more expensive goods way may give you more buying or earning power due to lower unemployment.
It boils down to open market vs. closed market economic argument.

[Chi-town Native]

Originally Posted by cubssoxfan

Koppel asks if America is ready for inflation that would occur if WalMart replaced chinese sourced product with American sourced product.
It is a double edged sword. Have cheap goods and stretch your buying power or have more expensive goods and erode your buying power. But the more expensive goods way may give you more buying or earning power due to lower unemployment.
It boils down to open market vs. closed market economic argument.

It's far more complex than that. The key issue are what economists call "externalities" - the hidden costs in producing these goods that doesn't get covered by the purchase price.

Pollution in China is an obvious externality, and it's not something to simply wave aside as "stupid tree huggers."

China has polluted their rivers to the point they can't even irrigate many farmlands with that water any more, much less drink it. You start looking at costs related to climate change & global warming and it gets ugly, real fast. Unless you're one of those folks who believe that climate scientists are all working in a conspiracy with Al Gore.

And there are other externalities to our society, like the cost to society of medicare, unemployment, etc.

The fact is that it really makes absolutely no logical sense that it should be cheaper to make a product thousands of miles from where it will be purchased than it should be to make it locally.

Transportation costs alone rebuke the "free market" concept.

No, what we're really dealing with here are Americans unwittingly supporting the "race to the bottom."

Replacing our manufacturing sector with a financial services one was the single largest boondoggle in the past 40 years. Read Kevin Phillip's "Bad Money" for more details, the fact is that a consumer-based economy dependent on Chinese junkola isn't sustainable.

'Bad Money' by Kevin Phillips - latimes.com

...Phillips doesn't hold out much hope that either party is willing to address the roots of the crisis. The GOP's faith in markets is absolute, and the religious right's blind embrace of capitalism has eliminated populist dissent from the party's internal debate. The Democrats, meanwhile, are irreparably compromised by contributions from the Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers, who are at the center of the current global meltdown.

Phillips locates that malaise in two structural factors: Over the last three decades, financial services have expanded from 11% of America's gross domestic product to a record 21%, while manufacturing has declined from 25% to 13%. The author rejects the notion that this shift simply reflects a healthy adaptation to a "post-industrial" economy. Instead, he argues that the emergence of hedge funds and ever-more exotic bundles of financial derivatives amounts to a "financialization" of the American economy that has facilitated a ruinous expansion of private, as well as public, debt. Failed energy policies -- or rather, the avoidance of any policy -- have made the United States vulnerable to what may be the coming peak in oil production, thereby further weakening the dollar, which is essentially backed by the global petroleum economy.

"My summation," Phillips writes, "is that American financial capitalism, at a pivotal period in the nation's history, cavalierly ventured a multiple gamble: first, financializing a hitherto more diversified U.S. economy; second, using massive quantities of debt and leverage to do so; third, following up a stock market bubble with an even larger housing and mortgage credit bubble; fourth, roughly quadrupling U.S. credit-market debt between 1987 and 2007, a scale of excess that historically unwinds; and fifth, consummating these events with a mixed fireworks of dishonesty, incompetence and quantitative negligence."

[ajolotl]

There are three plausible reasons I can think of: 1) if their people accept lower wages for the same work; 2) if they use various forms of free labor (slavery, prison labor, etc.) and 3) tied to (1), if they don't float their currency, which creates artificially low prices in $$.

Originally Posted by Chi-town Native

The fact is that it really makes absolutely no logical sense that it should be cheaper to make a product thousands of miles from where it will be purchased than it should be to make it locally.

[Chi-town Native]

Originally Posted by ajolotl

There are three plausible reasons I can think of: 1) if their people accept lower wages for the same work; 2) if they use various forms of free labor (slavery, prison labor, etc.) and 3) tied to (1), if they don't float their currency, which creates artificially low prices in $$.

I agree with all of those - we don't have anywhere near a fair-and-balanced playing field for those reasons.

On the other hand, the average American consumer really bears a lot of the blame as well. But this is where we have to really look at deceptive advertising/lobbying efforts as well.

[tonythetuna]

Originally Posted by MannheimMadman

All I know is the one on Touhy and Lehigh contains the absolute worst of humanity.

Lots of ghetto people from Skokie,Rogers Park, and Evanston go there.

[Drover]

Originally Posted by Chi-town Native

Supporting violators of labor and anti-trade law is not a "personal affair."

We've heard your opinions, and you clearly have no interest in actually learning anything about WalMart that isn't superficial.

Take an hour and read:

Walmart Watch

Then you might have some credibility. Otherwise, you're a broken record.

So got anything new to add? If not, you've said your piece, so adios.

I have no care in the world whether you think I have any credibility on the issue or not. I stopped caring when it became clear that a reasonable conversation on the subject without histrionics and attacks on my personal character and critical reasoning skills wasn't going to happen. You have no idea how little or how in-depth I have considered the issue because it wouldn't matter to you until I decided to agree with you. As for credibility, broken record, nothing new to add.... Pot, Kettle, shake hands.

[cubssoxfan]

Originally Posted by tonythetuna

Lots of ghetto people from Skokie,Rogers Park, and Evanston go there.

Ghetto?! These areas now have neighborhoods comparable to the "true ghetttos" on the south and west side?