Why Do WE Hate Walmart?

I don’t want to lose my choices!

I like to write, comment, argue, talk.  That being said, I almost just put the article below up without any comment.  It is important to this post and, I think, important to you – as a consumer.

Walmart being discriminated against?

The main idea here is simple:  big business (ie. Walmart) is being discriminated against and people are liking it.  Now, I see a lot wrong with this.  I am told I am smart; I am told I think ahead; I am told…well, a lot of things.  But here, what I see is the tip of an iceberg.  These cities are, in essence, saying that Walmart (the minority) should pay more money to people working for them than all the smaller stored (the majority).  Now, it seems to me that we had this war earlier with women, African Americans, Hispanics, and all other types of minorities.  The fighting was not nice and the majorities realized that, in America, the minorities needed to be recognized and treated “equally”.  But, we are not doing that here.  We telling the cities:

“Hey!  It’s okay.  Make Walmart raise its prices so that they are as expensive as the hardware store down the street.  We don’t mind giving even more of our money over to grocery bills and medicines and other commodities.  It’s okay.  It’s better that the little guys (ie. millions of stores) can keep their stuff marked up enough to stay in business. ”

Now, I know that last line sounds good.  I don’t want the little guys to have to go out of business.  But, here’s the thing:  they don’t have to.  All we have to do as consumers is go there, at least sometimes, and buy their stuff.  I do it.  I go to my local grocery store off and on; I buy hardware at another store when it is okay for my budget; I get my meds at CVS.

But what this legislation is saying is that YOU will no longer have this option because Walmart’s prices are going to be as high or higher than these small stores.

I say, “Don’t take away my choices!”

What do you say?

Namaste,

Scott

Walmart, What?!

I found this article the other day.  I can’t even remember now how I found it.

http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/get_it_together_walmart/get_it_together.html

After finishing it, well, that’s a lie – just a few pictures into it, I began to see that the person writing this article had some issues.  By the time I looked through all 100+ pictures he had collected of this “trashy” Walmart,  I could only shake my head and think, “You are either missing something upstairs or you have a tremendous grudge against Sam’s clan.

I am not going to go into long, tedious details about the pictures that this person found so utterly “trashy” that he would spend page after page on them.  It had to take a small fortune in time to simply down load and then comment on them.  Have you looked at, at least, the first dozen or so?  Do you see my point?

These pictures show nothing!  I mean, my driveway gets dirtier than a lot of these pictures of the outside of the building.  A cup?  A small, smashed food container?  OMG!  Call the police!  This is indescribably terrible!  A travesty.  Actually, the travesty is that I, actually, spent nearly 1/2 an hour looking through all this.  I even did most of it twice, trying to figure out what the problem was.

I figured, at first, that it must be the inside of the place that looks bad.  So, I continued on.  The inside of that Walmart is nice enough that I would be happy to shop in there.  There was one picture of a display that had a box, cut in half, lying on top of it.  Wow…that’s…horrible.

I mean, really, can’t you do better than that?!  Then the author went to two more stores and took pictures of the same thing!  It was a waste of time.  If you were a Walmart inspection team, yes, you would write these things up.  You would, as part of the Walmart force, tell the store to clean up the toothpick on aisle 7 or whatever.  But, to come in from the outside, take over 100 pictures of 3 stores and proclaim them to be totally unfit as a store?  Get real!

If this article really wanted to make an impression, then he needed to come back 2-3 weeks later and see if those same things were STILL there!  Now, that would be different.  As it is, he got thrown out of the last store for taking “pictures of the women,” at least, that’s what he was reported for.

I hate to tell him, but, since 9-11, it is pretty much illegal to take pictures inside of any store or mall.  They are afraid of terrorists taking pictures to get a layout of the place, I believe.  So, his entire effort was not only ridiculous, but the police could have confiscated his camera had they really chosen to do so.

How do you feel about the cleanliness in a store?

Do the customers have any responsibility here?

Namaste,

Scott