Frontline: Is Walmart good for America?

Matt:
[quote=PGanguly]Theoretically, this business plan has several inherent effects...[/quote]My cited conditions were based on the theoretical assumption that people will always try to find the lowest price on a given product.

Yeah Nos, I didn't think you were that much of a dirt-worshipping hippie either. I just had to cover all the bases.

Also, Mara and µ, the issue of wal mart developing on non-commercial land is this:

The land, in use as a park makes the city (or town) no tax money.

That same land, with a Wal-Mart on it, makes god-only-knows how much tax money for the town. Further, once the thing's built, there's really only going to be a handful of people who utterly refuse to go there, largely because, hey, it's right there, and their stuff's cheap. Then the conditions in my previous post take over.

The problem with the argument about them "JUST" doing what businesses do—and that is, make money—is that it reveals just how thoroughly brainwashed and complacent so many consumers have become. There's more to a community than how much tax money a property can bring in. You wanna se people go not a little bit sociopathic? Put them in an environment where too many natural things like farmland, trees, animals and an occasional view of the horizon are completely removed. Sorry, Paul, but your analysis of what's important is a little narrow and naive.

There used to be something called corporate ethics and community relations, but those things seem to have become factored out of the way many large companies do business these days. The bottom line has become so important, that the ethics of corporate and community relations just don't matter anymore.

Businesses now run like a recombinant mystery meat McRib sandwich tastes.

By this I mean they take all the good stuff out of the original, they slice and dice, mash, modify and quantify what they think the original should be. Then they add back in some rather false ingredients to make you think that the "New and Improved" thing is just as good as the original.

Keep following me here...

McDonalds does this with the McRib by removing bones, gristle, flavor and texture, then they try to replicate it by adding texturizers and flavoring agents. These things get crapped out of tubes onto an assembly line, and they're run through machines to make them kind of look like a slab of ribs. If you've never had a REAL rib sandwich, or if you've been eating this reprocessed crap instead of going out to a local restaurant for a real sandwich for so long, you don't know—or have forgotten— the difference, and may even be fooled into thinking that it's genuinely good.

Similarly, Wal-Mart has sliced and diced, mashed, modified and quantified the principals that Sam Walton held when he first started his stores and became successful. Now, in place of a set of real corporate culture ethics that are mindful of the community and the employees, they have replaced them with shiny commercials featuring actors playing "plain ol' down-home folks" who just love Wal-Marts low low prices, and who wax poetically about how the company has been a real boon to their community. They present a false face to consumers that purports to show they value their employees by featuring them in catalogs and adverts in place of actual, expensive, real models. They don't give a crap about whether their employees are ACTUALLY happy. These idiot employees and thier kidlets are MUCH cheaper to use. I'm sure employees who get picked to model some crappy clothes really think they're special, and that Wal-Mart just wants them to feel valuable, proud and happy. They're not. They're just placated. The reality is that these employees are NOT special. An entire store full of employees could be completely replaced in one week, with barely a noticeable hiccup.

And Wal-Mart doesn't give a crap about trampling over smaller local stores, but they'll run commercials showing rarified instances where they might have helped a few of the 3,000 communities they're in, and in cleverly crafted commercials attempt to make consumers think, that these couple examples is evidence enough of the way they behave everywhere. It simply IS NOT true. But, for many people, if they see the commercial 100 times in the course of a month, they start believing it.

I call bu||$h!t on the whole mess.

See, the thing is, real people— all of us —will almost always prefer the real thing over an imitation, given enough time and thought to make a proper decision. People like real corporate and community ethics, not just a codified set of behaviors that make it appear as if those principles exist, where they really don't.

"Please, just step back behind the rope and don't scrutinize us too carefully. You don't need to see what we're doing nor how we do it."

Companies like Wal-Mart are literally BEGGING for consumers to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Just watch the pretty moving lights on the TV and stare at happy sappy print ads and do what they say and buy the line of fluff they're floating your way.

"It's for your own good, dammit, because we say it is, because we love you, and we would never deceive you about our motives!"

I'm not sure what you meant about what my analysis was about the importance of running a business. I just believe that on the scale of a company the size of wal-mart, they will always err on the side of profit. That includes spending as little as possible, such as in the case of choosing a location upon which to build.

In reading your response, I'm very much in agreement about Wal-Mart wanting consumers to turn a blind eye to their business practices, and continue to patronize them without consideration.

I do agree certainly Wal-Mart is more a remnant of a robber baron era, market-monopolizing behemoth of a company that ultimately people began to realize the inherent 'evil' in offering their patronage to. The difference though is that they do not provide a commodity in and of itself, thus there is no real market need for them. Although they do teeter on a fine line

I predict that within 10 to 12 or so years, wal mart will go the way of K-Mart, in which the inferiority of their product is exceeded by their price, due to the fact that they will likely cut corners wherever they can, begin providing mediocre customer service, and ultimately, their earnings will suffer.

It baffles me that k-mart is still in business, and I would assume that with wal-mart outdoing them at their own game, they wouldn't still be in the market. Nonetheless, I think that there's a time coming when wal-mart will sort of stretch itself too thin, in terms of their cut-throat business practices.

One of the dangers I've seen of Walmart's business model has been the rate that they have dessimated suppliers. They drive the price down, and beat the price down, and promise the world for huge volume buying--and then after supplier 'A' has tooled up and leveraged themselves to the hilt to pay for the capital equipment to automate everything to reach the price goals--Walmart will pull the plug and go with supplier 'B' because they're overseas, or cheaper, or whatever.

Walmart has killed many a company in the U.S.... or so the supplier industry whispers at night after the lights are out, and the camp counsellor isn't listening.

Hey all - it's graphicsguy, checking in for the first time in months.... I see the new photography tutorials, new look, new bells & whistles, looking great...

Same old political debates, though. Kind of a turn off, but whatever... I almost skipped it - and I'm sure some of you wish I did! - but, for the first time, ( I think ) My buddy Malibu and I are on the same side of this one! Wal Mart is crap. It's good for low-income families to provide employment when there is no other option (the pay is too low, but it's work, they do very crooked things in their "Human Resources" department), but that's about it.

Anyone who supports Wal-Mart hasn't directly been affected by their business ethics, or the lack thereof. Wal-Mart-ology has dessimated independently owned small businesses in small towns throughout rural America as fast as the great depression, in my opinion.

I've seen it first hand. My father's photography studio went under when the invention of the $2.99 portrait came out. But it's more than that - it's the boarding up of windows of entire downtown business districts that worries me. Everytown, USA used to have thriving downtown business districts with flavor, variety, and promise. Now, they're non-existent, unless they're of the rare variety that has politically strong-armed Wal-Marts out (Fort Collins, Colorado - to name one). Ahh, the good ol' days...

I've done my part to vote with my wallet. I haven't shopped at a Wal-Mart for over 3 years. Hell, the last one I went into (for a shower curtain at 11pm) was so dirty and full of crack-whores that I walked out, anyway. Good riddance.

thanks for reading my rant.

Graphicsguy