Are You Tired of Wal-Mart?-Manly Poll for Americans

.454 will make a black bear sit down and be quiet.

The corporation is too cheap to buy checkout lane dividers for every single Wal Mart I went to in the four months I spent in Louisiana.

Then again, there were never more than three outta the twenty lanes open at any given time, no matter the traffic flow anyway.

Snark aside, the lack of any basic kind of fucks to give from the employees that can't be assed to look up something on the computer to the Walton brats and/or CEOs that only care about profit will kill this company.

In thirty years, they'll be the Radio Shack of big box retailers.

I like it. You just have to get there before the WICers wake up.

Every Friday is Black Friday at WalMart...

It will certainly work with me. You don't even have to shoot it.

Time will tell. But Wal*Mart succeeds because it delivers what paying customers want, and as long as it focuses on that, it will probably keep succeeding.

That was in response to Dinner, not to you.

I think my response to you got eaten. In any event, it boiled down to this: if Wal*Mart is the only employer in your town, either you work out some agreeable wage with them, or you look for a job in another town. People leave small towns to look for opportunities all the time.

And it doesn't take Wal*Mart to make a monopoly. I lived in a small town that had one small (non-chain) grocery store, and it was what you'd expect: small selection and high prices. At least Wal*Mart fixes those issues...

Okay, figured you'd say the person should move. does that mean we don't have a right to live where we want to live? As for the praise you extend to Walmart pricing, keep in mind that's achieved by virtue of tax payer subsidies. I dn't consider that a good thing.

What's preventing you from living where you want and working elsewhere? I do that.

I want to live in a beach house on Maui. Pony up some cash.

What taxpayer subsidies?

No problem, see bellow.

We've been through this story often enough, not sure how you've managed to miss it. I'll let Barry Ritholtz do the heavy lifting on this:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-11-13/how-mcdonald-s-and-wal-mart-became-welfare-queens

Long story short, Walmart employees don't starve on starvation wages due to food stamps. That's right, Walmart's business model depends on food stamps supplementing the meager wages they pay. And no, the workers can't simply look elsewhere. If that were so, Walmart would have no employees.

A right? No. There is no such thing as "the right to live where you want," especially in a context that means "and a promise that you will have the services, jobs, living standard, and other such advantages that you want." Life doesn't work that way anywhere, let alone in libertarianism.

Oh. This again.

Then the workers are being subsidized, not Wal*Mart. And since Wal*Mart doesn't pay below minimum wage, you'd have to say that any business hiring workers for minimum wage is getting a "subsidy."

There are lots of places to work around here, but Wal*Mart still has employees.

And if they starve, you don't much care, right?
The problem with "libertarianism" is that it doesn't give a damn about outcomes.

That's right. The Walmart business model depends on a tax payer subsidized labor force. So we agree on this, but apparently only one of us sees a problem?

If they starve it's their own doing. You shouldn't be guaranteed ANYTHING in life other than an opportunity to compete. If you're an adult working in retail you've earned your lot in life. I worked at Marshall's when I was 16. That's what these kinds of jobs are for. Stop asking others to pay for other people's lack of motivation.

So yeah, you don't care.
Poverty is not solely the result of a lack of motivation, and if you remove the social safety net, as you people would like, it would become a whole lot worse.

I don't know. There are a lot of women who were doing everything right, got married, had children, stayed at home to watch the kids because day care costs so damn much, yet huddy decided to dump her for his secretary and now she suddenly has to find a job after years of being a house wife.

Then you have people who worked in a factory and made a decent wage but the factory closed and now they have to take what they can get which just might mean retail.

In the real world shit happens and it isn't like the fantasy you have in your head.

And, of course, crime would skyrocket because desperate people will do desperate things. Having a safety net isn't just the morally right thing to do but it is also cheaper than paying the average of $90,000 per year to keep a single person in prison. TLS is penny wise but pound foolish as is often the case with overly emotional ideologues. They miss the big picture.

Walmart loves to strong arm sales tax give aways (meaning Walmart collects the tax from customers but gets to keep it)from communities and frankly that sort of favoritism should be outlawed. Then there are the property tax wavers and, of course, the subsidies for their work force in the form of benefits. Oh, and stop pretending that is only a benefit for workers because the company directly benefits in the form of paying workers lower wages.

Black bears aren't too tough, but brown/grizzly are .454 ready that's for sure!

I care only to a point. If someone is legitimately ddisabled or a child, they should be taken care of. If not, they're on their own.

Unless they're the child or disabled family member of the people you despise.

What is legitimately disabled? Can we get a definition on that one?

What I want to know is who are all the schlubs who didn't vote for "F*ck You Dayton!!"?

No. Not correct at all. I just ask that those who are able to do their part, do their part. I don't see why this would be controversial.

Possessing a non-elective physical or mental infirmity such that there is no reasonable way to perform labor in order to provide for oneself.

Well, they're not fat-assed Springer/Orca Winfrey watchers. Let's start with that.

Except that isn't even remotely your position. Stop being dishonest.

Can't agree with that. And I bet you couldn't, either, if you thought about what it implies.

I'm hardly the thoroughgoing libertarian that many here are, but I do consider myself, in general, a libertarian. Nevertheless, I think that a society ought to provide its people with more than "the opportunity to compete." I think it should also provide the opportunity to do so in a just and equitable manner, for example, which is more than merely "the opportunity to compete." (To give an illustration from sports, you could tie cement blocks to the backs of all the participants in a race, save one, and they would still all have "the opportunity to compete." But not the opportunity to do so in a just and equitable manner.)

Once you have grasped that principle, you see that simplistic libertarianism is too simplistic to be workable. It is nothing more than the domination of the weak by the strong, of the poor by the rich, and of the unfortunate by the lucky few. Libertarianism, to be a workable philosophy, has to be much more carefully worked out than that, in the same way that any rational philosophy has to be more than a bumper sticker.

Okay, then exactly what IS my position? You know, since you know so much.