So. Eeevil Globalcorp, Wal*Mart...

I'm reading "Good to Great". And it briefly touches on Wal*Mart. (I guess it was featured in "Built to Last", an earlier book.

Everyone loves to look down on them as an eeeevil Corporate Monstrosity. But you know how they started? In 1945. As a single, small town dime-store in the South. Then, for 25 years--a quarter of a century--Sam Walton worked and sweated and risked, until 1970. By 1970, Mr. Walton had managed to build a vast corporate empire, consisting of...38 stores--mostly in the Southern United States.

So anyone who tries to tell you how evil Wal*Mart is is really trying to tell you how evil hard work, good business sense, and patience is.

Darth Vader started out as a harmless little kid.
Hitler used to be an artist.
Osama Bin Laden began his career as a valuable ally against the Soviets.
Hillary Clinton was once a reasonably hot college girl.

Doesn't excuse everything they've done since then.

Don't tell me you wouldn't hit it at least once.

^^ But to be fair, Hitler's artistic compositions did lack a certain je ne sais quoi.

Once Sam died though, his "Made in the USA" down home quality company went to pot and the company started selling out to dirt cheap labor and engaging in ruthless practices. I'm not an anti-Corporate guy, and Wal*Mart as a business doesn't make me angry or anything, but let's call Wal*Mart what it is, and it's definitely not what Sam Walton created it to be. His kids are brutal in how they run that business. They're certainly not in the same ethical league as Sam Walton when it comes to business practices.


J.

My local Wal*Mart is a dirty, cramped, bazaar for white trash and the terminally welfared.

They supply sub-par goods with sub-par service. Sure, that second-rate copy of Turner & Hooch is only 1/2 ¢, but they gouge you on their suspect electronics from Kyrgyzstan and mystery goods of every sort.

But I have enough money to be discriminating, so I take my business to Target.

The people talk about walmart's bulk buying and how other stores can't compete, but he was once much smaller than them and they fiddled while rome burned. They were not willing to compete until it was too late for them. Then they whine about how unfair wal-mart is.

Yes, and their financing schemes which prey on all the globalization losers drive hundreds of thousands even deeper into debt. Because hooray, next year we'll easily be able to afford all the crap we don't need but the Jones' have too!

Yeah, I'm with you on this.

I own a very little bit of Walmart stock, so I'm glad to see them doing well. On the other hand, it concerns me very much that they rely so heavily on foreign imports, as well as some of their other business practices.

I live fifteen miles from a community which gave Walmart a tax abatement for 5 years, and at the end of those five years, it closed and demolished that location then moved 150 hundred yards into a new community and a new tax abatement. I suppose that there's some fault to be placed upon the people who didn't have enough forethought to put Walmart on the hook for more time than the length of the abatement. On the other hand, it says something about the character of the company as well.

(As I understand it, the abatement thing is something that Walmart's done on more than one occasion).

I don't have a problem with anyone turning a profit. On the other hand, don't blow sunshine up our asses when you come to town. Walmart isn't everyone's best friend, community-minded or caring. I hate that, "we're Walmart and we're here to serve and support you" shit almost as much as I hate the unwashed, patchouli-soaked layabouts who march with picket signs every time the company breaks ground.

Interestingly, both sides are right but they're not even discussing the same thing, really. Yes. Hard work and free enterprise made WalMarts(tm). Yes. Greed turned it into just another cut-throat multinatioinal.

I think Volpone missed the point in his first post. He seems to be trying to say they're still the little family-owned shop.

Nope.

The Wal-Mart by us is huge, they welcome RVs camping in the parking lot, it's clean and even has a McDonald's!

My biggest complaint is despite ample room most every aisle is barely two carts wide. After that it's the frequency of the shelf price not being the same as the checkout line price.

Indeed. I've actually amassed assets enough to likely qualify for a Target Credit Card.

^ And not nearly enough service people. Despite having 20 checkout lines, only 4-5 are open at once. Even the self-service checkout lines are sometimes closed. I imagine they won't even pay the one person to monitor the 4 self-serve lanes.

Now THAT's bad.

And they tend to take returned, defective electronics and return them to floor stock, in violation of the law. And there was that locking employees in for unpaid overtime. And so on.

Wal-Mart is no longer the company founded by Sam Walton.

Wal*Mart should expand, and build low cost apartments on top of their stores. That way, you would have customers who could just go downstairs and buy their stuff 24 hours a day.

I dunno why Wal*Mart has not thought of this yet. They already have a pharmacy, and awhile ago, they wanted to put doctors in their stores. (Whatever became of that?) All they would need is a bank and a movie theater, and people would never even have to leave their store!

C'mon now, Dicky has everything he needs in the basement. Why tempt him?

Sub-par goods? If you don't buy the store brand, aren't they all mostly the same as you'd get from Target, Meijer, or K-Mart?

You're right about the service, though. It's basically nonexistent. Walmart wants to hire employees that are competent enough to place goods on the shelves, count money correctly, and not much else. And they usually do a good job of that.

No, I've met Sam Walton and his kids take after him. That folksy down-home charm was all an act. It was there to be the public face of Wal*Mart and to grow the business, and it was very effective. But, it wasn't him.

He was as ruthless and cut throat as they come.

Well shit. It's too bad that, back in the early '90s when Wal*Mart switched away from American made products, they were allowed to round up people at gunpoint, herd them into the stores, and force them to buy stuff.

C'mon Chris. Wal*Mart ditched there American-made model for one reason and one reason alone: good customer service. They decided their customers didn't really give a shit whether what they were buying was made in America or China as long as the price was low. And they were apparently right. Same with the cluttered aisles and other factors. You think that is because the people running Wal*Mart can't figure out how to build a store!? They build their stores that way because that is what a lot of their customers want.

Wal*Mart is in the position it is because they keep their customers happy and they keep costs low. Wal*Mart raked in $150 billion dollars in profit in 2000. You know what the office of their corporate headquarters looks like? A warehouse. Furnished with discarded lawn furniture.

Wal*Mart is also a huge corporate giver. I don't have the numbers on me, but every year they give away huge amounts of money to charity--I think on par with that other evil eevil businessman, Bill Gates. And while Al Gore fights Global Warming (tm) by jetting around the world in his coal-powered rocket chair and living in a mansion the size of Rhode Island, Wal*Mart is actually driving initiatives to cut greenhouse gases.

Wal*Mart is good. Hell, Wal*Mart is great.

^ I didn't say I was boycotting them. I'm a sucker for cheap goods and I don't really need all that much help to find things (most of the time). But I do want to be able to pay for my stuff and get the heck out of there.

Hence my laughter.

No, Wal*Mart is driving initiatives to cut their own electricity costs, and claming they're doing it out of some concern for the environment.

Which is always the true motivation for such changes, something eco-warriors should've embraced long ago.

Ah. So helping the environment is only noble if it inconveniences you.

Got it.

As Bock has already said, I don't think anyone is disputing that. That doesn't change the fact that supporting this practice on such a large scale was and is short-sighted and has begun to hurt the economy.

Of course they don't do it because individual persons there are evil. That's the whole point about corporate evil: It works because everyone just serves a system in their own tiny context, and nobody has to or in fact can take responsibility for the whole process.

Really? Wow.

I should have figured, since everything I know about Sam Walton comes from my training classes when I worked at Wal*Mart, but hey, I was young..er.



J.

What the fuck are you talking about?

I don't care where it comes from, so long as it meets my standards of quality. Wal*Mart doesn't.

What's so evil about providing people with the products they need at prices they can afford?

Exactly! There was a time when I liked to shop at WalMart. Good prices, good selection, quality merchandise, and their customer service couldn't be beat. Sam was alive back then.

Since his passing, WalMart has become the epitomy of suck.