Ah, the great Wal-mart debate... Personally I hate them and everything they stand for, but then again they've run damn near everything else in my area out of business, so what's a guy to do? My girlfriend just left to go there, and asked me if I needed anything. The Wal-Mart philosophy is to come into an area and underprice everybody else until they go belly up and Wal-Mart is the only game in town. Then they raise the prices higher than they ever were in the stores that they ran out of business. They don't care if it takes years to accomplish, as long as they control the entire market in the end. It's basically the Japanese business model. They lost money on EVERY SINGLE cheap TV and transistor radio that they sold here in the 70's and 80's so that they could underprice the American competition. The American consumer fell for it. So tell me class, how many TV's or radios were made in America last year?? Give up?? Exactly ZERO. The same with watches, clocks, and almost every other electronic device you can name. We have ONE machine tool company left to the best of my knowledge, that would be Prince Industries in Holland, Michigan. If anybody else is producing industrial machine tools in this country I don't know who they are. Steel mills, mostly gone. And the ones left in this part of the country are owned by the Japanese. What used to be Armco Steel has been AK steel for years. The Japanese are smart, you have to give them that. An American CEO must produce a profit NOW, or he's out of there. A Japanese CEO doesn't have to produce a profit this DECADE if he can assure the company of domination of the market in the end. And Wal-Mart has learned this lesson well. As long as Sam Walton was alive, it didn't work like that. Once he was gone, all bets were off. That's when Wal-Mart started slashing benefits for workers and doing away with full time employees in favor of more part time employees who don't have to be paid benefits. That's when they started selling things in the stores that old Sam wouldn't, like music with lyrics that he considered to be immoral and etc. A few weeks ago Wal-Mart signed an agreement with a gay and lesbian "chamber of commerce" to try and cater more to the interests of homosexuals. It's just words, but old Sam would have had a fit. Our local Wal-mart will let the Salvation Army and the local veteran's groups and so on stand outside and collect, but they don't sponser much of anything else around here. They used to, but for some reason they don't anymore. And our new SUPER Wal-Mart is due to open next month. So now they'll run the local tire shops and oil change businesses out as well as a couple of local grocery stores that are already just barely scraping by. Years ago when our local Wal-mart plaza was built, a grocery store called Festival Foods was on the lot. It was built at the same time. The owner of Festival and Wal-Mart signed an agreement that if Festival would occupy the space, that Wal-Mart would not sell groceries. A few years go by, and Wal-Mart starts selling groceries. The owner of the grocery store compained, then took them to court. He won, they paid a couple of million dollars, and still ran him out of business. And wrote the lawsuit losses off their taxes. Amazing, isn't it? All in all, I consider Wal-Mart to be an immoral organization, and believe me they're going to bite us all in the butt before the American people figure it out.
