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I've been saying this for a while about Wal-Mart (that it's great for allowing low-incomers to eat and live at higher standards for very cheap), but I frequentl
by char 17y ago
I've been saying this for a while about Wal-Mart (that it's great for allowing low-incomers to eat and live at higher standards for very cheap), but I frequently get 'scolded' by friends who are very anti Wal-Mart. I'm glad I can reference this article now.
As someone living on a start-up budget, I absolutely love Wal-Mart. The one in Oakland doesn't have produce (though my neighborhood is not lacking in cheap produce), but I get all my dry goods and toiletries there for about half the price they are at Safeway. It's pretty amazing.
- oldgregg 17y agoPoor people never complain about wal-mart. It's rich white people-- who shop at target-- and conveniently ignore the fact that their impact is essentially the same.
- InclinedPlane 17y agoMost of the arguments against wal-mart are more arguments of taste than arguments of morality. Rich people despise wal-mart because it represents poor taste. They secretly despise the poor as well because the living, breathing, real-world poor folks tend to be lazy, overweight, and uncultured (yes, I'm aware that this is just a broad characterization which unfairly lumps many fine, upstanding, educated, highly sophisticated yet otherwise financially poor individuals into this group as well, I know many such people, I've been there myself, don't write letters) to a far greater degree than the hypothetical ideal model of the poor that rich people imagine. It's far easier to champion the poor in the abstract than it is to do so in practice.
- eru 17y agoYou are right. Poverty is too good a proxy for lazy, overweight, and uncultured. (And probably rightly so --- people who are curious and hard-working have a good chance of getting out of poverty.)