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> I think Wal*Mart has an image problem. If you know their history then you understand how they got where they are. Walmart grew in the 80s and 90s by plantin
by cptskippy 5y ago
> I think Wal*Mart has an image problem.
If you know their history then you understand how they got where they are.
Walmart grew in the 80s and 90s by planting itself just outside the city limits of small towns across America. They attracted the towns people with low prices and jobs. Their presence eventually shutdown every competing small business in those towns and the former purveyors of those businesses often wound up working at Walmart. Businesses that didn't directly compete often setup shop inside the Walmart leasing space from them. That is until Walmart started partnering up with larger chains and pushing those small businesses out.
At the same time Walmart was strangling small businesses in small town America, they were also putting the squeeze on suppliers. They were demanding custom products at lower prices from companies who were forced to outsource to other countries in order to meet Walmart's demands. Well known American brands like Huffy went from being proudly made in America to just being stickers slapped on products coming off the boat from China.
If you drove across the US in the 90s you'd run through empty ghost towns and as soon as you'd hit the "Now leaving..." sign for the town there'd be a Walmart Supercenter with a parking lot full of vehicles. Walmart destroyed small town America by draining towns of tax revenues and running small businesses under.
Through all of this Walmart proudly displayed Made in the USA or some other patriotic bullshit on the outside of their stores.
Yeah Walmart has an image problem, and there isn't anything they can do about it in my opinion.
- rubicon33 5y agoIt sucks that while there are enumerable benefits to free market capitalism, there's also serious drawbacks. You tend to see the formation of mega corporations that can use economy of scale to secure and hold huge economic advantage. Short of some breakup, or government intervention, what can be done? The system is designed to reward those who find the best market fit. The problem is, there's no brake pedal on their growth. They can absorb entire industries.
- rsuelzer 5y agoThis, in my opinion, is the largest role of government in a capitalist society. Capitalism is not sustainable without guard rails. By design, a company will always pass costs onto society if it can. The government has an obligation to ensure negative economic costs are paid by the producers and consumers of goods and services. An example of this would be Walmart for years relying almost exclusively on Medicaid benefits for their employees healthcare. Walmart is hardly the worst company in terms of passing economic costs on to others or future generations. But, the point is, that unless the government forces a company to pay the true costs of doing business it's always going to result in market distortions. It's a design flaw of capitalism, which is actually easy to correct within an equitable political system. However, this is much more rare than it ought be.
- bencollier49 5y agoThis is interesting. Normally people say "innumerable" in a sentence like this, meaning "too many to count", but in this case there's a malapropism which literally reverses the meaning whilst keeping the sense of the original almost intact.
- rubicon33 5y agoHah, that is interesting. I think I make that mistake because I'm a software developer an enums are a thing so my brain mixes up innumerable with enumerable.
- bencollier49 5y agoI guess it's perfectly cromulent in the sentence as well.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tartoran 5y agoAmazon followed their path and they also started to have issue: with their image.
- cptskippy 5y agoI am not sure I agree. Amazon is differently bad but I would say mostly competes with big box stores.
- taurath 5y agoThose ghost towns today are still ghost towns. If the suburban massive parking lot megastore is the best the economy has to offer I'm not sure whether the economy should exist that way. Also note - Amazon is doing the exact same thing to any remaining small retailers, squeezing suppliers like crazy and intensifying the brands selling exclusively from overseas (also destroying brand reputations as fakes are absolutely rife). Also doesn't help that the middle class has dwindled and anyone caught below the "capital gains" economic apartheid line doesn't have money anymore so even if they wanted to buy local they couldn't.
- cptskippy 5y agoI wouldn't say Amazon is doing the exact same as Walmart. Walmart never attacked the long tail of retail, the specialist shops where people talk to the retailer for advice or guidance on purchases. Walmart never offered these products. That's where Amazon hits, once a customer knows what to buy they can find it on Amazon.