Since I have a heart (in a jar on my desk ), I try to shop at smaller stores instead of Walmart.
Recently I’ve been keeping a closer eye on prices for food. Here is what I’ve noticed:
Diet Pepsi 2 liter
Local Store: $1.39
Walmart: 88¢
2 lb bag of corn chips
Local store: $2.70
Walmart: $1.97
Small bag of frozen peas:
Local store: $1.00
Walmart: 78¢
Cheapest loaf of wheat bread:
Local store: $1.59
Walmart: 99¢
6oz can of roasted peanuts:
Local store: $1.15
Walmart: $1.03
Walmart has lower prices on everything I bought. I didn’t calculate my fresh fruits and vegetables because that’s done by weight at the local store and I don’t want to do the math, but I suspect Walmart is cheaper.
I can’t be bothered to “nickle and dime” comparison shop, except when it comes to internet shopping. Amazon usually has better deals. I don’t consider Amazon evil, however.
I think we’d all be better if we bought less and ate less (thus spending less) rather than saving on the things we buy, or might not have bought had they not been on sale. Sorry for the run on . . . did that make sense?
We’s all be a little thinner and have a little extra pocket money.
Yes, that made perfect sense. I am thinner than I have been in a long time, and I buy less food, but I still need to “nickle and dime” (and in some cases “dollar”) shop.
If you buy 10 items every week and each one costs $0.10 more at a local store, you end up spending $52 a year more than you had to. I know that that is pocket change for a lot of people, but to me that’s a lot of money. Those nickels and dimes are important to me. That’s where my shopping dissonance comes in.
My biggest problem with WalMart is that they make it tremendously difficult to buy at other more local shops because of their unnaturally low prices. I have to stick to a very strict budget when it comes to food (and other things as well, to be honest). The law of supply and demand dictates that if consumers buy more at WalMart than at other local shops, the prices at the local shop go up. Also, since they are HUGE, they are able to get loads of stuff from China for next to nothing, and then sell it for a bit more than next to nothing. Little local shops just can’t compete with that, and while their merchandise tends to be better, it’s completely unaffordable for people like me who don’t have a ton to spend to begin with. So, unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of choices when it comes to grocery shopping. I can either go to a local shop and blow my entire budget on groceries that will only last a short amount of time, or go to places like WalMart, spend the same amount, and get 2 weeks worth of groceries. I try where I can to shop at the local markets and whatnot. I just wish I could do it for everything. Someday, when I am rich and famous, I’ll never shop at WalMart again
There’s a lot of people who can afford to shop other places who shop at Walmart too. At least at our local Walmart, where on the weekends the parking lot is full of BMW’s, Escalades (towing big boats), Hummers, Corvettes, etc, etc as the wealthy come up to play in my neck of the woods.
I suppose shopping at Walmart is how they afford their fancy cars and boats.
Ah…good old Wally-World. I was kinda bummed out yesterday with my weekly Wal-Mart trip. THEY’RE RENOVATING MY STORE!!! I was so used to the old layout (from when it was built around '98), and knew where everything was. It was so simple, and now I went…couldn’t find a lot of pharmacy stuff I needed, as well as electronics because it was so cluttered. It disappoints me, but oh well.
The little bus that takes my city’s seniors around to do their shopping started making a regular run to Walmart, but the seniors don’t want to go there anymore. After the first few times, they compared prices and found the Publix Markets has lower prices AND better products (the veggies aren’t just this side of being spoiled and the meat didn’t die before it was slaughtered), AND everything is unconditionally guaranteed. They take any competitor’s coupons. They’re also smaller stores, with lower shelves, and they’ll send an employee around with you to help you shop, if necessary. Cheerfully. You can’t even find an employee in Walmart here, much less get one to help you.
They were also unnerved by the size of the place–it was confusing. They feared getting lost in it and missing their bus. Or, being unable to get through the horrendous checkout lines and missing their bus. Most of the checkouts at our Walmart are now the automated kind, which are frustrating for them. They’re terrified of the gangs of aggressive youths that run through the stores, too.
I consider this (my cheapness) to be an asset, not a problem.
One part of being rich and staying that way is to know where to blow your money and where to save it. Rich people don’t buy, they invest. They will save money on unrecoverables like groceries, but spend big time on something like a house or car; things that can be resold.
Wal-Mart’s prices are low because they can buy in huge quantities. You could say that they help people save money which seems good, especially people who have a whole lot of mouths to feed. I really don’t think it is unnatural.
The local merchants actually can operate successfully in spite of Wal-Mart by offering products and services Wal-Mart doesn’t. Special orders, repairs, high-quality items, advice, etc. It takes some figuring out, but it is not impossible.
I get a lot of things at Wal-Mart like toothpaste, etc., but there are many things they don’t have. I’ll get those things in my town if people carry them, but usually they don’t. They would get more business if they did. Wal-Mart has a craft section, but it isn’t very thrilling. A wonderful shop has opened up in our town that sells just the sorts of things Wal-Mart doesn’t sell----really great fabrics, high quality yarns and knitting supplies, all sorts of things. Those people are very smart because they aren’t competing with Wal-Mart, they are selling entirely different things and offering help to customers with projects as well as classes. I will always check to see if that shop has what I need before putting it on my list to get in Des Moines.
Things change so local merchants have to change too. I’m sure they shop at Wal-Mart as well. I just don’t see why they are considered to be so terrible. Any business practice that is undesireable is practiced by smaller businesses as well, if that is the problem.
The weak link for Walmart, Home Depot, and any of the other big box stores is that they only sell what they could buy cheaply and in bulk. Once they’re out they’re out, and you’re screwed if you were depending on them having something in stock. As Cynth points out, this is where the smaller stores could fill in the gap, but seldom have the business savvy to do so. When stores like this go under, I feel little loss for them.
I don’t know that this is due to a lack of savviness (if that’s a word) on their part, exactly. It takes money to do what you are saying. Most small businesses don’t have the capital to purchase more unique items to sell in their shops. Not to mention that many of these stores already had been around for quite some time before Wally World came to town. They had already been fulfilling a certain niche in the world of buying and selling. But Wally World can do it cheaper, and so your answer is for these businesses to all of a sudden radically change their inventory in order to sell things that Wally World may not have. What would they do with their current inventory? What would they sell that WalMart does not sell (as an aside here, even the “niche” market is being taken over. They now sell many specialty items…for example, organic food. WalMart apparently wanted to cash in on the organic food craze, and now has their own line of it. This is true for most things…WalMart has a need to have a finger in each and every pie)? I mean, say you are a butcher. What could you possibly sell that would entice your consumer to want to buy from you rather than get the same thing from WalMart at a far cheaper price? Yak meat? Kangaroo tail? You are telling these businesses that they must radically change their inventory, offer more unique items (after, in many cases, selling one certain thing for many years already) in order to compete, and then offer no condolences whatsoever when they go under and are far more in debt than they were to begin with. I just don’t agree with you lack of compassion here.
[quote="Cynth"Wal-Mart’s prices are low because they can buy in huge quantities. You could say that they help people save money which seems good, especially people who have a whole lot of mouths to feed. I really don’t think it is unnatural.[/quote]
Being one of those families that has a lot of mouths to feed, I do understand this. I does help me save money to a certain extent, but because the vast majority of what is sold is crap made in China, it isn’t always worth it for me to buy their merchandise in the long run. If I put more money out for a pair of shoes from a more specialized store, I get much more bang for my buck because they last much longer. As for their food, again, you get what you pay for. Their meats are old (they are shipped out rather than being done on site), their vegetables are just nasty because they’ve been sitting in warehouses for days and days. So while their prices are cheaper, you are also paying for substandard food.
As for my using “unnatural”, I only meant it because of the way they buy tons of one item (thousands, in fact), in order to sell it for a much lower price than their competitors. This is not the way it had been done previously…two competing shops had to duke it out the old fashioned way, rather than forcing some little guy with no gloves to get into the ring with Holyfield just because Holyfield wanted an easy fight.
You have just made my point for me. No one is saying its good or right that so many smaller businesses go under, but the existence of a big box store means that the nature of smaller businesses must change. They clear old inventory out over a period of time and get in new to change their business, not because they want to, but because they have to. Its a simple necessity for survival. In the face of this, I can only feel so much compassion for people who know they need to change but refuse,and allow themselves to go down.
That’s certainly the truth. This is a trend that’s been occurring for some time and is seen all over the place. The original manufacturers of many of these products are themselves going out of business. Walmart has accelerated this trend.
Twenty years ago, I worked in media relations at Expo 86 which was, among other things, an effort to show harmony among various countries. In our pavilion, we had a beautiful gallery of locally produced products and art. During the first week of the fair I was escorting a group of Chinese diplomats through some of the big exhibits. We had a gorgeous waiting room inside our pavilion, complete with waterfalls and such, where people would spend ten minutes admiring the scenery before being subjected to a two minute blurb at exit time. Imagine our surprise when, while exploring this queue room to go inside a theatre, our group heard the following ad lib comment coming from our teenage hostess: “Don’t forget to check out the gift shop after the movie. It’s got lots of neat stuff made right here in BC, not like that cheap made in China junk you find in most places.”
This isn’t an American problem. The same thing is happening in the UK, and I hear reports of the French making similar complaints.
Here in the Shires the complaint is mostly that when the little shops close down, you are sort of stuck if you don’t have a car, as you need to go to the Global Hyper Mega-Mart to get anything.
The thing is, it’s not just happening now. It’s been happening since the Fifties, when Joe Arndale decided he was going to bring American Shopping Malls to the UK: and we have Arndale Centres. And a poxy curse they have been. But the process has accelerated. Tesco and Waitrose are going large, so to speak.
This “attempt to fill the niche” I’ve seen failing to work in our village. There is a small Somerfield (a chain of cheap supermarkets) in the village, and a small Co-op (another chain of supermarkets) and we once had a village grocer. It was run by Dilip and Jay, who I know. I would go in there every so often, but they rarely had anything I wanted. There was a horrified fascination in watching their stock grow more and exotic and outlandish, to the point were nobody in the village wanted anything they had. If Dilip asked me what I was looking for, I was afraid to say, as I knew he would try to stock it, and it would be something I’d only want every other year. Dilip has gone back to working in accountancy.
In the next village, Waitrose is the “big” supermarket. There was a fight about five years back when the locals prevented Tesco building a big, big supermarket right in the High Street. Now Waitrose is trying to expand. Waitrose is more likely to be successful, as it is perceived as a more “upmarket” retailer. Simultaneously, the landlord of the majority of properties is putting up the rents, in a deliberate attempt to force some of his tenants out. It would appear that he prefers junkies and deadbeats to promising businesses. Oxfam (the charity shop) have had a verbal reprieve, as the claim is they only have to move out so the premises can be refurbished. They have to smile and accept that. They are not happy, and neither am I.
I think what is going to happen is a return to self-sufficiency and market-gardening. For people who can’t afford to survive in any other way, allotments are going to be a big part of the economy. (That’s [very] small-holdings, rented from the Local Council on an annual basis.)
But my imagination paints a picture of the big boys in the backrooms saying “The economy needs another war.” In about ten year’s time. A big one. No, I’ve no hard evidence for it: just a gut feeling.
I can’t remember the name of the organization, but there is some group that is helping merchants figure out how they can deal with Wal-Mart.
A now defunct small fabric store in town would not order a bolt of lace for someone I knew. The person offered to paid ahead of time for the entire bolt so the merchant wouldn’t risk getting stuck with it. They just wouldn’t do it. They could have, that was established, but it was just something they didn’t want to get into. So that would not have taken anything other than intelligence to do. They could have made a good sale by being different than Wal-Mart.
We have a very fine decorating store in town. They sell flooring and stuff. They also sell much higher quality paint brushes than Wal-Mart sells. I always buy painting stuff there. I pay more when I need high quality, but I am not going to feel bad about paying less for aspirin and the like.
A store with a real butcher here competes successfully with Wal-Mart. They will help people get special cuts, people order things there for holidays, etc. The meat at our Wal-Mart is not bad meat, we would not buy it otherwise, but if it is at yours then I assume you are getting your meat somewhere else. That’s how it should be. If the Wal-Mart product is not acceptable or available, which it isn’t a lot of the time, then people do go elsewhere. It is good to have an elsewhere to go and it appears, at least in my area, that enough of the other stores are staying open to give a person alternatives.
There was some story, I think posted on the forum but not sure, about how Toro lawn mowers, or whatever they make, decided not to sell through Wal-Mart anymore. They were afraid the pressure to lower their prices would lead to a poorer quality machine and they would be in trouble. They have their own dealers I guess who can do repairs, etc. We have one of their snowblowers and I’m sure we would go to a Toro store rather than buy a cheap snowblower, since they don’t work as well.
I don’t think anyone would say it was good to buy cheap things that didn’t last or that were bad. Poor shoes I don’t think are worth the money either. I don’t get my shoes at Wal-Mart. Although I did get a pair of pants there that have turned out to be really good—at the time I thought I was insane. Same with poor food. I’m sure nobody is advocating buying poor quality things at Wal-Mart. I’m just saying that if they have what I need, and the quality is acceptable, then I’ll most likely get it there. If the food is crummy, then I wouldn’t shop for food there. I really don’t get most things at Wal-Mart, it is mainly household items, toiletries, medicines, etc.
There have been big stores for years like Sears, K-Mart has been around a long time, Gemco. I understand what you are saying but I just don’t see it as something really new. Some businesses I feel sorry for, some I don’t I guess. Cut-throat competition, if that’s what it is, is a term that has been around a very long time. It seems to be the size of Wal-Mart that bothers people. But mainly I guess if people who didn’t like Wal-Mart didn’t shop there it wouldn’t be so successful. It’s the customers that have made it a success, so why blame Wal-Mart? Blame the people that made it a success by shopping there if there is a wrong being done. That’s just my own opinion.
), I try to shop at smaller stores instead of Walmart.
