I hate shopping at Wal-Mart.
On a recent (forced) visit to one, I was reminded just why other nations dislike us.
It could be because of their crappy wages and lack of proper health care for employees.
Or their eagerness to dominate the market and drive everyone else out of business.
Perhaps it might be because they are trying to find ways of not even paying employees at all now.
Not to mention that every inbred redneck in the surrounding area is there, standing in the aisles beating their kids or buying more sugary crap to feed their fat @$$'s.
I haven't yet seen the movie, but I'm wanting to watch "The High Cost Of Low Prices".
It's a scathing look at what that corporation is costing us as a society.
Anyway, I'm not going to keep going off on a tangent. I actually came across this video and wanted to share it.
I think it's been around for a couple of years, but I hadn't seen it until just now.
Pretty accurate depiction of what they are doing, in my opinion.
2 things people had to say:
I actually did watch the Walmart movie. It was very interesting.
When I think of discount retailers I am always concerned with our ever-growing trade deficit. And how everything in America has deflated costs. Vegetables shouldn't be 99 cents a pound. Socks shouldn't be a buck fifty. I worry about what would happen if the government and other bodies stopped artificially lowering prices.
Also every child in Walmart has cheeto fingers. BLECH!
My mom doesn't understand why I dislike going to Wal-mart "because they have such low prices".
We've relied so much on getting cheaper and cheaper goods, that China now holds the the ball and is threatening to collapse the U.S. dollar.
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/08/07/bcnchina107a.xml)
Similarly, I wrote a letter to Backpacker Magazine regarding where all these new "eco-friendly" outdoor products they were extolling the vitrues of were coming from. They had talked about new synthetic materials made from soybeans and corn polymers and that the prices were coming down dramatically. But I had just read in Nat'l Geographic how the Brazil rainforest is being burnt and cleared to make room for companies to grow more soybeans. And the corn plants they are making plastics from are also being grown near our food crops.
We (as a society) have a short-sighted view of what is "good".
Low prices = saving money
Sustainable resources = Earth-freindly
But if somebody's making low-cost products, SOMEBODY else has to making the profit from it. Nothing's free.
And sustainable means that we have to be able to replace what we are using. That won't work if we destroy the ecosystem in the process.
It's just a vicious circle that's coming back to bite us.... hard.
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