ADVERTISEMENT

Wal-Mart is the greatest retailer in world history

Seminiferous

Seminole Insider
Gold Member
Mar 29, 2002
33,860
1,513
853
Buckhead, USA
Publix's main competition isn't Kroger; it's Wal-Mart.

Barnes & Noble's biggest competition is Wal-Mart.

Best Buy's biggest competitor is Wal-Mart.

Toys 'R Us's biggest competitor is Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart's so dominant that many fast foods and other retailers don't even do their own demographics; they simply follow Wal-Mart and locate next to them.

Many tree-huggers and other NIMBYs loathe Wal-Mart, and understandably so, but the plain truth is that Wal-Mart is by far the most successful retailer ever.
 
I wouldn't mind owning one. However, I would spend my profit by shopping at Publix, Best Buy, etc.
smile.r191677.gif
 
I shop there every week. No complaints about the store only the idiots behind the registers. A small price to pay for convenience of having most everything in one place and cheaper, too.
Posted from Rivals Mobile
 
Great place to buy motor oil. I don't find their food and beer prices any better than the local Kroger or Tom Thumb.
 
EVERY new Wal-Mart is hotly contested. Too much traffic, overburdening utilities, squeezing out local merchants, etc. It's the survival of the fittest; Wal-Mart's retail prices are often less than their competitor's wholesale prices. America bitches about Wal-Mart, but bargain-seeking America shops there.
 
There is no price low enough to get me to shop there. Thankfully the "new" one in our area is across county and wifey quit going there.
Heard a guy talking about how mini warehouses had to happen in order to store all the wal mart trash...people spend money storing plastic crap for years that is worth less than the storage bill.
People and their "stuff" is a strange kinda love.
 
Another valid criticism of Wal-Mart is that it homogenizes America.

Wal-Mart only carries top selling books, and a very limited number of those. They even censor books, requiring that authors re-write PG-rated versions of their books so as not to offend WalMart's wholesome God-fearing middle American customers. The result of course, is that many, many new, unknown authors aren't to be found in Wal-Marts.
 
I buy dog food, detergent, lawn and garden stuff at Wally's; just yesterday I bought a new Weber grill there.
Do I care what y'all think?
Uh, no.
 
Originally posted by goldmom:
I buy dog food, detergent, lawn and garden stuff at Wally's; just yesterday I bought a new Weber grill there.
Do I care what y'all think?
Uh, no.
Have at it. You probably were not gonna criticize me for buying elsewhere...
smile.r191677.gif
 
Can Amazon ever surpass them if they get their drone program working to allow for same day delivery? Can you imagine ordering something online and it being at your address from a drone in 30 minutes?
 
The only time I would step foot in a Walmart is if they have something I need that no one else has. Luckily, that pretty much never happens.
 
  • Like
Reactions: NoleGreg10
Originally posted by Seminiferous:
Another valid criticism of Wal-Mart is that it homogenizes America.

Wal-Mart only carries top selling books, and a very limited number of those. They even censor books, requiring that authors re-write PG-rated versions of their books so as not to offend WalMart's wholesome God-fearing middle American customers. The result of course, is that many, many new, unknown authors aren't to be found in Wal-Marts.
Never thought of this but that is a good point.
Posted from Rivals Mobile
 
Originally posted by Seminiferous:
Another valid criticism of Wal-Mart is that it homogenizes America.

Wal-Mart only carries top selling books, and a very limited number of those. They even censor books, requiring that authors re-write PG-rated versions of their books so as not to offend WalMart's wholesome God-fearing middle American customers. The result of course, is that many, many new, unknown authors aren't to be found in Wal-Marts.
They do the same with CD's. About 5 years ago, a friend of mine bought an album there, Disturbed, I think, and when he got in his truck and played it, some of the words were just silenced out.

We have a Target next to the two closest Wal-Marts and we will shop at Target. I absolutely hate Wal-Mart, right up there with Rite Aid.
 
Originally posted by West Duval Nole:
Can Amazon ever surpass them if they get their drone program working to allow for same day delivery? Can you imagine ordering something online and it being at your address from a drone in 30 minutes?

I hardly ever go to a retail store now. We order a majority of our stuff on Prime and have it in a day or 2. Returns are simple and customer service is top notch
Posted from Rivals Mobile
 
Originally posted by goldmom:
I buy dog food, detergent, lawn and garden stuff at Wally's; just yesterday I bought a new Weber grill there.
Do I care what y'all think?
Uh, no.
I go there all the time because it's convenient.
 
Originally posted by Seminiferous:
Another valid criticism of Wal-Mart is that it homogenizes America.

Wal-Mart only carries top selling books, and a very limited number of those. They even censor books, requiring that authors re-write PG-rated versions of their books so as not to offend WalMart's wholesome God-fearing middle American customers. The result of course, is that many, many new, unknown authors aren't to be found in Wal-Marts.
a valid critique, but read a book that came out a few years ago called the Long Tail. says that via technology more niches are becoming possible. And Amazon is their leading retailer, and not just for books.
 
I wouldn't criticize anyone for their shopping preferences, because the bottom line is always personal choice.

I've not bought books in Wal-Mart, preferring if possible Costco or BJ's or even BAM because I have a savings card there.
I shop sales and do price comparisons simply because that's how I've always made buying decisions.
 
People are free to shop where they want. I just prefer not to shop at Wal Mart. Too crowded and often dirty, plus their produce section is horrible. Every now and then I will go, but I try to get in and out ASAP.
 
Originally posted by runkpanole:
People are free to shop where they want. I just prefer not to shop at Wal Mart. Too crowded and often dirty, plus their produce section is horrible. Every now and then I will go, but I try to get in and out ASAP.
I dont buy produce from there often but I have, buy all of my toiletries from walmart
 
Originally posted by FreeFlyNole:
I go once in a while when I need some cheap plastic sh1t from China.
Do the Chinese pick an item off the shelf, flip it over and say, "Made in America!? I'm not buying this $hit!"
laugh.r191677.gif



...I've always wondered this.
 
Used to shop at Wal-Mart quite a bit but very rarely anymore and usually only for certain things. The closest Wal-Mart to me is not a bad store but it's just a pain in the ass.

My wife has converted me into a Target person but I still prefer to get a majority of things at Costco and BJs.
 
I find myself in Walmart maybe once a month buying something. I try to stay away at all cost, but sometimes you just gotta do, what you gotta do.

I did buy a Black Friday, 1 hour guarantee 50in tv. The HDMI inputs didn't work. I had a little trouble returning it, so I of course tweeted and yelped my experience. Corp contacted me and told me to go return tv and to pick out an upgrade. I'm happy to say I now have the nicest 50 in tv Walmart offers that is not a SmartTv....it was $650 tv that cost me $200.

That is the kind of stuff you can do with Walmart....which is an upside.
 
"Is Wal-Mart Good for America?" That is the headline on a New York Times story about the country's largest retailer.

The very idea that third parties should be deciding whether a particular business is good for the whole country shows incredible chutzpa.

The people who shop at Wal-Mart can decide whether that is good for them or not. But the intelligentsia are worried about something called Wal-Mart's "market power."

Apparently this giant chain sells 30 percent of all the disposable diapers in the country and the Times reporter refers to the prospect of "Wal-Mart amassing even more market power."

Just what "power" does a sales percentage represent? Not one of the people who bought their disposable diapers at Wal-Mart was forced to do so. I can't remember ever having bought anything from Wal-Mart and there is not the slightest thing that they can do to make me.

The misleading use of words constitutes a large part of what is called anti-trust law. "Market power" is just one of those misleading terms. In anti-trust lingo, a company that sells 30 percent of the disposable diapers is said to "control" 30 percent of the market for that product. But they control nothing.

Let them jack up their prices and they will find themselves lucky to sell 3 percent of the disposable diapers. They will discover that they are just as disposable as their diapers.

Much is made of the fact that Wal-Mart has 3,000 stores in the United States and is planning to add 1,000 more. At one time, the A & P grocery chain had 15,000 stores but now they have shrunk so drastically that there are probably millions of people -- especially in the younger generation -- who don't even know that they exist.

An anti-trust lawsuit back in the 1940s claimed that A & P "controlled" a large share of the market for groceries. But they controlled nothing. As the society around them changed in the 1950s, A & P began losing millions of dollars a year, being forced to close thousands of stores and become a shadow of its former self.

Let the people who run Wal-Mart start believing the talk about how they "control" the market and, a few years down the road, people will be saying "Wal-Who?"

With Wal-Mart, as with A & P before them, the big bugaboo is that their low prices put competing stores out of business. Could anyone ever have doubted that low-cost stores win customers away from higher-cost stores?

It is one of the painful signs of the immaturity and lack of realism among the intelligentsia that many of them regard this as a "problem" to be "solved." Trade-offs have been with us ever since the late unpleasantness in the Garden of Eden..."

-Thomas Sowell
 
No matter where you choose to shop Walmart helps keep prices down across the board. Now if they would just open gas stations up on every corner the oil companies could be held in check...
 
No matter where you choose to shop Walmart helps keep
prices down across the board. Now if they would just open gas stations
up on every corner the oil companies could be held in check...


I never understood the angst about gas prices.
Ever consider how much value there actually is in a gallon of gas? I mean, less than $3 of it can take you 20 or more miles. I know I'd pay a lot, lot more for something that could do what gasoline does. The reason we pay so little for it, compared to what it is worth to us, is because of the competition to sell it. You get a glimpse of what gasoline is worth the moment it becomes hard to find (e.g. after a hurricane).
Various layers of government make more off the sale of oil/gas than the companies who find it, refine it, and put it in convenient locations for me to easily obtain.

Oil companies make huge money because they serve an enormous customer base, not because they have high margins.
 
  • Like
Reactions: fmol4
Gotta love this board. Here's a thread full of people saying they're too good for Wal-Mart, directly above a thread debating who makes the best hamburger
laugh.r191677.gif
 
Sam Walton discovered, very early on, that most of America lives at the base of Maslow's pyramid and will likely never make enough money to move up...
 
I have no issues with Walmart but rarely go there anymore. Getting into and out of them is a nightmare - easier to stop at smaller stores or shop online. Costco once a month to load up on paper plates, towels, TP, etc.
 
Originally posted by Fijimn:

Sam Walton discovered, very early on, that most of America lives at the base of Maslow's pyramid and will likely never make enough money to move up...
"Capitalism is essentially a system of mass production for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses. It pours a horn of plenty upon the common man. It has raised the average standard of living to a height never dreamed of in earlier ages. It has made accessible to millions of people enjoyments which a few generations ago were only within the reach of a small elite."

"The consumers suffer when the laws of the country prevent the most efficient entrepreneurs from expanding the sphere of their activities. What made some enterprises develop into big business was precisely their success in filling best the demand of the masses."
-Ludwig von Mises


I like Walmart because they provide those electric carts to the obese, thus reducing their physical output and hastening their end. Can't people at least be thankful for that?
 
ADVERTISEMENT