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03/01/2004 01:30:18 PM · #26 |
True Story: There is a Napa Auto parts by my house that I frequent often. The guy that runs the place is an automotive genius and I trust his opinion. I went in to buy a TFI Coil to put on my Jeep on a recent upgrade project. He pulled out two and said they are identical except one was made in Mexico and one was made in Detroit. They were in the same box and had the same part number except the Mexico one had an A at the end of the part number. The Detroit one was $42. The Mexico one was $16. Both come with the Napa lifetime no questions asked warranty. Which one would you have bought?
For some odd reason, most people like paying less rather then more for stuff they buy. Business owners are the same way. If I can pay a HS dropout $6/hour to flip burgers and he does a good job, why would I pay someone else $20/hour to do the same job? If I can make widgets in my Texas factory at a cost of $3 each, but my China factory can make them at $1 each, even after shipping and tariffs, why should I keep the Texas plant open? If I keep the Texas plant open I have to charge the consumers and extra $2 per widget. The consumers won’t like that so they will start buying from my competitor that makes their widgets in China, and now my business is going down the toilet, I have to lay off all my workers, and eventually I have to shut the plant down anyway.
Its all my fault people at Walmart make low wages and jobs are moving to China and Mexico. I’d rather pay $.99 for a can of soup at Walmart the $1.59 for the exact same can at Albersons. I’d rather pay $16 for a TFI coil then $42. It’s all my fault.
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03/01/2004 01:42:14 PM · #27 |
Exactly, Louddog. If Walmart starts paying Johnny something realistic like $10/hr, you can bet that bulk toilet paper won't be 24 rolls for $3.99 anymore. It's a tradeoff, they'll start paying the employees more when consumers agree to start paying out the pocket more.
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03/01/2004 01:44:47 PM · #28 |
bravo GeneralE!!!!!!
but as a libertarian, I just want everyone out of my business.
what is a libertarian? a pot smoking republican.
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03/01/2004 01:48:16 PM · #29 |
Originally posted by jbruno1397:
bravo GeneralE!!!!!!
but as a libertarian, I just want everyone out of my business.
what is a libertarian? a pot smoking republican. |
Or divorced Republican gay ! |
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03/01/2004 01:51:21 PM · #30 |
Another true story, Walmart and Home Depot arrive in Orange county NY, about 15 to 20 minute drive from my parents home. Whenever I did work for my parents (I'm a carpenter) I would go to one of the three local stores for supplies. They were once bustling businesses that were now nearly empty. I paid a premium price, but it was to my neighbors and friends... people who were part of the community. Unfortunately, these stores no longer exist. Now, in the heart of this small town that once had a steady if not thriving economy, are several large unrented, basically abandoned buildings. Walmart is good for the economy, the Waltons economy, but is tearing the soul from small town America.
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03/01/2004 01:55:33 PM · #31 |
I got this in an email last week and fits this thread well! These are quotes from Andy Rooney. I have taken a lot of them out, for sake of space....
Andy Rooney, is a 82 year old US TV commentator who said on 60 minutes a few weeks back: "I like big cars, big boats, big motorcycles, big houses and big campfires I believe the money I make belongs to me and my family, not some governmental stooge with a bad comb-over who wants to give it away to crack addicts for squirting out babies.
"I believe that if you are selling me a milk shake, a pack of cigarettes, a newspaper or a hotel room, you must do it in English! As a matter of fact, if you want to be an American citizen, you should have to speak English!
"I don't hate the rich. I don't pity the poor. I know pro wrestling is fake, but so are movies and television. That doesn't stop you from watching them.
"I think Bill Gates has every right to keep every penny he made and continue to make more. If it ticks you off, go and invent the next operating system that's better, and put your name on the building. Ask your buddy that invented the Internet to help you.
Let the fun begin......
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03/01/2004 02:00:04 PM · #32 |
Originally posted by Brooklyn513:
Another true story, Walmart and Home Depot arrive in Orange county NY, about 15 to 20 minute drive from my parents home. Whenever I did work for my parents (I'm a carpenter) I would go to one of the three local stores for supplies. They were once bustling businesses that were now nearly empty. I paid a premium price, but it was to my neighbors and friends... people who were part of the community. Unfortunately, these stores no longer exist. Now, in the heart of this small town that once had a steady if not thriving economy, are several large unrented, basically abandoned buildings. Walmart is good for the economy, the Waltons economy, but is tearing the soul from small town America. |
But isn't that just right back to the consumer who'd rather pay 1/2 the price at a superstore than support the small local stores? If you build it they will come, but nobody forced them. |
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03/01/2004 02:00:07 PM · #33 |
So what do we do, tell the waltons it is illegal for them to open any more stores???
It's a price we pay to have freedom...
Also, pointing to a few comments above referring to a living wage and maybe some referencese to minimum wage:
I've heard many democrats in the last couple years complain about minimum wage and of late, saying that the poor should vote them into office because they are going to raise minimum wage.
Unfortunetly, most of these people can't add 2+2 or don't care about the truth. If we raised min wage today, the price of milk goes up tomorrow. Instead who does this screw? The middle class, because their wage will never go up. So that guy making $12.50 an hour is now only making the equiv of $11 an hour. Effectivly making the middle class even smaller.
I have ZERO patients for people who have ideas or try to implement laws or regulations with good intentions, in reality are TOTAL failures. This goes for both the left and the right, but lets be honest. The left runs mostly on ideas that are great in theory, but assine in reality!
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03/01/2004 02:02:46 PM · #34 |
If walmart is so evil, stop shopping there.
I'm the evil one because I shop at walmart and keep them in business. I created walmart with my greed, it wasn't the waltons. Walmart started as a mom and pop store, I wanted lower prices and they gave it to me. Walmart got so good at giving me my low prices that they expanded and took over all the other mom and pop stores. It's sad to see the mom and pop stores go away, but we have to live with that if we want lower prices. |
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03/01/2004 02:02:51 PM · #35 |
Unfortunately, the quotes you supply were not really Andy Rooney. That is an email hoax. Check it out...
Andy Rooney
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03/01/2004 02:08:33 PM · #36 |
Walmart has every right to do business. Their marketing plan is near genius, and they make tons of money. Good for them. I don't shop there. Nor do I go to Starbucks or Subway... both companies employ a similiar marketing plan... find a thriving business and undermine it with mass marketed cheaper product. I don't believe they should be outlawed or shut down, I just don't give them my money.
Message edited by author 2004-03-01 14:13:28.
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03/01/2004 02:08:57 PM · #37 |
Originally posted by Russell2566:
It's a price we pay to have freedom... |
I disagree. It's not the price we pay to have freedom. It's the price we pay to have our present economic system. There are other countries equally as free as the USA that have different economic systems. And some of them have a higher standard of living. |
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03/01/2004 02:12:53 PM · #38 |
Originally posted by coolhar:
Originally posted by Russell2566:
It's a price we pay to have freedom... |
I disagree. It's not the price we pay to have freedom. It's the price we pay to have our present economic system. There are other countries equally as free as the USA that have different economic systems. And some of them have a higher standard of living. |
I bet the Waltons don't think they are so free... And please, share with me these equaly free countries that have such a higher living standard than the US and allow mom-and-pop stores to stay open and charge to much for thei product/service!
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03/01/2004 03:33:08 PM · #39 |
Any site council around? Can we move this to the Rant forum please?
E
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03/01/2004 03:40:06 PM · #40 |
Originally posted by e301:
Any site council around? Can we move this to the Rant forum please?
E |
I don't think the line between discussion and rant is this fine at all. Most of the G.discussion threads get moved to the rant forum because they get heated. So far, this is a nice little discussion with good points for all sides thusly stated. Can't we civil beings have discussions without them being arguments? Let's see!!! |
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03/01/2004 04:04:24 PM · #41 |
Originally posted by Russell2566:
I have ZERO patients for people who have ideas or try to implement laws or regulations with good intentions, in reality are TOTAL failures. This goes for both the left and the right, but lets be honest. The left runs mostly on ideas that are great in theory, but assine in reality! |
... whereas the right has trickle-down economics. Did you ever stop and think just how degrading a phrase that is? "We will drink of the vine and the dregs shall trickle down to you ..."
I have many "patients" who have been victimized by assinine laws promulgated by both the "left" (such as they are) and the right in this country ... perhaps that the current crop of public officials are beholden to business interests instead of the ordinary CITIZEN is one thing on which we can agree. |
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03/01/2004 04:18:00 PM · #42 |
At Wal-Mart's 1992 general meeting, founder Sam Walton asked shareholders to sing God Bless America. The 15,000 Wal-Martians responded to Sam's call - even though Walton had been dead for two months.
Walton's request to the shareholder-cum-revival meeting in rural Arkansas - channelled through a spotlit executive crouching on bended knee to speak to the departed Deity of Retail - was scarcely surprising. Wal-Mart is America's most patriotic, flag-waving company.
But look under the flags. Stores are decked out like a war rally. Stars and Stripes hang from the ceiling. Cardboard eagles shriek 'Buy America!' But one independent group sampled 105,000 store items and found only 17 per cent of them made in the USA. Indeed some items in trolleys marked Made in America came from elsewhere. So just where does all this stuff come from? Ask avid Wal-Mart shopper Wu Hongda.
'Harry' Wu is famous in the States. He escaped from China after 19 years in a prison camp for holding 'counter-revolutionary' views, then conned his way back into the prisons to document the misery of forced labour. In 1995, Wu was jailed once more, but not before he had reported the appalling tale of slave labour.
Naturally, Wal-Mart has contracts with suppliers that say none of its merchandise should be made by slaves, prisoners or little children. But among its suppliers is Shantou Garment Trading Company, based in Guandong Province. The Trading Company uses factories in Shantou town: nothing wrong with that. But some of the Trading Company's manufacturing is also carried out in nearby Jia Yang prison.
Do any of Wal-Mart's goods come from the prison? The company says it would refuse to handle anything made in a prison, and no one suggests that it knowingly connives in supporting prison labour. Wal-Mart repeats the mantra that its contracts forbid it.
But there is a clear problem here. An associate of Wu helping to investigate the Trading Company was told that Chinese authorities explicitly prohibit the monitoring of production inside the prison. Hence it is virtually impossible for any buyer to establish for certain whether goods from the Trading Company have been made by prisoners or 'free' labour.
According to Wal-Mart, it has to rely on the word of suppliers when they say that goods have been made only by 'free' workers.
And outside China? Who makes the dirt-cheap clothes that fill Wal-Mart's shelves? Are the factories that supply the company staffed by properly rewarded adults? This has long been a sensitive topic for Wal-Mart. In 1994, former Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Ortega, author of the fearsome expose, In Sam We Trust, was taken round Guatemalan factories which supplied Wal-Mart. They were filled with smiling adult workers.
But Ortega had arrived secretly two weeks earlier, and managed to speak to the child seamstresses hidden from the official tour. (When the scandal was exposed, Wal-Mart cancelled its contract with the plant.) Furthermore, in 1996, Wendy Diaz of Honduras testified before Congress about the sweatshop where, as a 13-year-old, she earned 18p an hour making Wal-Mart label clothes.
Wal-Mart has been decidedly touchy when questioned about the use of child labour. Do children make its goods? The answer depends on how you define children. When reporters confronted chief executive David Glass in 1992 with photographs of 14-year-old children locked in Bangladeshi factories that supply the company, he replied: 'Your definition of children may be different from mine.'
But this was in the bad old days, before Wal-Mart published its Code of Conduct, which was meant to end abuses. Since then, the supply chain has been cleaned up.
Or maybe not. The National Labour Committee of New York has given The Observer an advance copy of a yet-unpublished report on manufacturing in Bangladesh. It lists Wal-Mart contractor Beximco as paying teenage seamstresses an hourly rate of 12p and their helpers 5p, both for an 80-hour week - half Bangladesh's minimum wage and way beyond the country's maximum 60-hour working week.
Wal-Mart told me this could not happen if contractors stuck to their word.
The Observer last week sought the views of Wal-Mart's former lawyer, Hillary Clinton, the 'little lady' Sam appointed to his board of directors. She did not return our calls to Washington.
Despite the bothersome gripes of a few skinny children from Guatemala - and, as the company is fond of pointing out, this all happened years ago - Wal-Mart maintains a folksy image based on Walton's aw-shucks Joe Bloke manner. Joyous clerks chant pledges of customer service that end with shouts of: 'So help me, Sam!'
The multi-billionaire took time to go into his shops and warehouses and chat with employees over doughnuts. In 1982, on his way to becoming America's richest man, he dropped into an Arkansas distribution centre and told the loaders, as one regular guy to another, that if they voted to join a union in a representation ballot, he would fire them all and shut down the centre.
The words, corroborated by eight witnesses, were darn effective. The workers voted down the union, keeping Sam's record perfect. Out of 2,450 stores in America today, not one is unionised.
Who needs a union anyway? Arkansas headquarters would not tell The Observer the company's wage rate for clerks. So our volunteers called Wal-Mart stores nationwide to apply for cashier jobs. Openings averaged $6.10 an hour, equivalent to £3.59. When we inquired at a store near an Indian reservation, we were told the starting rate was only £3.03.
Wal-Mart offers a pension plan and there is profit-sharing. But remember, Sam Walton invented the disposable workforce. About a third of Wal-Mart's workers are temporary; working hours are expanded, shifted, contracted at whim. The workforce turns over like the shoe inventory. And the shorter time someone is with the company, of course, the more difficult it is to build up a full pension or qualify for profit shares.
With 780,000 workers, Wal-Mart has the nation's largest payroll. Many are among the country's worst-paid employees. But it could have been worse: Walton asked for the company to be exempted from US minimum wage legislation. Courts refused.
Wal-Mart doesn't completely ignore workers who plead for an extra bowl of porridge. According to Ortega, when Kathleen Baker, a Wal-Mart employee in Minneapolis, handed her store manager a petition from 80 workers hoping for a rise, she was fired on the spot for using the company typewriter to write the petition. The charge ruined her ability to get another job - until Wal-Mart, under government pressure, agreed to clear her name.
In 1994, Linda Regalado was told she would lose her job if she continued to talk to fellow 'associates' about their right to join a union. She persevered and Wal-Mart made good its threat. Only when the government intervened did Wal-Mart agree to pay compensation.
And shortly afterwards Linda Regalado found herself at loggerheads with the company, her husband Gilbert, working at the same store, was seriously injured at work. Wal-Mart initially refused to pay for surgery, but later agreed after being sued by the family.
Having conquered America, will Wal-Mart's megaliths now chew up England's green belts and bleed high streets dry? A Wal-Marted Britain is not an inevitability. US towns 'are wising up,' says Al Norman, head of Sprawl-Busters, which has helped 88 communities slam the door on the Beast in the Box. Near my home, 60 miles from New York City, Wal-Mart has built a Sam's Club. It is one of the company's smaller outlets. Yet still, it could accommodate three super-Tescos and a football field. Shoppers are offered 70,000 different lines begging to be bought. Sam's Club panders to my nastiest human desire for Cheap and Plenty.
But my store-gasm has a cost. I step out of the Big Box and into the Pine Barrens, the last scrap of woodland left on Long Island's suburban moonscape, which Wal-Mart cut down for its parking lots. So Help Me Sam.
´ Bob Ortega's 'In Sam we trust: How Wal-Mart is devouring America', Random House 1998.
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03/01/2004 04:20:32 PM · #43 |
I am trying to understand the relationship between this discussion and the title of this thread: "I don't see any photographers here!"
I find it misleading. I may not have clicked on this thread if it was not titled in this way. |
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03/01/2004 04:25:47 PM · #44 |
Originally posted by KarenB:
I am trying to understand the relationship between this discussion and the title of this thread: "I don't see any photographers here!"
I find it misleading. I may not have clicked on this thread if it was not titled in this way. |
My impression was that his original point was that photographers aren't raking in the money. |
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03/01/2004 04:35:38 PM · #45 |
I think at the heart of the matter the thread was about right and wrong(and weather we as american's even care as long as the price is low) and I agree it is a little misleading and I know this is a photo site
but there is more to life than photography.
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03/01/2004 04:36:56 PM · #46 |
Originally posted by mk:
My impression was that his original point was that photographers aren't raking in the money. |
There are a lot of photographers around the world making A LOT of money. I myself know atleast a few photographers in Calgary alone making a decent salary [more than what I make doing 8-5], I also know more who are raking it in around the world. It's like any profession in that regard. I'm not even sure if this is on topic anymore..or what the topic was.
Message edited by author 2004-03-01 16:38:56.
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03/01/2004 04:40:37 PM · #47 |
Originally posted by GoldBerry:
Originally posted by mk:
My impression was that his original point was that photographers aren't raking in the money. |
There are a lot of photographers around the world making A LOT of money. I myself know atleast a few photographers in Calgary alone making a decent salary [more than what I make doing 8-5], I also know more who are raking it in around the world. It's like any profession in that regard. I'm not even sure if this is on topic anymore..or what the topic was. |
Umm, okay, but they still aren't on the list of the World's Richest People, are they? |
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03/01/2004 04:57:16 PM · #48 |
Originally posted by mk:
Umm, okay, but they still aren't on the list of the World's Richest People, are they? |
There are definetly photographers out there making the big Bling Bling, I didn't realize you guys were talking about the richest people in the world, though. {There are world reknowned photographers [fashion, journalism, even wedding photographers] making 6-7 figure salaries}.
Message edited by author 2004-03-01 16:58:29.
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03/01/2004 05:24:02 PM · #49 |
Originally posted by KarenB:
I am trying to understand the relationship between this discussion and the title of this thread: "I don't see any photographers here!" |
I think the point of the title was that our society is geared to reward the entreprenurial spirit over the creative. As photographers, we fall into the creative group and don't have much of a chance of cracking the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest.
I may be showing my age here but it strikes me as a reversal of the thinking I was brought up on. I was indoctrinated with thoughts of artists, musicians, authors, doctors, scientists, public servants, etc. making a more valuable contribution to society than the mere accumulation of wealth by the merchant class. There were better things to do with your life than pursue riches. I noticed the turnabout when Reagan's David Stockman preached the dogma of "trickle down" to Congress. Many admitted they didn't understand but went along anyway out of respect for the power of "the great communicator". Now that trend has gone way too far in the wrong direction and the hue & cry for change is building steam. Despite the best efforts of the NRA we are well beyond the point where armed revolution is a viable option. Politics may be the last chance to steer the nation back toward what the founding fathers intended. However it may be too late and history may judge that we sat by blissfully braying "So help me Sam" while a corrupted capitalism devoured our treasured democracy. Shame on us if we let it go without even being aware enough to kiss it goodbye! |
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03/01/2004 05:38:29 PM · #50 |
Originally posted by Russell2566:
I bet the Waltons don't think they are so free... And please, share with me these equaly free countries that have such a higher living standard than the US and allow mom-and-pop stores to stay open and charge to much for thei product/service! |
You make this comment like the "mom-and-pop" (M&P) stores are price gouging. These stores are usually barely making a profit, especially if they try to compete with the big chains prices.
The only way M&P shops can compete is by giving up some of the small profit they do make. Because of somebody like Wal-Mart's large size, they purchase in bulk, therefore getting it cheaper, the smaller stores can't so their overhead is increased and minimal profit decreased. If Wal-Mart's overhead increases, they just pass it along to the consumer.
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