Wal-Mart bashing?

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DasBoot

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Since I started visiting this site I've noticed more than a few threads bashing/ranting against Wal-Mart.
What am I missing?
To me, it's just another store to go to.
I've never had any problems w/them and I buy all of my range ammo from them.
The price on their 100 rnd Value packs can't be beat.
Can't beat the prices on lot's of other things also.
What's the problem?:confused:
 
Negative impact their presence has on small (gun)shops in surrounding communities...? :mad:
Level of competant help...? ;)
Something to gripe about...? :rolleyes:
 
+1 to what Baba said

Walmart is the opposite of everything I stand for. Pay your employees low wages with no benifits. Low cost, low quailty, and put local shops out of business. I also have no need to deal with the typical Walmart client!!
 
Wal-Mart bashing seems to be a national sport. However, Wal-Mart was the first national retailer geared toward downscale market segments that actually treated these folks like they wanted their business.

I'm actually like shopping there. It is always interesting and it always saves me a ton of dough. ;)
 
Walmart, the world's largest company, uses its enormous buying power to force manufacturers to lower their wholesale prices or be replaced with goods from China, which Walmart sells enough of already. These lower prices allow them to eliminate a whole host of smaller town businesses, putting skilled clerks, butchers, etc. out of work while employing more unskilled or less knowledgeable people to work at lower average wages.

Walmart saves you a few hundred dollars a year by lowering the net income of both their suppliers and the local employers. They are a textbook example of the dangers of unchecked capitalism, monopoly and "globalization". And they are only saving you money if you don't end up buying more crap because it is so conveniently available while in the store. I don't think the couple of bucks I save is worth the economic damage.


On the other hand, anyone who walks into Walmart's sports section and expects sporting goods store service is an idiot. You get what you pay for, so stop whinning about the clerk not being up on law, bullet type or whatever.
 
the trouble with tunnel-vision is that you don't see everything else that is happening around it...

try to think a little beyond..."it saves me a ton of money"...mentality...

short-sighted thinking leads to long-term disaster...
 
I don't disagree that Wal-Mart has had a dramatic influence on the retail market. My feelings are mixed. Wal-Mart has contributed to small business and big business failure, driving production over seas, etc. They have also contributed to holding inflation in check, delivered captive market areas cheaper alternative to pricing based on logistical factors, and improved availability of products in general.

I do not agree that Wal-Mart has had any worse effect on gun shops than any other small business. I believe the key for small business (i.e. gun shops) is not to try to compete for the low end. Let Wal-Mart have the cheap gun market. A small shop should stock quality and know what products Wal-Mart or other discount houses are selling. It is fairly easy to up sell most buyers if you can show them the difference. Too many shops I have visited have counter help who may know guns but could not sell a furnace to WA.

One shop I visit has one of each of Wal-Marts top sellers in stock (they are tucked behind nicer/higher quality guns. He prices them similar to Wal-Mart then up sells using them as examples.

This will work on many product lines sold by Wal-Mart IMO.

Oh, and there really are too many threads with Wal-Mart in the title, again IMHO.
 
Three areas of bashing that are common on all Internet gun forums:

1-Wal Mart
2- Gun Shows
3- EBAY

With that said one of my favorite gunshows is located literally right across the street from one of the SUPER DUPER MEGA WAL MARTS and he shows no signs of closing his doors!

His shop is always full of customers and it is rare when I don't see someone filling out paperwork. The 10/22s and Marlin 60s that WM sells does not really seem to bother him. He stocks and sells guns that you will never see in the WM case.

When I bought my Smith 629 I went to him , not WM. Same for my Smith Model 41 , same for my Remington 700P and my 700 LTR and ............

He does not seem to be affected by having a WM across the street. He has never griped or cried about it when I was in there.
 
Handy, you basically said exactly what I intended to say. Wal mart forces manufacturers to lower their prices or they will be dropped. Many of these manufacturers rely on wal mart because that is their biggest sale, so they have to drop their prices as wal mart says, or risk losing quite a bit of money.

Small businesses can not get these good deals that wal mart gets. They simply can not match the prices of wal mart without losing money. Small business is run bankrupt within little time of a wal mart opening.

Here is the part I don't understand: So many people protest wal mart and talk about how bad it is for small businesses, but when a wal mart moves into town, those people are the first in line. It's not technically wal mart that runs small businesses bankrupt. It's the people who shop there. Look beyond the cheap product. Look at your local family grocery store that has been in business for 60 years, or that small, family run hardware store down the street. Shop at wal mart, and these people are going to have to find a new source of income.
 
I stopped shopping at Wal Mart some time ago. That well known left wing
radical newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, cited them as a company that likes to fire older workers so it can hire younger ones cheaper, and I know someone that happened to. They are militantly anti-uinion, and since Sam Walton died in 1992 they have stopped emphasizing his "Buy American" policy
and are now responsible for 10% of all Made in China products in this country.
As a True Conservative, I firmly believe that a big part of the American Way
is your right not to patronize (boycott, if you prefer) businesses whose business practices you disapprove of and when you hit such organizations where they feel it most-in the bottom line-they will feel it the fastest.
 
I still shop at Wal-Mart occasionally, where else can you get all of the supplies needed to open a stubborn floor safe in one stop?:confused: ;)
 
Walmart is a chain of discount stores - nothing more, nothing less.
Click to expand...

No, Wally-Wart is a massive conglomerate with discount stores, groceries, gas stations, auto service departments and more. Sufficiently large enough to demand, and get, special pricing from manufacturers not available to anyone else, they devastate and market niche they care to compete in.

The gun shop example above is worth expanding on: he's happily in business because he is catering to a niche Wally-Wart does not deal in. If, tomorrow, that Wal Mart suddenly carried all the same merchandise, at al-Mart style pricing, he'd be the vacant building across from the Mega Wally Wart, nothing more. It's the rare local business that competes in Wal Mart's selected market type and survives...
 
Good friend of mine, who's a millionaire many times over, says, "If Wal-Mart doesn't have it, I probably don't need it."

I find the "Wal-Mart's not socially acceptable" silliness on internet boards truly amusing, particularly when Wal-Mart's critics appear to be nearly illiterate.
 
Not exactly certain what line one has to do with line two, nor how discussions of market manipulations have anything to do with being "socially unacceptable" or not? As for the final item, regarding literacy, one wonders where that even came from? Generally speaking the diatribes against Wally Wart are long, well written and logical(whether you agree with them or not) while the rebuttals are pretty much like yours: Disjointed ad homs.

But hey, to each their own.
 
"I find the "Wal-Mart's not socially acceptable" silliness on internet boards truly amusing, particularly when Wal-Mart's critics appear to be nearly illiterate."

I am a Junior in pursuit of an Applied Mathematics degree in University of California, Berkeley and a stout conservative, and I am a WalMart basher. I have seen first hand what Walmart has done to a lot of towns and it is NOT pretty.
 
I politely refer to the Kalifornia scholar's post as an example of near-illiteracy. :) I was specific in my criticism of the near-illiterates who bash Wal-Mart; didn't offer any opinion on the more literate, well-informed, but largely-incorrect bashers. :)

I was also right-on, in my humble opinion, regarding those who talk on internet boards about the "type" of people who shop at Wal-Mart, particularly those "snob wannabes" who are nearly-illiterate and probably haven't had a cogent thought, ever. ;)

I can't think of a class of people much lower on the social totem pole than those clowns who hang around mom-n-pop gun stores.
 
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