Wal-Mart Coming to Boston? Not If I Can Help It
I've Moved! The Boomer Chronicles has closed after 6 years, but you can keep up with me on my new blog at http://www.rheabecker.com
Every day, another community has to fight off mega-corporation Wal-Mart. Now the retailer has set its sights on Boston, where I live. For years, I’ve added my voice to the protests of Wal-Mart and other similar big-box retailers. Here’s why:
- They kill small, independent businesses and change the character of the areas they enter
- They make a profit at the expense of their employees’ health and ability to earn a decent wage
- They use sweatshop labor overseas
- If Wal-Mart locations do not work out, they leave behind a big box, a parking lot, unemployed people, and ghost towns where all the competing stores closed down long ago
Here are some places to look for information on fighting Wal-Mart:
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance is a group fighting big-box stories, and promoting “buying local.”
Here’s a tool kit for fighting Big Box sprawl.
Check out Sprawl Busters.
February 1st, 2011 at 12:15 pm
their quality so poor.
February 1st, 2011 at 1:01 pm
Now, that’s something I didn’t know. Another reason not to support them.
I must say, though, I realize that in some locales, there is no other option to Walmart. I understand that.
February 1st, 2011 at 1:02 pm
None of the issues you’ve cited make Wal-Mart’s business your business.
You need to learn to keep your nose out of other people’s business.
I shop at Wal-Mart for some things. They are especially good for prescriptions.
And they employ the elderly, in case you haven’t noticed.
Mind your own business.
February 1st, 2011 at 1:07 pm
So, let’s see.
You understand how to run a business.
You’re an expert in labor and employment.
It’s your job to fix labor condition overseas.
Jesus, but you are a loony busybody!
Do you have anything to do?
From what I can see, your only real expertise is in reading foolish novels and silly feminist and New Age crap.
Ever thought of finding something useful to occupy your time?
February 1st, 2011 at 2:39 pm
Back at you, Thomas!
February 1st, 2011 at 5:07 pm
Well, I do have useful things to do.
I have a technical job. Unlike you, I can actually program and do math.
I play in three bands. We make money. Make take a job as a church organist and choir director.
I came over here because I expected you to be weeping over Obamacare. You want the government to be your daddy and husband.
I came over here because you represent a particularly lazy and foolish point of view that has come to typify the left.
You’ve disappointed me by not weeping and wailing that Big Daddy the government isn’t giving you more stuff.
February 2nd, 2011 at 8:03 am
Wal-Mart also makes tax deals with the local government (before they “agree” to come into a community) where the sales tax you’re thinking you’re paying for all the good things taxes do actually goes to Wal-Mart corporate headquarters instead of into your roads and schools. A lot of big box stores do this and it’s one of the main reasons why local economies dry up around them.
February 2nd, 2011 at 1:09 pm
It seems that Wal-Mart has become the Big Boogieman. I am a tad older than you, Rhea, and have seen the very same complaints about Wal-Mart aimed at Sears, K-Mart, Target, and shopping centers over my 6 and half decades. I have also seen 7-Eleven get blamed for some of the same things (putting small grocers out of business). We survived all these things and grown our economy over the decades. Boston can handle a Wal-Mart, it’s big enough and strong enough.
The result will be a boost in jobs (though they won’t be high paying ones), reductions in overall food and electronics prices (competition works well here), and more choices.
If enough people like the Mom & Pop places, they will survive. I have always found these to be inefficient, high-priced, and poorly stocked.
February 2nd, 2011 at 1:32 pm
This opposition to Wal-Mart is class snobbery.
The people who shop at Wal-Mart aren’t the “right kind of white people.”
They don’t subscribe to the Stuff White People Like regime of tastes and manners.
Blue collar guys and gals shop at Wal-Mart. So do retirees trying to live on the cheap. Trailer park white trash shop at Wal-Mart. Teenage moms and dad buying diapers on the cheap shop at Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart does a great job of serving its clientele. Cheap, plentiful stuff for people without much money. Beneath all the BS rationalizations, this is just hippie/yuppie class snobbery. The writer of the blog reeks with this class snobbery. (Why, I haven’t a clue. She doesn’t seem to know how to do anything of any value.)
The wrong kind of people work at Wal-Mart, too. Like the elderly looking for a part time retirement job, kids working their first job, people with only a high school education or less and immigrants.
Hopefully, this is all BS. I hope Wal-Mart rolls over you like a bulldozer.
Looking forward to learning that you not only lose, but that you get humiliated. You’ve got it coming.
February 2nd, 2011 at 5:30 pm
Ban the troll. He just wants to be hateful because nobody loves him. A well known type and to be avoided.
But as to Wal-Mart: Quality is not a problem. Their goods are fine. Everything is made by underpaid labor in other countries anyway, so it doesn’t matter from that standpoint where you buy things. Where I live I have no choice but the shop there for some standard consumer items, because they are literally not available anywhere else.
The business plan of Wal-Mart is fascinating and is based on such ideas as that you can employ women at very low wages because it’s more than what they would get for working at home, namely nothing. Women in poor and pious areas of the country, especially, are schooled in service and self sacrifice and for that reason make excellent undemanding employees, grateful for whatever little thing they can get.
A fascinating book on the Walton family’s business strategy is *To Serve God and Wal Mart:* The Making of Christian Free Enterprise* by Bethany Moreton. I recommend this book to anyone who is serious about keeping Wal Mart out of her community. You will have a lot of arguments to counter the notion that it is mere snobbery to be against Wal Mart stores. The inotion that they are the store of the good common non-elite folk is part of their hype, and most of the suckers have fallen for it.
February 2nd, 2011 at 7:20 pm
I have very mixed emotions about Walmart. Their hiring policies are a mixed bag–they do hire the elderly and the handicapped, and they don’t hide them in a back room; but they also hire mostly part-time so they can avoid paying health benefits, and they encourage employees to apply for state aid for health care rather than use available store benefits.
But the biggest quandry for me is that no one beats their prescription prices: $4 for generics or $10 for a 3-month supply. If one shops carefully (some of their products are shoddy) one can find excellent values.
So do I pay less attention to my budget than to the store’s politics?
I don’t have any answers.
Neither, by the way, does Thomas, who should shout less and listen more!
February 3rd, 2011 at 4:39 pm
“The business plan of Wal-Mart is fascinating and is based on such ideas as that you can employ women at very low wages because it’s more than what they would get for working at home, namely nothing. Women in poor and pious areas of the country, especially, are schooled in service and self sacrifice and for that reason make excellent undemanding employees, grateful for whatever little thing they can get.”
This statement is fascinating in its global stupidity.
So, you want to take away what you admit is the only source of employment of poor women.
What to you plan to replace it with? Welfare?
Wal-Mart will be fine whatever you do. The entitlement, welfare, class snobbery attitude of this website is deadly. The person you destroy with this is yourself.
“I don’t have any answers.”
Grace, unless you are a stockholder or manager of Wal-Mart, your opinion about how Wal-Mart should do business is of no importance. Wal-Mart hasn’t asked you about how it should run its business.
If you’d like to run Wal-Mart, perhaps you should apply for a management job.
How did you morons puff yourself up like this and imagine that running Wal-Mart was any of your business?
What we have here is an entire group of self-destructive people who don’t know how to do anything wasting their time pontificating about something that isn’t any of their business.
Get an education. Learn a trade. Get a job. Stop trying to create an ideal world and to something to improve yourself.
What a horrifying display of self-destructive attitudes and habits!
February 3rd, 2011 at 4:47 pm
I wish I could feel some compassion for this crap, but I can’t.
Reminds me of an animated video out there with a conversation between a man and a woman who is describing her feminist beliefs. It goes something like this:
Woman: “More women should be working in the sciences and technical fields.”
Man: “What’s your major?”
Woman: “English.”
Man: “What’s your minor?”
Woman: “Women’s Studies.”
Man: “So, why aren’t you studying science or some technical field?”
Woman: “It’s too boring.”
It’s clear that the women who frequent this site have a problem. The dialogue above has a lot more to say about that problem than this BS about Wal-Mart.
February 7th, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Really, Rhea, you ought to ban him. I don’t let posters like him on my blog.
February 9th, 2011 at 1:43 pm
Well, you know you have arrived when you’ve got a troll. Congratulations.
As far as my blog goes, it is not a Democracy. It is a cheerocracy, and I am a cheertator. I delete anything I want. I will delete even if I think you smell funny.
Googie Baba
February 9th, 2011 at 1:50 pm
Hello Rhea…
Please do not ban the redundant, shouting thomas. He is the life of the party here…he is so funny I actually got off a few belly busters reading his canned responses.
He is not attacking you, he attacks all women because his mother probably did not breast feed him and he has been missing the tit all of these years.
Hey shooting thomas, thanks for the laughter and I must profess…I will not be meeting you at Wally-World. I do not shop there. They do not get MY money…I shop at the Dollar Tree, Dollar General and Family Dollar Stores. They are CHEAPER than Wally world.
And Rhea dear…do not worry, I know you are not a yuppy snob!
Hey shouting thomas…here is a big fat raspberry for you “XXXXXX.” LOLOLOL
Southern smiles and world peace,
Sharon
~The Baby Boomer Queen~