I guess Walmart thinks we are a bunch of idiots.

We do not shop at Wally world very often, mostly because the stuff is crap. But once and awhile we stop to look around. We also owned one of those stores on main street in downtown America. We had a fiber mill, sold yarns, knitting needles, and lots of other fiber related items. I told the wife don`t expect this little town to support us enough to keep the doors open, sure enough the little old church ladies would come in and want to buy cheep nylon yarn, which we did not carry. Most would come in look around, ask for what we did not carry and leave in a huff when we said we did not carry that. We soon had more and more customers coming in for our special made yarns, from natural fiber, and most all of them came from out of town. We then bought another building next door and expanded our yarns and added sweaters, antiques, and more fiber related items. We did very well, but still most of our customers came from out of town. And even our own downtown business owners would not stop by very often, and we ate in town, banked in town, bought lumber in town, bought flowers for funerals in town. So I really think america has gotten to use to buying cheep and out of town. Don`t know if the downtowns will ever pick back up, unless it ever gets way to expensive to drive to Wally world to buy cheep.( by the way we did sell our fiber mill, out of town, closed out the store, and sold the last of the two buildings last fall. And I will never do it again.) >Thanks Marc

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Our Diversified Stock Portfolio: cows and calves, alpacas, horses, pigs, chickens, goats, sheep, cats ... and a couple of dogs...
http://springvalleyfarm.4mg.com

Its been around a long time too!

Quote from Wikipedia
"Customers at Piggly Wiggly entered the store through a turnstile and walked through four aisles to view the store’s 605 items sold in packages and organized into departments. The customers selected merchandise as they continued through the maze to the cashier."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggly_Wiggly

That may actually happen if Cap and Trade ever passes. Gas will be too expensive to drive 20 miles to shop at Wally.

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I hope walmart fails, and we can get back to small town america. Would help this country out..



Jeff

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"Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death" Patrick Henry, March 23rd, 1775

There are WAY too many walmarts. They are annoying!

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There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for a man-Winston Churchill

Your true character is what you are when nobody is looking.

Netflix

Amen.

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"I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else."
- G. K. Chesterton

funny i pay a buck to rent a video and movie gallery is still 3 bucks for two vids and two nights.....

Not to mention most small towns have big taxes for mainstreet shops, wallymart on the otherhand gets breaks and incentives to lure them in just because it wil add a few dozen new minimum wage jobs to the economy.

so the small towns want to get rid of downtown good for them on the tax thing my home town simply forbid Walmart to move in. they limited store hours and store size. now everyone drives 30 min to get their stuff

Wish my town would do that. Instead they want to be a carbon copy of the trendy rich folk town nearby. When wallymart comes in the local shops dry up, and when that happens the trendy overpriced services that are next to useless in a working life come in. Trendy overpriced luxury is the first thing a sensible person cuts out their budget when money goes downhill plus the tax money the town has been irresponsibly spending goes downhill.

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maybe we can bring back buggy whips and 8 track tape players too.

Competition is glorious. It weeds out the weak, the inefficient, the complacent and the reactionary. It also provides the best value for the consumer. Only ineffectual elitists extol the virtue of the defeated.

If only there were some real competition. Doesnt happen when competitors are reduced to a handful and they all use same buisiness model. Also "best value for the consumer" isnt necessarily the item with the lowest initial cost or the most advertising hype. Only fools extol the virtue of so-so pricing on overhyped bottom of the barrel low quality goods. Its good for the stockholder and the CEO bonuses, not good for the consumer.

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"What would you do with a brain if you had one?" -Dorothy

"Well, then ignore what I have to say and go with what works for you." -Eliot Coleman

Business reacts to consumers not the other way around. It cost more to produce "green"/organic items yet even major businesses, even Wal Mart, are selling them. Why? Because consumers want them and are willing to pay the extra cost. On the other hand because consumers are willing to buy cheaply made items as long as they don't cost too much there are going to be businesses out there to supply them.

The Mom & Pop business model is dead. It died a natural death it was not murdered by Wal Mart any more than the buggy industry was murdered by Ford or GM. Its not extinct because there will always be niche markets which high volume-low profit stores like Wal Mart, Lowe's, Tractor Supply, etc will not fill.

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Remember, when seconds count. . .
the police are just MINUTES away!

Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. . .Davy Crockett

What a hubristic statement.

Someday we're going to wake up and discover that there were other virtues besides efficiency that we should have been promoting. That there were other values besides ruthless competitive energy and a lust for profit that might have saved America.

The man who shops at Walmart is either a man who cares more about saving a buck than he does about watching his neighbor the butcher, the tailor, or the grocer starve to death, or a man who doesn't put any thought into what he wears on his back, fills his house with, or puts in his mouth.

Neither man is a man I'd care to know.

I believe in buying local. You save gas, and you get to help out your neighbors. If you always shop at the large stores, what will you do when you need something quickly and your local store has closed?

http://www.businessreport.com/news/2...ka-mims-gnit1/

This is a short story about a local woman whose business uses a local manufacturer even though the monetary cost is higher than manufacturing abroad. A local manufacturer can provide benefits valuable to the retailer. Competing head to head with WM on price alone is a no win game. One needs to figure out what they can provide of value to the consumer that which WM is unable or unwilling to provide.

You seem to have it backwards. To get the things I need at 'local' stores I'd have to drive to the hardware store, then to the shoe shop, then to the grocery store, the hobby store and then stop by the auto part store. Or I can drive to Wal Mart and get my hinges, new tennies, milk, bread, hamburger, tacky glue, googly eyes, oil, oil filter and air filter with one stop. Tell me how buying local save me gas?

As I have said Mom & Pop stores are a dieing breed, just as the buggy stores were after the auto started becoming popular. Now with "site to store" shopping which allows you to order dang near anything online and have it sent to your local big box store without any shipping charge you are going to see more and more M&P stores go belly up.

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Remember, when seconds count. . .
the police are just MINUTES away!

Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. . .Davy Crockett

There you go. I have a near perfect example of how a store can do this. I'm looking to buy a new CCW handgun. In my search I have found one store, Store 3, which sells it for about $390. Another store, Store 6, which sells it for about $650. How does Store 6 stay in business? Because when you buy a weapon at Store 3 you get the weapon and whatever the manufacture includes with it. Store 6 sells you the weapon and gives you 100 "free" rounds of ammo, offers a "free" gun safety class, allows you to swap the weapon for a different caliber or even different weapon within a set period of time, offers "free" usage of their indoor gun range for a period of time.

Both stores are making money because they are not competing for the same market.

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Remember, when seconds count. . .
the police are just MINUTES away!

Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. . .Davy Crockett

and more and more jobs going to China

WalMart -- killing America one store at a time