Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Go Wal-Mart Go

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Nathan Odle wrote:

> 
> On Apr 5, 2004, at 8:43 AM, Heivilin, Jim wrote:
> >
> > Generally speaking ./ is not one of my top, most reliable,
> > unbiased news reporting locations.  But that's just a personal
> > opinion.
> 
> Agreed.  In this case the actual source was the NY Times, which is
> admittedly also unreliable much of the time despite being the
> "newspaper of record".

The NYT isn't (yet) unreliable, just less reliable than you would 
like given the degree to which other papers and media outlets have 
pulled out of the news-gathering field and into the 
press-release-rewriting field.
 
[snip]

> On the contrary, I'm a fan precisely because I *respect* many of
> their business practices.  They've taken great advantage of
> economies of scale, for one.  They're also unbelievably efficient
> with their logistics.  Their ordering/fullfillment system is
> UNBELIEVABLE.

And if allegations surrounding some of their labor policies are 
true, those are pretty unbelievable as well.  I'm a big fan of 
businesses moving their cost structure down to as low a level as is 
legal and moral, but no lower than that.  Unlike many people, I 
don't really shed too many tears about people deciding to shop at 
Wal*Mart rather than other retailers as a matter of principle.
 
> Now, this isn't to say that they don't have some shadier
> practices, i.e. mislabeling things "Made in the USA" or
> (allegedly) employing people with the knowledge that they're
> illegal immigrants, but sorry - you have to take the good with the
> bad.

Baloney.  An organization as highly engineered as Wal*Mart can 
ABSOLUTELY get rid of 95% of these "accidental" screw-ups.  It's 
exactly because we KNOW that Wal*Mart can control its own behavior 
so extremely well that makes these kinds of things less acceptable, 
especially when they are in the position to swing the market around 
like it were a game of "crack-the-whip".  I agree with you 
completely that the low-cost structure of Wal*Mart has saved people 
a ton of money, and that this is a good thing.  But it is, as always 
with businesses, an incidental result of Job #1, which is maximizing 
return to the stockholders.

jking


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