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I've not personally observed Wal-Mart raising their prices after driving the competition away

Just wait until they actually drive away their competition. They're general retail; wait until there's no other retailers.

Then when prices are jacked up, there's an opportunity for competition driving prices down again. I don't know of a place that has a Walmart but not a Target, a Sam's Club but not a Costco. There's Aldi and Amazon too. Last week I bought an item from a local store but after seeing Amazon selling it a lot cheaper, with "free shipping", I returned it.

Falcon

That isn't likely to happen. Wal-Mart's niche is cheap disposable crap. People who are willing to pay more money for a quality product will always have some place else to go. Wal-Mart might manage to kill K-Mart one of these days but they aren't likely to kill Men's Warehouse. They might kill Aldis but they'll never touch Wegmans. They cater to different market segments.

It's a cake with fruit in it, and no, it's not a fruitcake. Not the fruitcake everyone's thinking of, anyway.

FWIW, Aldi sells imported German stollen around Christmastime. They're pretty good, and they'll certainly dispose you of the idea that stollen are fruitcakes.

But what about the supply?, if rate of outsourcing continues to increase at this current rate, by 2015 , all jobs (except for the Restaraunt Jobs) will be outsourced overseas, and even the restaraunt jobs will not be safe, because who would be going out to eat because people will be struggling to get the cheapest of the cheap food at places like Aldi and with idiotiotic Conservative Republicans controlling washington, Minimum wage, Social Securtity, Overtime, welfare, anything else will be abolished to please the Rich in Corporate America.

This phone has moved to the upper region of my DO NOT BUY list.

Yea, have you noticed that cellphones have already slid into the uncool category for the star-bellied sneaches? Maybe it's the fact that every shopper at ALDI (is yacking away on a phone nowdays, or that they've become so ubiquitous.

Certainly, the next level of cool will be how one manages life without a phone. Now, a phone that stays at home and gets me out of boring meetings... that's cool.

*scoove*

I worked in a grocery store for a while (Kroger) and shopped there as well.

I cannot even begin to explain the intense, mind-numbing rage I felt after hearing the same, mind-numbing ads on the PA system every minute of every day for months on end.

"OMG, I'm BOB BUTLER! This is 'SmartSource Radio'!"

Gahhhhhhhh

There was this one ad for "Fresh California Asparagus" that would literally play nonstop for months. It took all the willlpower I had not to rip the entire PA system from the wall and throw it under the wheels of some Idiot Housewife's SUV, letting it's boundless stupidity be shattered by the same stupid customers that drove everyone insane.

I think if this, and other new methods of advertising in grocery stores takes hold there will be a mass-uprising of employees driven mad by their endless exposure to marketing BS.

Now, I shop at Aldi.

ZERO in-store advertising. The ultimate in no-frills shopping. They make you pay for the grocery bags and put a deposit down on a cart you take for crying out lout.

But, you do pay next to nothing for really, reallly good no-name brand food.

From the article:

"Dr. Greg Landsberg, a Brown University physicist who works at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., is part of a team planning for black hole production."

Batavia is also the home of Aldi. It's interesting that we're expecting a city to control the black holes the make, when the most disgusting refried beans ever produced come from the same town!