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Wal-Mart Squeezing Record Labels to Cut CD Prices
Raindance writes "RollingStone.com has a revealing article detailing how retail giant Wal-Mart is making loud noises about throwing its weight around in order to get significantly better bulk prices on CDs. Says one industry executive, 'This wasn't framed as a gentle negotiation, it's a line in the sand -- you don't do this, then the threat is [your product is dropped].' This is the first time a big player has attempted this sort of hardball move on the labels, and the labels may be forced to deal, as Wal-Mart sells 1 out of every 5 retail CDs. Monopoly one, meet monopoly two."
Tensions are not as high now as they were last winter, but making sure Wal-Mart is happy remains one of the music industry's major priorities.
How about making the customers happy? Personally, I can't believe that 1 out of 5 CDs are sold in Walmarts. I can't stand their stores. I absolutely DREAD entering one. They aren't clean, they aren't friendly after you pass the greeter, and they aren't someplace that I want to shop for music as it's just usually a mess and full of people.
Why not concentrate on making music available for less money somewhere that I might want to buy it instead of worrying about making sure Walmart is happy.
Virtually no industry executives would publicly comment about their company's relationship with Wal-Mart. But off the record, many record-industry executives shared their concerns. "I don't think there is a music supplier in America who really enjoys doing business with Wal-Mart," says one major-label rep.
Awww, are we supposed to feel sorry for them? Am I supposed to shed a tear from the corner of my drying eyes that they don't like something? Here's the river... Notice it's dry.
I don't like dealing with either company and I certainly don't think that Walmart is going to bat for the consumer. They are only doing this to make themselves richer. We aren't exactly benefiting by buying a $10 CD.
Wal-Mart is like no traditional record seller. Unlike a typical Tower store, which stocks 60,000 titles, an average Wal-Mart carries about 5,000 CDs. That leaves little room on the shelf for developing artists or independent labels.
I was at Walmart recently buying something I couldn't find at Target. I happened to stop into the electronics section while my fiancé did some shopping elsewhere. Perhaps I wasn't looking in the right spots but I wasn't finding anything by developing and independent artists. If anything it was most older music that wasn't exactly getting radio play. I saw the typical teenybopper crap but nothing that I would consider new and exciting.
"When you're buying CDs for twelve dollars and selling them for ten like Wal-Mart, it makes the rest of us look like we're gouging the customer, when we're not," says Don Van Cleave, head of the Coalition for Independent Music Stores, a retail consortium. "It's supertough to compete with that price point."
Most independent stores I have gone to shop for music in are charing $16+ for a CD. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you.
"They proposed it to a bunch of artists and managers, but everyone was worried that we are sending a message that instead of the sixteen-track album we sold, those nine extra songs were filler," says a label executive.
You sent the message when we bought your shit music for $16+ and found that 14 of the songs were filler. Walmart didn't help to spread that message... Your crappy albums did.
Its about time that someone stood up to those thugs and gave them what's what.
I'm still not buying any more RIAA CDs, Walmart or elsewhere.
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Two wrongs sometimes do make a right.
Which one am I supposed to ridicule?
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meet Evil Empire 2.
Make it difficult to know who to BOOOOH! at!: Ugly Sister 1 (speciality: cutting wages to the bone and destroying local stores) or Ugly Sister 2 (speciality: suing young children and pensioners).
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
...treat others as you would like to be treated. Enjoy the seed you sowed RIAA (and members)!
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At the end of the day the profits will move from one company to the other. Walmart can pass these reductions along to the end user when the cd is 10 years old and nobody wants it..
good for them..
Capitalism can work if the big boys are greedy enough to turn on each other!
Unfortunately, someone is going to try to do this to Microsoft and when the dust settles, Bill Gates will still be there smiling.
You'd think the 5 major countries that use the most oil could form a bargaining voice powerful enough to counter OPEC in this same way....speaking of dangerous challenges.
Maybe they'll hook up. Wal-Mart would be like, "Damn, girl, you look all sexy and stuff". The RIAA would be all, "Yo, you want somma dis?".
You know, the could have little monopoly babies or something.
Of course, probably not. Wal-Mart might be hideous, but the RIAA looks like some cancerous mole on the butt of a pig.
Now I'm all confused. Am I supposed to be rooting for the corporation that drives all the mom & pop stores under? Can't root for the record companies...
What to do, what to do?
Walmart does not sell 'warning label' CDs, and alot of my collection have that scarlet letter on them. This will hopefully get the record labels to finally reduce the prices, like they promised over a year ago. Then I can go to Circuit City and pick up some good, dirty music.
It's kind of like being a mouse watching two professional wrestlers fighting over a hoagie.
"Ooo look! Crumbs!
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
If WalMart doesn't stock an extremely wide range of music, it will not be taken seriously as a place to get music. To be honest, I'm surprised it is taken seriously at all anyway, given the fact the music it sells tends to be the bleeped versions anyway.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
and...
1. Give the RIAA a taste of their own medicine.
2.
3. Profit!
The anti-corporate crowd hates Wal-Mart so much, they can't see this as good. The $10 price point (Reminds me of good old Discord Records) works for me. Who cares how we get it. I don't shop at wal-mart, but I expect this price pressure to affect others. $10 leaves more than enough for profit. It takes a bully to bully a bully.
I really dont think you could label Walmart as a monopoly by any stretch of the word. THere are plenty of competing businesses, Walmart is jsut the biggest.
...there was some way to trade Wal-Mart on Napster--the ORIGINAL Napster.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Nothing like having to take it as well as dish it out.
Ironically, if they give in and sell cheaper it will probably result in MORE money for all involved, since people will be able to buy more CDs without feeling quite so ill at the prices.
Can't say I'm real happy about Walmart having so much power though. Frankly I don't trust any business with so much power. But I will say I'm inclined to worry about Clear Channel more than Walmart, since for most of Walmart's products the barrior to entry in the market isn't unthinkably high.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Walmart does it to ALL of their manufacturers. Perhaps this one may deserve it.
If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us.
Making a profit on a 33% mark-up is gouging? Sheesh, I had no idea that CDs should be sold for one penny more than they were purchased.
I can't stand [Walmart]. I absolutely DREAD entering one. They aren't clean, they aren't friendly after you pass the greeter, and they aren't someplace that I want to shop for music as it's just usually a mess and full of people.
I think it depends on where you're at. Most of the Walmarts I use are Super-Walmarts in Wisconsin. They are always clean, pretty friendly, and very spacious. Yet when I was on vacation in St. Louis, I was in a normal sized Walmart that was at least 10 times over capacity. They were in serious need of a store upgrade and a few extra stores in the area.
So you may find that different people have different experiences with going into Walmarts. Big city people will probably hate them (lots of negativity toward them here in Chicago) while the less populated areas will love them.
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Sorry. 1 in 5 is not a monopoly at all. A major player, obviously, but not a monopoly. Walmart has been doing this type of price squeezing on suppliers for years. It's how they got where they are. If the major labels didn't see this coming, they're pretty foolish.
In the blue corner we have a gorilla weighing in at 600 lbs! The Recording Industry!!!!! In the red corner we have another gorilla weighing in also at 600 lbs!!!! Wal-Mart!!!! Announcer1, "This bout is expected to go the full 15 rounds and the odds makers are expecting a split decision that will just end up costing every one more money one way or another." Announcer2 "Yes, but we have seen a lot of this pre-fight hype before."
My
though many of you hate walmart for a bunch of good reasons, if you do not sell your CD in walmart, you can not top the billboard charts. Artists have changed core elements of their music/art because walmart said they wouldn't sell it if they didn't. This might actually lower prices for some independant music resellers, though unlikely. Them walmart will just ask for an even lower price. The fact remains that walmart has such a huge purchasing power, that little stores can not compete.
Does walmart still force cd's to be edited there?
That's 20% of all CD sales. Wal-Mart is a monopoly for very different reasons (i.e. killing off all competition in rural and suburban communities).
Well, make up your mind ...
Do you want the RIAA asking for higher pricing [see the many stories about price fixing & the lame settlement that followed]
Or
Do you want lower prices?
I hardly see how lower prices is a negative effect of a monopoly.
This is NOT Walmart's OWN product - they do not also control the content of this product - IE as Microsoft does with Internet Explorer.
Microsoft abused a monopoly by distributing a product for free, a product that was an essential component to the OS, but was also competition to other software. They controlled the development, quality, and distribution.
Walmart is only controlling ther distribution.
I see this as a net gain for online music stores to be able to negotiate better bulk pricing and for small record shops to use a negotiating chip as well.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
That's the way the world of capitalism works...
...some lawsuits, and then all of your local Wal-Marts will come complete with "The RIAA Store" located right next to the instore McDonalds.
A few more "negotiations"
While I don't agree with this practice, I am glad to see it getting turned on the record companies now, since they've been ripping me and other consumers off for years. Let the jackals tear each other to pieces...
Sigh... here we go:
...and who made you buy the CD? If you don't like the price, don't buy it. No one has a gun to your head, and you certainly don't need a CD to survive.
How about making the customers happy? Personally, I can't believe that 1 out of 5 CDs are sold in Walmarts. I can't stand their stores. I absolutely DREAD entering one. They aren't clean, they aren't friendly after you pass the greeter, and they aren't someplace that I want to shop for music as it's just usually a mess and full of people.
Making the customer happy? Wal-Mart is their customer. You would be Wal-Mart's customer.
And if you don't like Wal-Mart, don't shop there. Your personal experience isn't exactly scientific proof that Wal-Mart sucks, there are plenty of people (myself included) that shop there because the employees on the whole are friendly and because their prices are incredible.
Why not concentrate on making music available for less money somewhere that I might want to buy it instead of worrying about making sure Walmart is happy.
Because they have a responsibility as a company to maximize their profits. So does Wal-Mart. Why should they make it available for less money if they can charge more and you'll still pay for it? Do you know anything about business?
I was at Walmart recently buying something I couldn't find at Target. I happened to stop into the electronics section while my fiancé did some shopping elsewhere. Perhaps I wasn't looking in the right spots but I wasn't finding anything by developing and independent artists. If anything it was most older music that wasn't exactly getting radio play. I saw the typical teenybopper crap but nothing that I would consider new and exciting.
Do you ever consider anyone else's point of view? Reading through all of your comments, all I see is that they are all super-biased and don't actually involve any rational thought. You are a selfish, elitist prick. Just because you don't like the music being sold at Wal-Mart doesn't mean that it sucks. There are plenty of people buying those discs (or Wal-Mart wouldn't stock them!), so maybe you should think about that for a minute.
Most independent stores I have gone to shop for music in are charing $16+ for a CD. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you.
evil adrian
Meet the Super Ultra-Plaid Dark Side of the Force. Frankly, it's astonishing that it will take a WalMart to do what all the folks on this site and others haven't with three years of complaining. But in WalMart I trust on this one. They are many times more powerful that the RIAA, and will squash them like a bug.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Most independent stores I have gone to shop for music in are charing $16+ for a CD. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us.
Do you honestly think that a mom and pop record store is buying discs in the same volume at the same price as the largest retail juggernaut in the history of this planet?
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
The cost of carrying 60,000 cds instead of just five is tremendous assuming you don't want to be constantly stocked out. Granted, I buy all my music on the 'net and none of it from major labels, now, so I'm not necessarily supporting the old model, but if people want to find those other 55,000 CDs in a store, they're going to have to pay more. No gouging about it.
Read jack phelps dot net
is they have good prices, they have hte lowest of any grocier in my area including all the local ones
however any company that encourages their employees to apply for welfare and foodstamps as walmart does is off my christmas card list
Am I the only one cynical enough to think that the difference in bulk prices now and in the future will only go to line the pockets of WalMart itself, leaving the consumer with ever more highly priced music?
a snob and a music snob? i couldnt of begun to imagine !
yeah the RIAA does suck...
Because they'll probably do this next.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
This is the first time a big player has attempted this sort of hardball move on the labels, and the labels may be forced to deal, as Wal-Mart sells 1 out of every 5 retail CDs.
It scares me just how big Walmart is. What happens when Walmart succeeds? You think the record labels are simply going to drop the prices across the board? Of course not, they are only going to do it or Walmart. And then more people will buy CDs at Walmart because they are cheaper than elsewhere, making Walmart even more powerful.
The sole reason why the record labels are so powerful is because they are fundamentally a monopoly. It doesn't matter if you can buy music from an indie record label if your favourite band is signed with a major record label. There is no competition. It's even worse because the major record labels have formed a cartel.
What I would like to see is a shortening of the copyright term to something realistic like 14 years. Then people could legitimately make money and compete with the major labels by selling public domain works. Right now, for music that the public actually want to listen to, the public domain is practically nonexistent. And don't give me any crap about the RIAA training us to like Britney Spears. I like lots of artists signed to major record labels.
Barring that (hey, with Disney's deep pockets, no music will ever enter the public domain again), I would like to see regulation of these monopolies. The artist should keep the copyright, and be forbidden from signing exclusive contracts with the record companies. That way, if a record company has excessively high profit margins, another record company can come in and sign up their artists and undercut them. The free market in action - this is how it is supposed to work, competition is good for the public. If the government insists on screwing it up with copyright, then the best they can do is offset the negative effects with regulation.
Oh, and one last thing:
Wal-Mart sells 1 out of every 5 retail CDs.
Bullshit. Perhaps they sell one in five retail CDs in the USA, but not worldwide.
Did you know that only wal-mart can sell products in wal-mart stores? That?s right. Only wal-mart can sell products in wal-mart stores. 100%. And you know what else? 100% of wal-mart's profits go just to wal-mart! Can you believe that? All 100% of wal-mart's profits go to wal-mart. Something must be done!
My guess is that the music industry will be forced to reduce their prices and Walmart will make a bigger profit.
Of course, I'm just being really cynical. In the long term it may work out better but for the moment, I'm saying pessimistic.
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The only people Wall Mart is good for are their shareholders. Their vendors think their getting into a huge market, but then see their margins get squeezed into oblivion. Their shoppers who decide where to shop on price alone find their downtown turn ghost town and wonder where all the manufacturing jobs went.
Wal-Mart and the RIAA suck
Come on guys. I know most of you hate Wal-Mart. But this article isn't about how they pay low salaries, make employees work overtime or whatever your complaints are.
Let's for once be glad a move was made in the direction we want. Even if it's WalMart. If this works out, and WalMart isn't all too greedy to keep all the aditional profit to themselves, well, then prices should go down to the end customer.
I for one would like that.
You obviously didn't read the headline let along the article, since Wall-Mart sells 1 out of every 5 CDs you better believe they are taken seriously.
Just because you don't take them seriously doesn't really ammount to a hill of beans!
-=Linsys=-
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Personally, I can't believe that 1 out of 5 CDs are sold in Walmarts.
...to shop for music it's just usually a mess and full of people
Whaddya think all those people are doing in the music section of Walmart? Jerking off?
If Walmart truly sells every 1 out of 5 CDs sold, it should simply start signing major artists directly. That way Walmart could keep even more of the profits.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Walmart that was at least 10 times over capacity
Walmart has a monolopoly on the Third dimesion. If my house could store 10 times its capacity than I would be rich as them. Those b*s!e^#s having a monopoly on such a comondity - it should be FREE!
I hate Walmart's Business practices...
I hate the RIAA's price fixing...
I like cheaper music prices....
*Head explodes from the logical paradox*
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
i...i....i don't know which one to support...this is worse then the election...
Personally, I can't believe that 1 out of 5 CDs are sold in Walmart. [...] Why not concentrate on making music available for less money somewhere that I might want to buy it [...]
So, you have a hard time believing that Walmart constitutes 20 percent of their sales, and you also don't understand why they don't concentrate on the 0.000000001% of sales that are attributable to *you*? Have I got that right?
Monopoly one, meet monopoly two.
You are completely misusing the word. Walmart is a leader in the incredibly competative retail sector. They got that way by being maniacly efficient and offering low prices on goods people need. They compete with other strong retailers (Target, Sears, Home Depot ...) everyday
to the benefit of everyone. To make money they require
volume. To create volume Walmart
must offer low prices. The RIAA is under
the same market pressures as any other Walmart
supplier.
an ill wind that blows no good
Isn't WalMart evil? Despite selling products for less money and letting people get more for less?
"Personally, I can’t believe that 1 out of 5 CDs are sold in Walmarts."
The thing is, nearly 1 out of 5 *anythings* are sold by Walmart. They are big on a scale most people can't imagine.
We view "entertainment" industries as big, but really, companies like Walmart dwarf them. They just aren't in the news every day like the movie and record industry. They chug along making billions of dollars without drawing attention to themselves.
Wal-Mart has 3500+ domestic stores, and nearly 1500 international units. They pull in over $60 BILLION dollars per quarter and $2 billion of that is PROFIT.
Walmart has so much purchasing power with wholesalers that this current story is just everyday business. However, this time they happened to target a branch of the media, who tend to yell and scream louder than most industries when *anything* happens to them.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
It depends on what part of the country you're from. Here in the North-East, we're not as affected by the Walmart monopoly. But I've got relatives that live in Florida, and they don't say "Store" or "Supermarket" anymore.
... I need to run to the Walmart". "Oh, we need a new TV ... I need to head up to the Walmart."
They say, "Oh, we're out of soda
Walmart is ubiqitious in some parts of the country. They're the second highest employer in the country, behind the government. Frankly, I'm surprised it's not a higher ratio.
If Walmart wins will that pass the savings on to the consumer or do something for their horribly treated workers like give them health care?
Probably neither, why should we care.
Just two big behemoths fighting over a scrap of plunder
From the end of the article...
$0.17 Musicians' unions
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties
$0.80 Retail profit
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists' royalties
$1.70 Label profit
$2.40 Marketing/promotion
$2.91 Label overhead
$3.89 Retail overhead
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
Whaddya think all those people are doing in the music section of Walmart? Jerking off?
The music section is located in the electronics section which is small and usually full of people nearly shoulder to shoulder.
Reading through all of your comments, all I see is that they are all super-biased and don't actually involve any rational thought. You are a selfish, elitist prick.
No offense, but having a strong opinion is not a crime. You're certainly not going to change that opinion by throwing around insults, either. The guy may have his problems (or he may not, I don't know), but intelligent discourse is a much better way of getting him to change his mind. For all you know he may be a very intelligent person who you would often agree with, or at least enjoy debating with.
Sorry to interrupt, carry on.
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Wal-Mart sells 1 out of every 5 retail CDs.
...Wal-Mart carries about 5,000 CDs.
:/
So the LARGEST CD vendor has the SMALLEST selection. Yeah, THAT makes sense
Incredibly priced dog shit is still dog shit.
If the record labels drop the price on CDs for wal-mart (say $10 for a CD) and they keep the price the same for Vintage Vinyl (say it's still $15), then eventually vintage vinyl is going to go out of business. Vintage vinyl won't be able to turn a profile on music sales since they don't purchase 2.3 ba-zillion cds at once.
Either way, we're screwed.
I'm not a doctor, but I play one in bed.
I just thought I'd tack something onto that post--a bit of math in case you don't understand my point. Purchasing 60,000 CDs at one unit each is $720,000. If you expect a store to shell out enough to carry ten each of those most-popular 5,000 CDs and still carry one each of the rest, you're talking $1,260,000. At EACH store branch! Up front, with no chance of recouping most of them, offering that variety for you as a customer so you can have what you clearly desire: choice!
Assuming they want to stock enough to not lose sales to the store-next-door if they sell one of those 55,000 albums of which they only stock one, they need to tack on another $660,000 in stock. If you were to go try and borrow that kind of money, it'd cost you all your profits just to pay the interest!
I seriously cannot believe you fault indie-er record stores for charging what they charge, man. It's really, really pathetic.
Read jack phelps dot net
I can't believe that 1 out of 5 CDs are sold in Walmarts.
I saw the typical teenybopper crap but nothing that I would consider new and exciting.
This is the same demographic that made Titanic the box office "phenom" that it was.
I wasn't finding anything by developing and independent artists
I don't think the masses of America buy stuff by developing and inde artists. So I can see how 1 in 5 are sold at walmart.
see your quote below to reinforce that many people buy music from walmart.
it's just usually a mess and full of people.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Monopoly one, meet monopoly two.
Factually incorrect about the monopoly, at least in Walley-World's case, but evidence that in most cases capitalism works this sort of thing out. The only alternative is paying $300 for CDs that must praise the Peoples Republic of America.
"How about making the customers happy? " They are. Wallmart is there biggest customer. You do not buy records from the record companies you buy them for a store that buys them from a record company. As to Wallmart not carrying anything from new artists. You have got to be kidding. Wallmart provides what most of it's customers want at a low price. They do not cater to people that want the best. Wallmart is the land of the OK. If you want good tools you buy them from a Snap On dealer or get Craftsman tools from Sears. You need s screwdriver cheap you get it from Wallmart. You want a really good stereo you get it from a stereo store or on line. Want a cheap cd player Wallmart. So of you want Pop music you can get it cheap from Wallmart. The question is will Wallmart lower the price of CDs if they get the price drop from the record companies to make Wallmart customers happy?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
lol. I remember marking stuff up 100%. $12 cost, $24.99. It's still a good deal when you think about it. Think about what the retailer has to pay for: rent, electric, water, employee salaries (managers, assistant managers, cashiers Christmas help), insurance, shipping, returns, snow removal and other maintenance, and new product. How is a record store supposed to pay all of that with a %33 markup? What a moron.
I hope Walmart really STICKS it too them!
I reset my case.
Some of those stories details how Wal-Mart abuses its position as the largest, wealthiest and subsequently most powerful retail chain in the world.
They have squeezed their suppliers enough that many suppliers have had no choice but to shut down all manufacturing operations in the United States and move those operations into foreign markets where they can continue to stay in business.
The option is either lose their largest customer and possibly enough revenue to shut down completely or shutdown all US Factories, put anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand American factory workers out of a job and stay in business. Business-wise, they have no choice but to comply with Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, that isn't good for the US workers that just lost their jobs.
You can say things like, "Well, those American workers should have learned to live with earning less money."
It's not all about just the money paid to an hourly worker. It's about the cost of benefits, cost of mandatory operation fees, like licenses, worker's compensation, unemployment office fees and a number of additional aspects that raise the cost of production in the US.
Then, you also have to take into account the minimum wage law. If you can have something produced overseas by workers that are fine with making, over the couse of a single day, the same amount that a highly skilled American manufacturing worker, like a Tool & Die Maker (Which is between $19 and $25 an hour), is paid for one hour. As a business, what are you gonig to do? Stay in business or go out of business?
Wal-Mart has done more to help decrease the number of available manufacturing jobs in the United States then most people think.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
"Paying fifteen dollars for a piece of music is a difficult value equation for customers."
WOW! Is it ever. Apparently Walmart marketers understand the music biz better than the music biz people.
At Wal-Mart, we're a commodity and have to fight for shelf space like Colgate fights for shelf space."
Which is why people go to walmart. Walmart is like a commodity store. Are we going to sell the new Eminem CD based on the "Intrinsic Value" of the liner notes or the number of hits on the CD?
Then the article says:
Unlike a typical Tower store, which stocks 60,000 titles, an average Wal-Mart carries about 5,000 CDs.
and then
. "When you're buying CDs for twelve dollars and selling them for ten like Wal-Mart, it makes the rest of us look like we're gouging the customer, when we're not," says Don Van Cleave, head of the Coalition for Independent Music Stores, a retail consortium. "It's supertough to compete with that price point."
Well, Don Van Cleave, there you go! Your message to consumers needs to be, your prices are higher, but they have to be because you carry a much larger inventory and your large selection is a service your store is providing. Have tastes that go beyond the top of the charts? Well guess what, your music is in our store, and for the selection we have our price while still not the best, they are very fair. Now you're not selling a commodity. You are selling a service. You are selling expertise that perhaps your music staff has. But instead, you people try to do the same thing - push the hits.
My girlfriend took a temporary position at a cocunuts store here in town. And let me tell you, they don't get the sell based on value thing. They push the hits, hits, hits. The kind of CDs you will listen to for a month or two and then forget. How is that kind of CD worth $15? It's not. She has pretty diverse tastes, and has broken "company code" by playing other "non-corporate approved" kinds of music,a nd has had a lot of sucess selling it. She figures every time she plays something, even if it's old, she has 5 or 6 people that ask "What is this?It's interesting". And a lot of them buy it. Now imagine what could happen if the whole store's marketing was geared that way. You could sell a good amount of that older or lesser known stuff, for a higher price. And you could still take the hits, and trim the price way down, as a loss leader, to get people in the first place. Maybe you can't go sub-cost like walmart, but you can get down close.
Kudos to Walmart for beating the record industries margins down. As long as they only stock 5000 cds in each store, independent retailers should have no worries if they figure out how to position themselves correctly. The beauty of this is it could also force the record companies to sell to distributors and record stores for a lower price, actually helping the smaller guys.
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
Monopoly has a lot of definitions, not all of which apply in all cases. Walmart often has a monopoly in a market area. They drive out the Mom & Pop businesses in small towns, removing any competition. In the area I live, central NJ, there are enough people that they their tactics aren't completely effective. But small towns, isolated from larger metropolitan areas, are areas that they have certainly been able to gain a monopoly.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
Heck, most individuals pay more in taxes than either they or their employer pay for benefits.
I'm not a big fan of Wal-Mart (having read Naomi Klein's No Logo), but in this case what are they doing: Trying to sell (mostly stupid pop) CDs cheap.
Of course there will be record executives saying
"I don't think there is a music supplier in America who really enjoys doing business with Wal-Mart,"
They want to earn as much money as they can - and have more or less succeeded in having a fixed price policy. Finally they get hit back by a major retailer.
As for the impact on independent retailers I can muster a bit more of sympathy, but my hope is that these businesses can make a living by having a much broader selection.
Consumers should be the ones making this kind of pressure. The retailers are in fact consumers from the Labels point of view. So in fact the people doing the pressure in this case are the consumers. This seems good and healthy capitalism at work to me, but I am not american so maybe I dont know jack about it.
Yup. The creepiest thing about those places is how they also have meeting centres, photo labs, halls, etc. This is the old Town Hall. The goal is that they become the only store in the community. Not just the only department store, or electronics store, or grocer - but the only store. They become the centre of town. The local Wal-Mart then dwarfs the government in power - they provide access to all goods for a community.
Consider this: you have one company that provides for all of the needs of the citizen in the town, and a lion's share of the citizens work for that company. How is this not a commune? Its like communism's evil twin!
Having dealt with Wal-Mart as a supplier, I can say that they definitely DO have leverage that seemingly can't be fought. Basically, they are the 800 pound gorilla that calls the shots. Don't like it? Then they won't carry the product.
From a CD-purchasing-consumer's perspective, this may sound great, but my problem with this is that it is easy to get caught up in anti-music industry sentiments while overlooking the fact that Wal-Mart can do this in just about any other industry too. Don't like the price of tires? Just threaten to drop the product. Don't like the price of milk? Just threaten to drop the product. Never mind that the price is already competitive with other, smaller businesses that don't have the leverage to "force" lower prices.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
One way that Wal-Mart makes more money on sales is they do this: 1) What you just described - be the only customer for a product maker. 2) Stop paying when they receive the product, only pay after a short time AFTER the product is sold! 3) During that time that the product is sold, that money goes into short term investments, and only then is it given back to the producers of the goods. On another note, Wal-Mart also has one of the most advanced distribution methods and this is one of the major reasons their products are so cheap.
Perhaps you should read before you type. The article said they had little room on the shelves for developing/independent artists...
Wait a minute... wasn't the industry supposed to be selling their CD's at a reduced cost now anyway because it now costs a miniscule amount of money to make per CD?
Not so long ago they were taken to court over the unchanging prices... so how does that play into this?
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
Why not concentrate on making music available for less money somewhere that I might want to buy it instead of worrying about making sure Walmart is happy.
While much of what you say about the stores are true, you should feel sorry for the folks trapped working there. I've worked at one, appalling is about the only word that comes close to describing how management treats employees. Many of the people there can't find other work, or Wal-mart pays more than anything else they can find. Wal-mart knows this and abuses it. I fully expect there to be lots more class-action lawsuits against the company in the near future, even with current ones they're getting worse if anything.
But the 1 in 5 figure is quite believable. While Wal-mart might not have as large a selection, their core customer base isn't looking for one. The CDs sell like proverbial hotcakes at even smaller Wal-marts, bigger ones move so many it's scary. Around here (Tennessee) there are very few chain record stores left. Of the two malls in the closest large city to me, there's one record store apiece. There are a few small retailers, but the biggest of those is a local used-CD chain (two locations).
On this one you're both right and wrong. Wal-mart is indeed wanting to make more money, but their entire business plan is to buy low and pass along the savings, keeping profit margins lower and making up their money by selling tons of the stuff. Anything Wal-mart can get cheaper will benefit consumers because then the consumers will get it cheaper. Granted Wal-mart's not doing it because they're some grand benefactor, but the end result helps consumers a bit. Actually I suspect that Wal-mart is pushing for this because the overwhelming consensus of their customers is that the CDs cost too much, even at Wal-mart's prices. (I worked in Electronics, you hear this constantly, although people still buy.)
I was at Walmart recently buying something I couldn't find at Target. I happened to stop into the electronics section while my fiancé did some shopping elsewhere. Perhaps I wasn't looking in the right spots but I wasn't finding anything by developing and independent artists. If anything it was most older music that wasn't exactly getting radio play. I saw the typical teenybopper crap but nothing that I would consider new and exciting.
Umm, did you not read the sentence you posted? It said it left little room, which is exactly what you found to be true. Wal-mart's not big on new and exciting though, they're big on selling decent stuff cheap and lots of it. Independent artists and developing artists don't fit that so it's no surprise they're absent.
It is interesting to note that Wal-mart doesn't handle the merchandising of the CDs itself, they hire a company that does it, so I'm not sure how much direct control Wal-mart has over exactly what is on the racks.
While it's hard to understand t
The Walmart's I've been to here in the midwest are usually acceptably clean, but most of the greasy people that shop there aren't. I think it depends if you go to one of the small-town ones with the Walmart signs constructed from surplus WW2 material, or if you go to one near a medium to large city (say, population > 50k). I've seen dirtier Walmarts in more rural areas.
As far as friendliness, I haven't had any more rudeness from Walmart employees than I've had from the likes of Target or local grocery stores. I suppose it helps that I only use self-checkout, but they need more self-checkout lanes. The lines are always long, and one person can run 4 lanes. It only makes sense. Why have 5 people running 5 lanes when you can have 5 people running 20 lanes? Same cost in wages, but your customers never have to deal with lines!
/wish all stores offered self checkout so I didn't have to interact with people as much
It's about time people stood up the RIAA and Wall Mart. I hope both sides lose this argument.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
Wow, what an angry post. But I think I see what's going on.
;)
I was at Walmart recently buying something I couldn't find at Target. I happened to stop into the electronics section while my fiancé did some shopping elsewhere.
Read: my fiancé couldn't find that sweater she wanted at Target, so she made me go to Wal-mart, where I killed time looking at DVD-burners while she was in the ladies' apparel.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Yeah, you're right. I did mess up. I apologize.
Tie that in with the fact that Wal-Mart operates on a "do it our way or you're out" mentality, and will not hesitate to give your competitor an internal "wal-mart monopoly" by only selling their product, and you're quicky doing whatever they say. Our company identifies that we lose money in cutting prices for Wal-Mart and meeting their ridiculous supply demands, but if we didn't play game with them they'd make sure in a second that our competitors could run us out of town.
Wal-Marts cut throat tactics should also give a clue as to why the music industry is putting out so much formulaic crap, because Wal-Mart refuses to put anything on the shelves unless it makes them a certain amount of profit in any given time. So only the big pop stars get pushed at Wal-Mart, which in turn means 20% of the market won't even know about other artists.
Umm. It's obvious you've never run a business. This markup barely covers overhead and people expenses. What do you expect them to pay their people with? Dorito's?
It's funny listening people complain that the Independent record stores are disappearing and then think those same stores should give their stuff away for free.
Money from heaven I guess.
I like to go onto the record to say I don't consider wal-mart to be a monopoloy per say. There are many other stores in competition with it, it's just that walmart puts everything under one roof where you may need to go to 1/2 stores otherwise and they sell cheap.
Target I would consider competitioin to walmart, k-mart too though they're not really competitive anymore. And then costco is in big competition with sams club. Pretty much whatever walmart sells, they'll be a bunch of other stores, namely lessor name stores, that sells them too.
I don't like shopping in Walmart too much but I love to take my car there for oil changes. They offer a really cheap price and I don't always have to wait a year and a half to get my car back..
does this to all their suppliers. That's why they have the lowest prices.
The problem comes when the supplier is doing so much business through Walmart that they rely on them, then when Walmart keeps asking them to reduce their prices, it drives the supplier out of business.
Cyberbite Networks - Web Hosting, Dedicated Servers & Colocati
Do you mind linking to the dupe if you can point one out?
Actually, being one who roast his own coffee beans, I can asssure you that your statement is false. The process of decafinating beans also removes essential oils from the beans, resulting in a lackluster flavor. It is chemically impossible to have decaf taste "just as good" as the good stuff. I'll leave it to you to google for the exact process because unlike other arrogant people on here, I am not a teacher.
I thought Wal-Mart was bad...
...but they're against the record companies...
...who are bad...
...which is good...
...which puts Wal-Mart on our side...
I'm soooo confused.
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
What's good for the consumer...the ones buying RIAA music that is...is that if Wal-Mart gets price concessions then every other retail distributor is going to be showing up wanting a cut. It about time the music industry got a taste of their own medicine. HA-HA! How does it taste now?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
After college I worked at a great independent bookstore for about 3 1/2 years, just at Burns Ignoble (Barnes & Noble) was starting to drop store everywhere.
More than once UPS, USPS, etc dropped off the wrong box in the shipping room, intended for B&N, we'd be opening boxes quickly usually and didn't always notice until we looked at the invoice. The discount a place like B&N gets over the independent is significant, like 8-12% more. This is a similiar situation with record stores.
When you're running close margins to begin with and your comptetitor is getting stock for 8-12% less than you, THAT's huge, and it's d*mn hard to compete. Sadly, that bookstore, after 45 years in business, closed this summer.
Also before you complain about costs, think about what independent media places (records & books) tend to offer; people who love their product, are knowledgeable about it, and MOST importantly, they support small presses/publishers/labels than the uber stores won't touch (including Target by the way, not just Wal-mart)
As independent record and book stored closes, so do the many small presses & labels. The store I worked at bought some great books from indie pubs, many of those are now out of business since Target, Wal-Mart and the like won't even talk to them. Those books are no longer available and those people lost their jobs.
Seriously, thing hard about where you buy things. Yes, I understand $2-3 more is a lot to some people, however, you are ultimately reducing your the choices and varieties of the music you hear and books you read. Sometimes being a consumer involves more than just the price of an item.
My 2 cents
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
Hello Mr Pot, I'm Mr Kettle. By the way, I couldn't help noticing that you're black...
Telling people that anyone who disagrees with you and attacks you is a troll after you post a comment full of attacks - attacks on the record industry, attacks on Wal-Mart, attacks on its staff, attacks on people who buy the music that it stocks, attacks on independent music stores - is a bit rich.
Let moderators decide for themselves how the comment should be moderated. If I've noticed anything in six plus years of reading Slashdot it's that people with mod points aren't shy of moderating down even the slightest personal insult.
In the meantime though, I suggest you learn to appreciate a few things, including the fact that Wal-Mart does just fine selling CDs you don't want to buy, that other people have different tastes to you and that's not a crime, and that independent stores sell CDs for $16 because that's what they need to do to survive.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I can't believe that 1 out of 5 CDs are sold in Walmarts != and full of people.
Look I am with you on Wal-Mart do not like shopping there, but I didn't like AOL either but the signed up a ton of people and the stock went up over 1000% in the 90's.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
>> I'm still not buying any more RIAA CDs, Walmart or elsewhere.
Of course, you realize that's "stealing" (by the RIAA's) definition. They have a right to your money, and by denying them your hard-earned cash you're just plain evil.
Now if the RIAA were intellectually honest (stop laughing, I'm trying to make a point) they would revise their annual "loss due to piracy" (e.g. "we lost 3 billion dollars to internet pirates this year...) statements downwards due to the lower retail costs. Of course, that wouldn't suit their agenda so don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen.
You may resume laughing, now.
Walmart has so much purchasing power with wholesalers that this current story is just everyday business.
It makes business sense to treat your high-volume repeat customers well... who would you want to please more?
The guy who pays 1% of your paycheck or the guy who pays 20% of your paycheck?
stocked up on lego toothbrushes for this reason..
Well... usually in communism, there's some sort of nominal promise that the communes and stuff belong to the People, not to the WalMart corporation.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Yeah, hey, Wal-Mart isn't looking to FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT and CRUSH THE EVIL RIAA with lower prices. This isn't for the benefit of the modern music lover.
/that/ when our profits are so thin!
/really/ win here sit on Wal-Mart's shareholders board.
They're looking to bottom-line everyone else, and they will. Who suffers?
The record companies? Not really, no. It's not like they're going to go out of business now or realize the error of their ways. They're already making posting more profits than they ever have, while actually shipping fewer CDs than in the recent past.
The artists are going to get their asses kicked by this. "Oh, hey, looks like we, the Mighty Record Label, are making less money on records now, thanks to the EVIL WAL-MART ENEMY, so we can't afford to pay you as much now (not that you were getting much of the profits to begin with). Sorry!"
Your local retailer? The awesome guy who knows your name and has that comfy record store that either has all the indie and eclectic artists you like but can't find elsewhere? Yeah, he's just had his nuts put in a vise because he can't bully distributors and Sony/EMI into cutting him breaks on bulk orders of a hundred gagillion copies of the latest J-Lo record.
I guess it's also a good time to keep Wal-Mart workers' wages and benefits down. I mean, profits on this segment of our product line are down this year! Raise? We can't afford
The only people who
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
No, it's not a monopoly, its the power to dominate, which sucks just as much. Bully in the schoolyard, etc.
The one with overwhelming power is almost always going to bruise, intentionally or not. Microsoft, US foreign policy, you name it.
In this case, just like the bully in the schoolyard, we can choose to ignore it and it will go away. Really I don't care about big record labels any more, and people can fight over the scraps for all I care while I seek independant music and sane, modern distribution methods.
Oh, how delicious this is!
The "typical" slashdotter is torn between hating big, bad WalMart and hating the Big, Bad Record Company.
The fact is that businesses operate to make a profit. Despite the fact that profit is considered a dirty word here, I would wager that anybody reading this article would certainly not turn down money handed to him. In this case, WalMart knows that it has bargaining power and is using it. That's business.
It would be foolish of them to ignore this bargaining power to get better prices (which might not necessarily show up on the retail sticker price), and foolish of us to expect them not to use it.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
I would disagree with this sentiment...
...
Walmart creates volume over margin sales...
Walmart SHOULD be able to come in and say
You sell "Mom & Pop Store A" this widget for X$ each per 50 ordered - giving you a 50% margin and giving them a 25% margin
We want to buy 50,000 of your widget [1000x MORE per month] than "Mom & Pop A" - your margin is 50% with them - we want it it be 40% for us
Do you understand that this DRAMATICALLY increases the profit, the employment, the scope of the company creating said widget?
I would rather sell 1 million of my items at $1 than 500,000 of my items for $2 - as long as I was making a profit and I could keep up with demand.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Well if the record company says no and Walmart drops cds, then one might expect to see a surge in the number of on-line sales. Sounds like a good reason for the labels to promote on-line sales.
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
Walmart is only about 1 out of 10 average things (they are about 8-9% of US retail sales. It's no surprise that they are above average in a loss leader catagory though. Size of a company is an odd measure, Walmart is huge in sales they swap with Exxon Mobil for most revenue, but Microsoft consistently makes more money than Walmart (on about 1/4 the revenues). Exxon generally makes more than both.
Keep in mind that the music market has historically operated with small costly stores (in malls and such) that stock a wide variety of albums (to get people in the stores) but make their money on say the top 200 selling albums that turnover (sell through inventory) much more rapidly than the others. Walmart tries to stock only the albums that sell (letting online sellers fulfill the remaining orders) and sells them below cost (also to get people in the store) in order to make money on all the high margin items they are selling. Nearly every business does this they sell certain things cheaply in order to increase sales of higher margin items. Fast food joints give away the burgers to make money on soda and fries. Fancier resturants try to break even on the food and make their money on wine. In software the real money is made on maintenance contracts rather than licensing. What surprises me is how much music Wal-Mart sells when so many titles are edited. Seems kinda pointless for Wal-Mart to even have a rap section, but I guess you never go broke underestimating American smarts.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Hidden Cost Of Wal-Mart Jobs
t %20study.html
t %20study.pdf
Use of Safety Net Programs by Wal-Mart Workers in California
Arindrajit Dube
UC Berkeley Institute for Industrial Relations
Ken Jacobs
UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education
from http://www.dsausa.org/lowwage/walmart/2004/walmar
A Study for the UC Berkeley Labor Center
August 2, 2004
Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the United States, with over one million workers. It is the largest food retailer and the third largest pharmacy in the nation. The company employs approximately 44,000 workers in California, and has plans to expand significantly in the state over the next four years. Wal-Mart workers receive lower wages than other retail workers and are less likely to have health benefits. Other major retailers have begun to scale back wages and benefits in the state, citing their concerns about competition from Wal-Mart.
We estimate that Wal-Mart workers in California earn on average 31 percent less than workers employed in large retail as a whole, receiving an average wage of $9.70 per hour compared to the $14.01 average hourly earnings for employees in large retail (firms with 1,000 or more employees). In addition, 23 percent fewer Wal-Mart workers are covered by employer-sponsored health insurance than large retail workers as a whole. The differences are even greater when Wal-Mart workers are compared to unionized grocery workers. In the San Francisco Bay Area, non-managerial Wal-Mart employees earn on average $9.40 an hour, compared to $15.31 for unionized grocery workers--39 percent less--and are half as likely to have health benefits.
At these low-wages, many Wal-Mart workers rely on public safety net programs-- such as food stamps, Medicare, and subsidized housing--to make ends meet. The presence of Wal-Mart stores in California thus creates a hidden cost to the state's taxpayers.
This study is the first to quantify the fiscal costs of Wal-Mart's substandard wages and benefits on public safety net programs in California. It also explores the potential impact on public programs of Wal-Mart's competitive effect on industry standards.
Main Findings:
* Reliance by Wal-Mart workers on public assistance programs in California comes at a cost to the taxpayers of an estimated $86 million annually; this is comprised of $32 million in health related expenses and $54 million in other assistance.
* The families of Wal-Mart employees in California utilize an estimated 40 percent more in taxpayer-funded health care than the average for families of all large retail employees.
* The families of Wal-Mart employees use an estimated 38 percent more in other (non-health care) public assistance programs (such as food stamps, Earned Income Tax Credit, subsidized school lunches, and subsidized housing) than the average for families of all large retail employees.
* If other large California retailers adopted Wal-Mart's wage and benefits standards, it would cost taxpayers an additional $410 million a year in public assistance to employees.
For the complete study (840 KB pdf file):
http://www.dsausa.org/lowwage/walmart/2004/walmar
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
When someone on Slashdot admits he is wrong, a geek loses his virginity. God bless America!
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
It's not THAT crazy when you think about it. Itunes charges ~10$ for an album (which is only a digital copy). Here, you're recieving the hard copy, allowing you to rip it to lossless, or any other format you please without the restriction to using it on a single player. On top of that you're recieving a booklet with various things like lyrics which also costs money, jewel case, cd, etc... Well, that's just my two cents :)
The point was that Walmart is supposedly selling music by developing/independent artists. I said that I haven't seen anything like that in the Walmarts I have shopped in.
I don't think that was the point, I think the article said just the opposite.
Wal-Mart is like no traditional record seller. Unlike a typical Tower store, which stocks 60,000 titles, an average Wal-Mart carries about 5,000 CDs. That leaves little room on the shelf for developing artists or independent labels.
Sounds to me like they are saying Walmart stocks much less music than traditional music retailers so their shelves are dedicated to mainstream music they know they can sell.
Rampant Ninja related crimes these days...Whitehouse is not the exception
But when you buy music at Wal Mart, are you getting the real version or the censored but identically packaged version made especially for that store? (This is why you never see those 'explicit lyrics warning' stickers at Wal Mart -- they just don't give you a choice and force their censorship on you without your knowledge or consent.)
To do business with Wal-Mart is to invite death."
I think I saw it in a Wall Street Journal article at some point...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Actually, you misread the article. It says "...leaving little space for indy artists..." In American English, this means "...leaving essentially no space..."
The article definitely doesn't say Wal*Mart stocks indy artists.
You may not be a selfish, elitist prick, but you do need to read better.
Personally, I can't believe that 1 out of 5 CDs are sold in Walmarts.
and then you said
it's just usually a mess and full of people.
What did you think all those people were doing? Just wandering around in a daze? (I agree, that's what they _look_ like they are doing).
Seller, meet buyer
Telling people that anyone who disagrees with you and attacks you is a troll after you post a comment full of attacks - attacks on the record industry, attacks on Wal-Mart, attacks on its staff, attacks on people who buy the music that it stocks, attacks on independent music stores - is a bit rich.
I did not deserve to be called an "elitist prick". Perhaps a more appropriate statement would have been, "I don't agree with your opinions and here's why."
Let moderators decide for themselves how the comment should be moderated. If I've noticed anything in six plus years of reading Slashdot it's that people with mod points aren't shy of moderating down even the slightest personal insult.
Now there's an interesting comment. If I trusted that the moderators had the first clue about moderating I wouldn't have made the comment.
In the meantime though, I suggest you learn to appreciate a few things, including the fact that Wal-Mart does just fine selling CDs you don't want to buy, that other people have different tastes to you and that's not a crime, and that independent stores sell CDs for $16 because that's what they need to do to survive.
I suggest that you learn to appreciate what I wrote. Walmart does fine because they are a monopoly and have shoved out every competitor in every market.
Taste has nothing to do with this discussion.
Independent stores shouldn't deal with the RIAA then. If there is no one is willing to sell overpriced products something else will take its place.
OK, everyone, read the parent post where it says:
They pull in over $60 BILLION dollars per quarter and $2 billion of that is PROFIT
Now, while 2 billion bucks is a load of cash, 58 billion was spent in search of it. That's a margin of only 3.3%. It is NOT a profit of 33% as a post farther up claims with the illustration of a $12 CD being sold at $16. Walmart makes all of its money on razor thin margins. Yes, 3.3% is razor thin. Compare to, say, Intel, who pulls in a whopping 22.7% profit margin. Now THAT'S a huge margin of profit. Not Walmart and their piddly 3.3%, nevermind how many billions that 3.3% adds up to. Say what you want about the monolithic nature of Walmart and their heavy handed tactics with supplies but you cannot knock it on gouging or otherwise extraordinary profits.
Since Walmart is so big, they have some monopsony power: they (the buyer) can set the prices at which they buy. Since RIAA is an oligopoly, they set the prices at which they sell. ``Monopoly v. monopoly'' just doesn't make sense.
Really, it should be ``oligopsonist meet oligopolist'' since the RIAA is a cartel of producers.
See what I've been reading.
do it.
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
Warning: Sarcastic mode on
I'm sure the mom and pop stores love to sit on large stocks of CD's with limited audiences to sell to just so they can charge low prices that leave them little profit.
I think someone should actually have to own or be a part of a small business before actually commenting on one. It certainly changes your opinion after having your own time and money invested in the venture.
Rampant Ninja related crimes these days...Whitehouse is not the exception
Does this mean that our musicians will be outsourced to China due to cheaper labor?
... Obviously not.
This is one of the few industries that can withstand price reductions with little or no job loss. I am glad Wal-Mart is keeping the music industry in check. The price of a cheap plastic CD has hovered at $15 for two decades. We consumers deserve a price reduction.
I went to one of those 1/2 stores once. Compared to other stores, their prices were ---you guessed it---- half off!
Wal-Mart is not a monopoly. Being extremely efficient and taking advantage of economies of scale do not a monopoly make. Even in rural areas they face competition from Target, KMart, and to a lesser extent food stores and home improvement stores (Home Depot, Lowes).
:)
And given the relatively low barrier to entry for retail stores, if Wal-Mart ever tried to inflate their prices on some product thinking they had a monopoly, someone would start up a competing store that sold that product at a lower price.
Don't cry foul that nobody could ever charge as little as Wal-Mart because they buy in such volume- these savings still get converted to a lower price for the end-consumer. They'll still pay a lower price then what a low-volume store would have to charge. And guess who Wal-Mart's #1 customer is? People living paycheck to paycheck, the people who benefit most from having the lowest prices possible.
Now personally, I find Wal-Marts to be on the dirty side, overly crowded, not terribly helpful with customer service and generally distasteful; but of course I still shop there from time to time because they're so damn cheap
But I've got relatives that live in Florida, and they don't say "Store" or "Supermarket" anymore. They say, "Oh, we're out of soda ... I need to run to the Walmart". "Oh, we need a new TV ... I need to head up to the Walmart."
I have seen something similar. I used to live about a mile from both a Walmart and a Kmart. Both were on the same side of a major street in my city, seperated by a smaller side street. Both stores were about the same size and about the same age. Guess which had more visitors and cars in the parking lot? Walmart, by a factor of 10.
Walmart had a bit more stuff in the store than the "Big K" next door, but the prices were about the same. The largest difference was the amount of time required to stand in line to check out. There was always an open cashier at Kmart, but I usually had to wait 6+ minutes at Walmart. The other difference was the smell of the store. Kmart had a little ceasars pizza, which wasn't good. Walmart was worse, there always seemed to be a cloud of blue smoke from something burning in their little cafe near the front door.
Needless to say, I did 95% of my discount retail shopping at Kmart.
I recall reading in the Wall Street Journal a few years back that Wal-Mart had been pressuring movie studios to drop the prices of DVD significantly. Apparently, Wal-Mart wanted to sell DVD's at the $3-$5 range because they felt that they could move a serious number of DVD's as "impulse buys" (just like the wonderful candy isle). I wonder if they're trying the same thing with CD's. Imagine it: you go to check out at Wal-Mart and instead of candy, there's a wall of $2 CD's and $4 DVD's to choose from.
Alas, the movie studios held out, at least partially (I seemed to have noticed quite a few $5.88 and $9.88 DVD bins in Wal-Mart since I read that article though).
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Lost Sheep to Shepard, you got your ears on?
I have posted a few time on this music industry thing, and I always point out that none of this fits the supply/demand model properly. WalMart is finally showing it for what it is.
The supply of this copywritten data is infinite, therefore there is no justification for the high prices and huge profits. WalMart should be able to get discounted prices buying bulk, especially considering the lack of limit on supply.
Or..... I can just copy it and throw it around on the net playing monkey in middle with the RIAA in the middle! Oh yeah...
God Bless Sam Walton!
This is just a typical big business practice for a company to press their suppliers for lower costs. In this case, I don't believe that even Wal-Mart has enough clout to force the RIAA to lower the prices. What could they do if they're told to go to hell?
Just another simple example of what I was pointing out above... My dad owned a specialty box business that created containers for Ford & GM. You'd be amazed at how much insight the big boys want into your business when you're a supplier. They'll tell you how to do it, how much you MUST lower your price, and how much supply you've gotta have on hand. And if you resist, they'll try to take the business to someone else and use the patented processes (my dad had many...you'd be amazed how many ways there are to make a box) that you own...I know there are alot of patent gripes here, but this is a situation where the small business owner is protecting themselves.
Just another day in Paradise
The cheap CDs come with some hidden prices; secret censorshipand coercive censorship. Wired article here
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Not even close. Anything available there can be bought elsewhere, and their pricing is quite low. They continually beat up their suppliers in order to give the lowest prices to their customers. Contrast with a true monopoly, like Microsoft, which rapes customers up and down. Wal-mart makes lower profits than Microsoft on revenues that are 4 times Microsoft's. Do the math.
You might hate Wal-Mart (which I frankly don't understand), but them beating up the record labels over pricing is a good thing, period. It should have been done long ago, particularly given how they've famously beat up all their other suppliers, many of whom already had reasonable pricing.
Do you have ESP?
I'm not sure you get the basics of business here.
You're in business not to create revenue, but profit, so if one of your customers causes you negative profit (ie margin x units < 0), rather than positive, then you're a fool. It doesn't matter if you have $10m of revenue, if getting it costs you $11m.
If supplying Wal-Mart costs you $n per unit (ie margin $0), then the more units you supply to WM, the more profit you lose. In that situation, the *best* thing to do is find some other sucker to take that loss - crippling a competitor with that loss is a smart move.
Still, nice to see that businesses that are !me continue to be dim, rather like the people who consistently pay higher CPC rates to Google.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
I don't mind Walmart discounting albums or anything, but keep in mind that Walmart only sells you what they see fit.
Here's a few links to keep you busy as you praise Walmart for "puttin' it to the RIAA". Keep in mind that this is also the biggest company (Well... next to the military) to mandate RFID tags on everything.
So not only do you get to choose from a limited selection of CD's (those deemed acceptable by Walmarts censors), but soon you'll potentially be able to have Walmart scan you as you shop to see what other items someone in your demographic is purchasing. Or in Walmart terms, "Shoppers who purchase band XXX from our censored music selection, are also likely to purchase items YY and ZZ".
Ain't it great to be a number with big brother determining what you can have!
Walmart CD Censorship
Market censors and market mechanisms
Censored magazines, banned music and pseudo-Christian fun at America's scariest retailer
If you're concerned with the cost of CDs, blame the labels and the price they charge. How will you ever buy CDs for $12 if that's the cost the labels sell to stores at?
That happens to every brand of products sold on Wal-Mart. Someone posted an excellent article on ./ putting as an example the maker of a jar of pickles that sells at Wal-Mart.
/Largest corporation in sales (bay far) in the world
//scary shiat
The adavantages of having your product on Wal-Mart is that you become market leader almost instantly. Wal-Mart will pay on time and the full amount of your product order (something the other retailers did not do).
The disadvantages are that every year Wal-Mart will ask you to lower your price 5-10% otherwise they will drop you. They will continue to ask for this until they realize they don't want you to disappear in bankruptcy or because they haven't found a more agressive competitor.
It is said that Wal-Mart is the distribution channel of the world.
Most independent music stores I visit sell cds for about $8 and max out at $14 for hyped up albums. Maybe you should find a better record store.
They eventually made a slight change to this policy and placed a black E on the barcode of edited CDs. I assume this was in response to customer complaints, but the E is certainly not easy to see if you aren't specifically looking for it. Why hide it like that? I've always wondered why Wal-Mart didn't just not carry explicit CDs instead of requiring them to be edited in a way that makes some CDs sound like random bits of line noise.
Meanwhile RIAA would still sell CDs to other retailers at current prices.
This can NOT be viewed as a good thing. If Walmart gets what they want, the independent record store will dissappear everywhere where Walmart is. They simply won't be able to compete, their revenues will continue to drop until they go out of business.
And since Walmart is well known for exercising "editorial control" over goods sold at Walmart, you will no longer be able to buy any records with explicit lyrics or controversial topics. Certain types of music will simply dissappear or become even more expensive in areas where Walmart dominates.
Welcome to Fahrenheit 451 21st century style.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I don't like Wal-Mart's "kill the little retailer and the supplier" attitude, so I don't shop there.
I don't like the RIAA's CD pricing and 'CD copyprotection' methods so I buy exclusively from iTunes Music Store or I download it from Limewire if iTunes doesn't carry it.
You hold the power, it is in your wallet.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
To justify the high costs of CDs, the end of the article included a breakdown of the costs associated with CDs.
The music industry claims that a whopping $2.40 of every CD sold goes to marketing/promotion. If that's true, and if it's also true that 50 Cent's new CD sold 7 million copies, that means that the label spent a whopping $16,800,000 marketing it. Do you find that hard to believe?
The labels also claim, than in addition to the $1.70 profit they receive from each CD sold, they also suffer a whopping 2.91 in "label overhead." So 50 Cent's label had $20,370,000 in overhead in relation to that one CD?! 20 million dollars in overhead to release a CD?! Wow!!! How can they possibily stay in business with THOSE costs?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
That $15.99 quoted is 8.90 GBP according to XE.com's converter. Clearly our CDs are better quality than yours? No?
That $9.72 quoted as Wal-mart's price equals 5.41 GBP. At that price I for one would be buying lots of CDs, but all you can get for that price in the UK is the broken stuff in the remainder bin.
Differential pricing and price pointing are the scourge of modern retailing. I'd love to see Asda (UK arm of Wal-mart) take on the BPI in this way, but I fear it would have consequences for the independent record stores that still exist, not to mention the second-hand record stores.
When I think of the music industry these days I think of King Canute (that one who thought he could hold back the sea by just sticking out his hand and shouting stop).
He got wet.
Warren Cohen writes:
Wal-Mart willingly loses money selling CDs for less than $10 (they buy most hit CDs from distributors for around $12).
I cannot believe that all CDs sell to retailers for $10. If you subtract the $3.89 retail overhead from the price of a CD along with the $.80 and $.90 retail profit and distribution costs of a CD (all are retailer costs and Wall-Mart agressively controls costs in its own channel), you come up with a price per CD of $10.40 (assuming Wall-Mart makes nothing and eats its own costs as reported by Mr. Cohen).
But record companies typically underreport by 20% the sales of releases to artists, writers and unions so let's factor that in, making payments to unions actually $.14, $.68 publishing royalties and $1.28 artists' royalties. We now have a price below $10 per CD. Of course record companies' costs go up a little for every artist who takes advantage of the audit clause in their contract but that tends to be an insignificant minority.
Then Mr. Cohen ignores the fact that the companies typically will offer large lots at a discount to large sellers. I can see where a specialty store might need to charge some $16 for a CD -- they're not buying a small subset of all available CDs in mass quantity like Wall-Mart is. Larger buyers will find their price is a lot lower.
I cannot see how Wall-Mart can be considered a serious music seller if what they are doing is stocking a subset of the fastest-selling music. The article strongly suggests that anything in the top 40 or so of hits that are local to that area (perhaps more CW in the deep south, more alternative rock near large cities) on the various charts will be in Wall-Mart. But you probably won't be able to find the Beatles White Album (you'll find their most recent "1" album though) or any of Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays' collaborations in their store.
And that bothers me. It is like how if you have a book and you want to get exposure for it, you will have to pay the large retailers like Waldenbooks and Barnes and Noble for shelf space and/or a window display in order to get noticed. This limits what I can find in a bookstore and depresses the sale of otherwise excellent books. In Wall-Mart's case, it diminishes the sales of CDs that are "just outside" of their popularity cut-off point and artificially increases the sales within that zone.
The end result of this will tend to pressure future contracts with artists. And it will give the labels yet another reason to underreport sales to them.
Look for a stronger attack against people trading music. They'll try to cover the Wall-Mart effect through legislation and through the courts.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
In the end, the small towns are screwed either way. With the "walmartification" of small towns, the main street stores are being run out of business. Even some large regional grocery stores are having a difficult time fighting the Super Walmart stores. The result is fewer store choices in a small town, generally low wages for employees, and most of the profit being pumped out of the state.
Now, without Walmart we'd probably have far more locally-owned mom-and-pop businesses in small towns. But there would be fewer product choices in each of these small stores. Also, due to the low volume purchased and sold by mom-and-pop, the prices would be higher. The winner is the supplier, who is probably out of state anyway. How many employees do these small stores have? Maybe a high school kid to stock shelves or deliver grocerys in the afternoons.
Walmart sucks, yes. But small town mom-and-pop stores aren't all that great either. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Yes, the penetration and presence of Walmart into the retail sector is immense.
I spent a summer travelling across the US 2 years ago, and I was totally shocked to see how the focus of most small towns is a single Walmert, often surrounded by the abandoned hulks of their former competitors, small businesses. In many small towns or even small cities, Walmart is the only place to buy many consumer goods, or the only place that you can do anything resembling one stop shopping. In these towns, they are not competing with the other large retailers, the other large retailers often never opened stores in markets that small. They are directly competing with family owned small businesses, and they are taking the right out of the market.
By doing this, they are carving out a niche for themselves that will be very hard to displace, should the other large retailers come to their territory to compete with them. Walmart's unique system of distribution and their predatory relationships with their suppliers will keep their position solid for some time to come.
(This is why you never see those 'explicit lyrics warning' stickers at Wal Mart -- they just don't give you a choice and force their censorship on you without your knowledge or consent.)
Apparently, Wal-Mart is doing just fine with these CDs on their shelves. It seems that theer is a large enough market for these censored CDs that they turn a profit on them. That's all well and good.. but if you're not happy with it, don't shop there. Simple as that. Don't complain about a company because they do something you don't like. Voice your opinion by disposing of your cash reserves elsewhere.
What is your penile percentile?
Depends on turnover, and that's a big part of the problem. WalMart isn't going to buy anything risky, they know that the vast majority of the albums they sell will sell quickly, so the money will be available to buy another album to sell quickly...Profit on an individual item doesn't have to be high if you can turn it over enough times. Meanwhile, the perceived price of an album is whatever WalMart's price is. "Why do I have to pay $6 more for than I pay for Eminem? The independants can't afford to compete with WalMart on the hits, but can't survive only on non-hits.
There's a reason why Walmart is popular in sparsely populated areas -- time. In rural areas, a consumer may have to drive to several different stores separated by great distances to get everything they need for the household. This takes an enormous amount of effort and time. Walmart brings all of these disparate "stores" under one roof, making it much more convenient for rural shoppers to go to Walmart. The tradeoff is that the stores may not be the cleanest or have the greatest variety of products, especially at the high end.
By contrast, in the larger cities, the necessary goods are in closer proximity to one another so that going from one store to another is much less cumbersome. This also creates greater competition for shoppers' dollars, and the stores (on the whole) have a greater variety in order to distinguish one from another. In addition, bigger cities are actively trying to fight back against suburban sprawl and make better use of nearby land. The sheer size of Walmart runs counter to those goals. Therefore, Walmart is disdained in the big cities because it takes up an enormous amount of valuable space and does not stock the high end products that are locally available.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Walmart is so powerful it's scary.
If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you. Not a business person, are you? A 33% markup isn't exactly all that great. Wait till you see the markup you're paying for the clothes you're wearing, and it doesn't matter where you got them, either. Want an even more ridiculous markup? Eyeball the softdrink you get with your lunch today and ponder the n-hundred percent markup you just paid for *that.* These small shops don't push the volume nor the product that Wal-mart does, so every sale is really important to them. When it comes time to pay the rent, the bills, restock inventory... it's kinda nice to have something left over to go buy dinner!
Very important distinction: in the North, we say "I'm going to Wal-Mart". In the south, they say "I'm going to THE Wal-Mart".
Seeing as Wal-Mart is taking profits away from self-pitying record companies I'd say that is grounds for RIAA to sue Wal-Mart.
Firstly, perhaps you didn't deserve to be called a prick but crying about it after you've done such an effective job denegrating so many others doesn't get you much sympathy. And, whatever you may think, your comment definitely had an element of elitism in it.
Secondly, it's interesting that you have no faith in the moderators (by the way, neither do I, when push comes to shove) but you feel comfortable practically telling them what to do. Here's a thought: don't cry about it (to the moderators or anyone else) because you threw the first punch.
Lastly, as other people have pointed out, 20 percent isn't a monopoly. It isn't even close to being a monopoly. If Wal-Mart really had a monopoly then those independent stores that you think are gouging you on price by making $4 a CD (and I'm not even sure it's that much), when they have higher costs and overheads to think about, as well as the online retailers that you do buy from, wouldn't exist.
And indie stores shouldn't deal with the RIAA? Gee, don't you think they have a hard time keeping their heads above water without turning away every other customer who wants to buy something from a RIAA-backed artist? Do you have any concept of how quickly all but a few very specialised indie stores would fold if they took that approach?
Taste has nothing to do with this discussion, huh? That's rich coming from someone who described the music that Wal-Mart does stock as "the typical teenybopper crap".
I'm not sure how you could come across worse, because right now, you come across as arrogant, hypocritical and plain old dumb. Your arguments hold little or no water because you fail to see that the world doesn't work the way that you want it to. I hate to disappoint you, but that isn't going to change any time soon.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
"Walmart has made themselves based on extraordinarily good pricing."
;-) On Legos? Not really. On videogames, they're the same price (apparently strong-arm tactics aren't working in this part of the business) as everyone else.
I like Walmart just fine, but when I've gone into the stores, I don't see this great pricing.
On CD's? Nope, typical pricing that I can get online in a dozen places. On electronics? Not really, I can do better at Costco, or Best Buy. On Clothing?
Now that said, at their superstores, they have a good selection, and its nice to do one-stop. But I find their pricing mediocre.
Can you give me an example of this good pricing?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
...everyone was worried that we are sending a message that instead of the sixteen-track album we sold, those nine extra songs were filler," says a label executive.
Nobody would ever think this. 7 good tracks - HA, one would be hard pressed to find an album with 3.
How do I keep track of people who are fingering
Most independent stores I have gone to shop for music in are charing $16+ for a CD. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you. Obviously you have never been in business. Because of the risk involved with running a business, investers expect a 20% net profit (otherwise, they are better off putting their money in goverment bonds). To achieve that most businesses require a 40% margin. $4 out of $16 is only 25%, so this is far from gouging.
A 30% markup for a specialty store is not unreasonable. You act like some asshole is just taking the $4 and putting it in his pocket. You should try to run a business. The owner of the store probably invested a good bit of money up front to get started. You have to fill the store with racks, buy inventory, and plan on running at a loss for the first few months as you grow your business. The owner is probably paying back the debt incurred at startup for a long time or they risked a lot of savings just to get started.
Once you get past that hurdle you have to pay rent, taxes, insurance, hire employees, pay unemployment tax, workers comp, social security. You also have to pay to advertise your business, pay your accountant to file your taxes, possibly hire a book keeper to help you keep up with the sales tax that you must pay. It is endless. $4 per CD doesn't go very far. You have to sell a lot of CD's to break even. Making a big profit off of such a business isn't a trivial thing.
I'm not saying that you should feel bad for business owners. Just realize that it isn't all that easy. If you go into a store that you really enjoy that has a wide selection, knowledgeable employees, and a great atmosphere with good customer support, you should appreciate it for the gem that it is. Someone has really had to put a lot of thought and strategy into pulling it off right. They probably also took a lot of risks just to get it started. It isn't all that easy.
Could it be that the five major labels were accused by 41 states of price fixing because "Previously, the companies said that MAP [Minimum Advertised Price] was needed to protect independent music retailers from rising competition from discount chains such as Wal-Mart, Circuit City and Best Buy."
Mind you, I'm not fond of WalMart putting mom-n-pop stores out of business, but that settlement could amount to a loaded gun to the labels' heads.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
You know what? Here's the thing. Walmart, though they do have incredible power, delivers! As a broke college student, I can go to Walmart and get everything I need, toothpaste, random shirt, CD, whatever and spend under... $20 usually. THAT's why Walmart is a good thing. Those who can't afford to shell out the major bucks for brand name stuff can still get the things they need. And with CDs, who wants to spend $16? When I'm not downloading music, I'm finding the bargin CDs. I always go to Walmart first for music and Sam's Club first for DVDs. And FYI, Sam's Club is owned by the same company. They have the best prices, good service, they're convenient, and it's one-stop shopping. I say, good for Walmart, take down the labels.
actually the walmart and walmart super center back in iowa city, IA are very clean, with clean stuff, their CD selection sucks, but everything else is not bad
here in a city, where targets are every where, the walmarts here just suck, probably like the ones you have near by.
Me am confused. Are we for or against monopolies now?
"The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote" -- Kosh
Wal-Mart has every right to decide what it will and will not sell, and to base that decision on whatever criteria it likes. Don't want to play with them? Don't sell at Wal-Mart. You don't own Wal-Mart; therefore, you're not entitled to sell your stuff on its shelves. It's an opportunity Wal-Mart can extend to your or not at its discretion.
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Since when does someone bagging groceries or stocking shelves have the skills to be able to demand $15+ an hour? There's no right to a certain standard of living that allows you to pay for cable TV and two cars.
The article mentions that Wal-Mart could stop selling CDs altogether, and their sales would be relatively unaffected.
"While Wal-Mart represents nearly twenty percent of major-label music sales, music represents only about two percent of Wal-Mart's total sales. 'If they got out of selling music, it would mean nothing to them,' says another label executive. 'This keeps me awake at night.'"
So what happens when the publishers don't sell to Wal-Mart?
"...Wal-Mart executives hinted that they could reduce Wal-Mart's CD stock and replace it with more lucrative DVDs and video games."
So, not as easy for the labels as it seems. If Wal-Mart "will not be taken seriously as a place to get music," they can move on with other things, having made an example of the labels to others who might try the same tactic.
I'm going back to CD Baby, where I can wait for this blow over.
No, the welfare and food stamps to cover their employing twice as many people at 1/3 the cost because nobody is full-time.
I'm not sure how you could come across worse, because right now, you come across as arrogant, hypocritical and plain old dumb. Your arguments hold little or no water because you fail to see that the world doesn't work the way that you want it to. I hate to disappoint you, but that isn't going to change any time soon.
I'm sorry you again just negated your entire round of discussion with unnecessary personal attacks. Move along.
Just because you don't like the music being sold at Wal-Mart doesn't mean that it sucks.
:)
He didn't say it sucked. He said they don't carry "developing and independent artists." That seems like a fairly rational assessment. Not sure why you bit his head off. Unless it has to do with that whole "Evil" thing.
If you don't like the price, don't buy it.
Surely if he had known in advance that the CDs were crappy, he wouldn't have bought them. Anyway, it might've been more constructive to point out that $4 is not a huge markup at all. You have to pay rent, salaries, compensate for shrinkage etc. The article itself notes that on average, after overhead costs, retail profits per CD amount to just 89 cents. I wouldn't call that gouging by any means.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Some might say that they have been singly responsible for reeling in Inflation thru the 90's.........
Cool! Amazing Toys.
If WalMart doesn't stock an extremely wide range of music, it will not be taken seriously as a place to get music.
Have you ever lived near a Wal-Mart? It's NEVER stocked a wide range of music. It's never stocked a wide range of anything. It sells anyway because Wal-Mart (a) is everywhere, (b) is sells what's most popular, and (c) what it does sell, it sells cheaper than anyplace else, including Internet retailers.
Remember, the key word in "popular music" is "popular". So what if it's not a wide selection? If 95% of all shoppers save money on the 5% of all CDs Wal-Mart stocks, then thay will. The other 5% of all shoppers don't HAVE to take Wal-Mart seriously as a music store. Wal-Mart, in many non-urban parts of the US, is nearly the only place you can go to buy CDs anyhow, and if there is another music store in town it's vastly overpriced by comparison.
Don't think like a music connoisseur, think like a capitalist. The 95% that buys what's popular is all that matters to Wal-Mart's bottom line, and it's the same 95% that the record labels have built their entire industry around. If Wal-Marts across the country refuse to stock a label's new CDs, then those record companies lose a big chunk of their business. Certainly not enough to cripple them, but enough to hurt their quarterly sales. Wal-Mart has played this game of Chicken plenty of times before, and it's always the other guy that blinks.
Most independent stores I have gone to shop for music in are charing $16+ for a CD. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you.
The problem with that is that you aren't counting the cost of doing retail. They don't net that 4+ dollars, for all we know, they might still only net fifty cents a disc. It is too easy to look at the wholesale price and the retail price and assume a gouge, that it is all profit.
The costs are employees, taxes, insurance, rent, electricity, maintainance, equipment heat, water, advertising, shoplifting and so on. These costs are not cheap.
Walmart is going for economies of scale for a lot of these things, where it is expensive to start up, but for each additional unit, the costs go down.
Over the years CD prices came down a bit, ~$15 these days. But they never came down to what LPs and Cassettes sold for.
Considering how cheaply CDs can be mass-produced, they should always sell for $10 or less.
By the way, in the 80s you could also buy your favorite song for about $2.50 as a 7" vinyl single. ($.99 for electronic versions of the songs from iTunes is the *right* idea.)
Sam
When are /.ers going to realise: the purpose of commercial entities is not to spread knowledge of music, but to make profit.
There are two perfectly valid business strategies to do this:
Target a consumer segment that wants to buy a wide selection of music, which necessarily cannot be limited to the current top radioplay/chart list.
To do this, you have to hold a much higher level of stock. To do this profitably, you have to have a higher gross margin to maintain a livable net margin.
The trouble is, unless you can carry a truly huge stock and shift it very fast (Hello, Amazon), you won't be doing the volume to have the buying power with the distributors. Therefore you must add your higher margin to higher costs. Result: high consumer prices.
Target a consumer segment that only cares about what's in the charts/on the radio.
This is a much bigger segment, and it's a much smaller set of product. Therefore, you can be much more efficient with your supply chain processes, you'll need less real estate for shelving, and you'll shift more volume so can negotiate more robustly with suppliers. You can therefore offer lower prices and still make respectable net margin as your costs are so low.
Both of these strategies are viable, and are only somewhat competitive. You're a consumer who likes non-chart music, so do you go to WalMart to find it? No, of course not. The existence or otherwise of WalMart is entirely irrelevant to your music buying habits. You worry about all those teenagers who only go to WM only finding chart music? They shop where their needs are met - if they wanted anything else, they'd go elsewhere.
But I think the biggest trap you've fallen into is the High Fidelity one - mistaking selling CDs for loving music. If you're a retailer who does it because you love the music and don't have a profit motive, then you have a hobby, my friend, not a business.
Amazon are very smart about this. They explicitly do not target people who love *read* books, but those who love to *buy* them.
Wal-Mart don't care about the music. It's just business - they supply a need profitably to provide a maximised return to their owners. This isn't A Bad and Evil Thing: their owners (ie the stockholders) legally require them to behave like this.
And this is the case for pretty much everyone involved: The people who press the CDs, the people who design the covers, the people who ship the CDs, the people who provide catering to the studios - everyone. Even among professional musicians, the strongest desire of all is to be paid, or didn't you notice the existence of the Musician's Union...
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
The conventional wisdom is that monopolies cause higher prices.
Why would a monopoly be trying to get lower prices?
Because they aren't a monopoly, you potheads!
Don't complain about a company because they do something you don't like. Voice your opinion by disposing of your cash reserves elsewhere.
That's not quite right. Railing against the company on Slashdot isn't very useful, obviously, but companies like Wal-Mart spend millions on market research. Believe me, they will welcome free customer feedback. If you strongly disagree with something they do, write a letter to the corporate headquarters to tell them so. You should indeed vote with your wallet, but how are they going to know why they lost your business if you don't tell them?
Wait wait wait...
If you add two more cents you'll raise final price in almost a dollar.
Keep this two cents out of the bill.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
I guess you aren't one of the people who miss the days when Levi's were the best jeans you could buy? Wal-Mart forced them to "cut the fat" so they would be able to offer the product at a reduced price every year. From jeans which could hold together while being pulled by two horses, to jeans no tougher than three ply tissues.
The consumer quest for rock bottom prices has also lead to rock bottom quality.
You don't mind that Wal-mart is essentially a sweat shop that pays below average wages? That they lower the standard of living in the neighbourhoods they are set up in? That it's up to the government or the spouces benefits package to make up the difference? You may save up front, but at what cost? Every consumer that shops there is contributing to the problem.
People get up in arms when workers are exploited overseas, but don't care when it happens to some extent in their own backyard as long as it saves them $0.50 on toiletpaper?
You're right, no one has to shop there if they don't want to. I don't like what Wal-Mart stands for; I think they lead to a social net loss. So I don't shop there. And I discourage others from doing so as well.
Walmart upsets this rule by quantity. They make tiny margins on every product that they sell. But since they sell so many of them, they make a killing. And at the same time, this makes everyone else look like they're trying to gouge the consumer.
Man, this is insane.
If you don't like what they're selling at Wal-Mart, DO NOT BUY IT. If you don't like their pricing, DO NOT SHOP THERE. If you don't like their attitude, the color of the store, their stance on not carrying lesbian porn, DO NOT FREQUENT THEIR ESTABLISHMENT.
All I ever hear about Wal-Mart anymore is how damned evil they are and how the store sucks and their music is unfairly censored and blahblahblah. If it's so damned bad, why are they making money hand over fist?
Frankly, I love what they've done for supply chain management, I love how they slap their suppliers into line, their prices are incredible, watching white trash is funny as hell, and I don't buy music there because I want to hear Jay-Z say 'fuck.'
Anybody else actually have a problem with Wal-Mart they can express intelligently?
Could you educate a simple Scotsman, what is a greeter?
I have a mad vision of somebody stood just inside the store saying "Hello, enjoy your shopping" as you walk in.
But I'm sure that's just me being too literal. Especially if they don't help you, or give you directions to stuff you want.
How about making the customers happy?
Walmart and other retailers are almost exclusively record label's customers, not you and me. Yeah, you can get some stuff directly from sony, but I would guess that is much less than 1% of sony's sales.
Most independent stores I have gone to shop for music in are charging $16+ for a CD. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you.
I'm not shure who you think is gouging here, the wholesaler or retailer. To me a wholesale price of $12 is outrageous, but a $4 markup on a $12 item is only a 33% markup, most retail markups are in the 100% and up range.
How is this not a commune? Its like communism's evil twin!
It's not a commune in that it's not owned communually, i.e., by its workers. In that sense it's very much a capitalist enterprise.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." -- John Lennon
You are confusing the 20% marketshare that Wal-Mart has nationally with the monopoly that it holds on retailing in many less urban areas.
Also, that 20% share is still enough to allow Wal-mart to dictate content.
These particular gripes about Wal-Mart are nothing new to Slashdot.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
And how did Walmart kill off all of this competition? By using Thompson .45's and sawwed off shotguns or by giving consumers what they wanted? I've yet to run across a Walmart greeter that's strong armed me into buying anything.
Rampant Ninja related crimes these days...Whitehouse is not the exception
That is utterly fucking idiotic. Wal-Mart is a huge company, and they do some really stupid shit sometimes, but they are no monopoly. You need to be careful with that label because it makes you sound like some knee-jerk anti-corporate raving loon.
This is actually a pretty good example of the forces of capitalism trying to create lower prices. You assmunch.
And don't forget that CD's have a 100% return policy at all retailers. Whatever they don't sell can be returned to the label (large or small) for credit. That's why you don't see a lot of indy releases at Wal-Mart. They order a minimum of about 40,000 pieces. If they return 39,000 of those, it would put an independent label out of business.
Wal-Mart is a monopoly on the local level. It focuses it's stores on suburban an rural areas where it can achieve it through sheer size. It has so thoroughly saturated these areas that it is now trying to move into urban areas simply due to a lack of traditional sites.
The risk (to my view) here is that WalMart will demand lower CD prices for WalMart stores only (or else they won't care about other distributers). They are also in an advantageous position over dedicated music/DVD stores, as WalMart could live without CD sale revenue if need be.
So, the result of this could be that WalMart (monopoly 2) could get a special deal from the RIAA (monopoly 1) while other stores get stiffed. People will then flock to WalMart to buy music, putting the dedicated music stores out of business, and helping to reinforce monopoly 2 even further.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you.
And exactly how many retail businesses have you run?
Both bush and kerry favor a temporary worker card that would allow aliens to legally work here, without citizenship. Bush said IIRC in last night's debate that it would be for jobs that citizens aren't interested in, but does anyone believe that? Look for employment conditions at wal-mart to worsen dramatically in the next four years.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I still buy pickes at the grocery store. Oddly, the companies that didn't sell at wallmart are still doing fine. Vlasic went for the short term high volume and got itself killed. There is an evolution at work here. Everyone complains about companies only paying attention to the bottom line and here we have a mechanism to destroy the ones that operate that way, leaving only the others... Perhaps Walmart is actually doing something good - in a strange and twisted kind of way.
I think it depends on where you're at. Most of the Walmarts I use are Super-Walmarts in Wisconsin. They are always clean, pretty friendly, and very spacious. Yet when I was on vacation in St. Louis, I was in a normal sized Walmart that was at least 10 times over capacity. They were in serious need of a store upgrade and a few extra stores in the area.
So you may find that different people have different experiences with going into Walmarts. Big city people will probably hate them (lots of negativity toward them here in Chicago) while the less populated areas will love them.
It also has to do with the shoppers and employees. There are about at least 10 Wal-Marts here in CT, and of the ones I've been to, they all pretty much suck in terms of cleanliness and usablility. Granted, some of it is the employees (or lack of) being too busy stocking shelves/dealing with customers to do any clean up. It also doesn't help that the customers go through the stores - especially on Sundays - like a horde of locusts on a field of crops.
If I'm in a store and my kid knocks something over, one of us picks it up and puts it back. If I suddenly decide I don't need something, I either give it to the cashier and tell them or put it back - usually where it belongs. If I'm in the store with a cup of coffee and am finished, I throw it out - I don't just leave it on a shelf for someone to find 3 hours later.
Is it just me, or does a little common courtesy go a long way?
Computer geek for hire. Reasonable rates. Email me.
Wal-Mart might be worse than the behemoth in Redmond, WA?
Wal-Mart is selling linux boxen and living to tell about it.
You bet your ass they're bigger than MS. Of course, this is only until MS figures out how to make it so credit cards have to be run through some sort of hash scheme only their computers can process. Then MS controls all of Wal-Mart's credit card processing...
link?
Most independent stores I have gone to shop for music in are charing $16+ for a CD. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you.
If I read the article correctly, the $12 point is what Wal-Mart gets, buying in bulk. Smaller retailers probably can't leverage that price. So it's probably a little closer to $13 or $14.
And think about it, to run a small record store, you'd have to sell a boat load of discs at $1 profit margins to even dream of paying your bills. Smaller volume stores need higher profits on its sales. That's just how it goes.
That Walmart is death?
emt 377 emt 4
I read somewhere, "There is no honor amoung thieves."
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Well I'm in the south and have never heard that. Perhaps it's a localized thing.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
The correct term to describe Wal-mart is as a monopsony. Monopsony is a market situation in which one buyer exerts a disproportionate influence on the market.
Consider this: you have one company that provides for all of the needs of the citizen in the town, and a lion's share of the citizens work for that company. How is this not a commune? Its like communism's evil twin!
Umm, you're describing corporatism which is certainly not communism. Not that either of them are very nice.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Look at the breakdown in the article for the cost of a $15.99 CD:
$0.17 Musicians' unions
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties
$0.80 Retail profit
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists' royalties
$1.70 Label profit
$2.40 Marketing/promotion
$2.91 Label overhead
$3.89 Retail overhead
Excluding profits for all those involved I calculate almost $11.00 in COSTS that are way out of line.
We are in an era of "innovation stagnation". Companies are not creating "new stuff", but making money by taking costs out of the "old stuff". The record industry has simply refused to accept this fact.
Wal-mart, Dell, Southwest Airlines, and other low-cost providers are not providing new and innovative products, they are providing new and innovative business models that take cost out, and therefore provide value.
If the record industry is to survive, it must either create something radically new (MP3 online distribution of every artist past and present, and DVD - SACD discs) or reduce it's costs to meet market price.
The market has spoken. $15.00 CDs are not a viable business model.
-ted
No, saying that someone comes across as "arrogant, hypocritical and plain old dumb" isn't the same as calling them "arrogant, hypocritical and plain old dumb".
There's a big difference between the two, perhaps not a difference that you care to acknowledge, but a difference nevertheless.
In this case, mon ami, it's you that needs to "move along"...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
How could you possibly call Wal-Mart a monopoly? Especially given the competition from Target, Sears, K-Mart, etc. It's more like, "Monopoly X meet Company Z, who you greatly depend on, and has the strength to stand up to your strong-arm tactics..."
--end of rant--
I ran a small independant record label. A store typically has 90 days to pay for the CD or return it to the distributer. Of course a small label doesn't get paid until the distributer does. Problem is that many (if not most) of the stores didn't pay *or* return our CDs. The distributer didn't really care because we were obviously one of the 55,000. The distributer was not about to offend a store over a few copies of a nobody when they hundreds of copies of the top 5000 (or 40, as it were) to sell. Running a "indie-er" record store is a tough job, and a labor of love for most owners (I know several), but your numbers are quite a bit off.
Even the dead can't escape the wrath of Walmart.
What?
Of course, from the artists' perspective, you could already make that comparison about some of the distributors.
It's also worth noting, the "Music Industry" is NOT just the RIAA. It's the musicians, the RIAA and non-RIAA distributors, and the retailers (from as big as Wal-Mart to as small as "Plan Nine from Outer Space"). It might even arguably include the instrument makers. Wal-Mart is as legitimate a part of the music industry as any member of the RIAA... which, I admit, says less than the RIAA would like.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Bitch! Meet Slap!
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Most independent stores I have gone to shop for music in are charing $16+ for a CD. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you.
$16 retail for an item that costs $12 is a 25% margin, which is very reasonable for an independant retail store. I wonder how reasonable it is to charge $12 for a CD that costs about a dollar to produce. Note that 40% to 50% margins are common for many consumer items that are sold at list price and margins for some types of items are much higher than 50%. 50% margin = 100% markup = cost x 2.
Maybe so. But they've also changed the marketplace so that lowest manufacturing cost is the only consideration for success. Consequently, they've created a gargantuan flood of imports that we've paid for with IOUs. Low inflation over the last 15 years has been bought on loan.
Since with current demographic trends we're never going to pay those IOUs off at current values, there's probably going to be a huge surge of inflation in the future while the government prints money to devalue our foreign debt. So really what WalMart is doing is just pushing the inevitable inflation into the future, where it's going to hit us all at once.
It's like they've handed us a credit card, and we as a nation have become lazy and quit working to earn the stuff we buy. We just keep charging more stuff on the credit card.
Here is a very interesting article on the way Wal-Mart works with suppliers. They have done similar things in other industries to what they're doing here, and really transformed the way business is done in some fields.
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
Many rural and suburban areas have no alternatives left. So much for freedom of choice.
"Frankly, I love what they've done for supply chain management"
Actually they just get exclusive purchase agreements. Once they get rid of further competition they'll have no reason to cut prices.
"Anybody else actually have a problem with Wal-Mart they can express intelligently?"
Keep trying, maybe you will
I'm tired of everyone bashing large companies, especially Walmart. Last year Walmart had 258 billion in revenue, paying over 5 billion in taxes. People are always complaining about unemployement.. well just think about how many jobs walmart stores create. Benefits are usually better with larger companies. I work for a small company and health insurance I pay out of my own pocket. Unless you're a communist, capitalism is good for our society. Nobody makes you shop at walmart, so if you don't like them, don't shop there. Personally, I enjoy the lower prices.
I would rather sell 1 million of my items at $1 than 500,000 of my items for $2 - as long as I was making a profit and I could keep up with demand.
Wow. And you want to lecture about economics. Perhaps you might want to reconsider the figures of your example.
Suppose that it costs 0nly 5 cents to produce your item. Then, the profit of 1 million sales at $1 is $950,000. The profit with 500,000 sales at $2 is $975,000.
Wal-Mart's unique position makes them a monopsony rather than a monopoly. Basically, a monopsony exists when there is one buyer in the market. Since Wal-Mart is so colossaly huge, they can effectively set the price points for their suppliers. This is good for the consumers, but bad for the suppliers and their employees.
Anti-trust legislation won't work in this case because they're not harming consumers (at least, not directly).
Some good statistics and links can be found here.
Keep your friends close.
Keep your enemies in a little jar on your desk.
Despite Wal-Mart destroying small town businesses and lowering people's wages, I think they should be given a big hand and puttin' the smack on the record labels.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
It seems that theer is a large enough market for these censored CDs that they turn a profit on them.
I doubt that. If these CDs were actually upfront about being censored, that would be fine, but they're not.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The labels have been squeezing artists down to a puny 65 cents per CD or less and now Walmart is squeezing the record labels. I love it! There is justice in the world occasionally. Since the artists cut is already so low the labels will have to absorb this.
:)
I predict people will definately buy more CD's if they are $10 or less. Also, since the CD's will be so cheap, the labels probably won't be able to afford to license copy protection for the CD's. Note to self, sell stock in companies that license CD protection technologies.
The race to the bottom has begun and now the slick record label exec's in their $3000 suits are about to feel the pain. However, the exec's shouldn't worry too much if they should lose their job, George W. Bush is creating jobs that pay $5/hr. or less every day
Welcome to the free-market monopoly!!!!
All hal Wal-Mart, the 3 ton elephant that everybody ignores until they move.
Sounds a lot like the old days in mining towns, where the mine owned the houses that the workers lived in, owned the store where the workers bought their goods, and of course paid them just enough to cover the price they charged for shelter and food, even taking it off their paychecks directly or issuing the pay in their own currency rather than US currency.
If you've heard the song "Sixteen Tons", you've heard the expression "I owe my soul to the company store". This is a description of conditions in those kinds of mining towns.
I don't like Walmart, but the problem is, like most people...
I'm too broke to NOT shop at Walmart.
cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Yes, The closest Walmart to me is to damn far away!
Thank you California!
moo.
K-Mart, Target, Costco, and dozens of other retail chains being the competition. I'll never understand why left-wing nutjobs like michael have this obsessive compulsive desire to slander 'big corporations'. What is the gain in attacking someone for being successful? There is none. It's all part of this collectivist mindset which punishes anyone who exceeds the herd. I could abide by their stupidity if it were merely idealogical, but these tools don't attack the ideaology, they attack the symbols.
for free off the internet? Priceless.
priceless... quite literally!
Personally, I can't believe that 1 out of 5 CDs are sold in Walmarts. ... they aren't someplace that I want to shop for music as ... full of people.
I don't think anymore needs to be said...
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
No, that is exactly what they are. They greet customers walking in, tag bags of people coming in with returns and sometimes check receipts on the way out.
Generally older folks have this job at Walmart.
The more you know, the less you understand.
The RIAA is being told by Someone Big Enough to Stand Up to Them to lower prices -- that's good.
It's Wal-Mart - Home of the Censored and Creatively Limited Music Selection -- that's bad.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
I'm just curious, since I heard people say this on slashdot so often. Could you give an example of such an album? I have lots of CD's, some that I like better than others, but none that I think of as 1 good track with the rest filler.
--Bruce Fields
It sounds to me like you live near Nashville. Possibly Murfreesboro. Am I correct?
oh i agree the stores are disgusting! but i can see how it does so much business... it is always full of people! even at like midnight... and honestly i never thought i would say this... but Hooray for Wal-Mart! Seriously, the record companies have had a few lawsuits and have been required to bring down the prices anyway, yet it has never been down and held up in appeals.
"But i loveded you PIGGY I LOVEDED YOU!!!!!" *Gir*
You have 2 factors that you aren't considering:
Line capacity vs output vs distribution
You have artificially increased demand for your product. If you have 1 million customers for your product rather than 500,000, don't you think you will have even higher sales overall?
After all, you aren't just selling your product to Walmart are you? This is certainly the case with music CDs - to get us back on topic.
That 3% difference is worth the price is distribution, recognition, and brand loyalty.
As a manufacturer, I might even consider taking a small loss to distribute at Walmart BECAUSE I might want to distribute my next product there as well.
In most cases - the new and improved that came off my line was streamlined, honed, and cost less to produce. In my next go around - I come out ahead.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
You are correct.. They stand inside the door.. say hello.. and maybe help you get a cart. They also stamp any item brought into the store to be returned. What a job eh? =)
Most independent stores I have gone to shop for music in are charing $16+ for a CD. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you.
Perhaps you should look at this again. In the mall around the corner from where I live, it costs $5000 per month for rent on their smallest sized storefront. Assuming they need a minimum of 4 employees working 40 hours per week to cover the store, and they pay them $8/hour, you come to over $5000 in salary expenses per month. That's $10,000 per month just for these two expenses. That means you need to sell over 83 CD's per day with a $4 markup in order to cover just these two costs. A music store requires hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory. Personally, I don't think a $4 markup on a CD is gouging the customer. The record comanies, however, with a cost of under $1 per CD, selling for $12, is certainly gouging, especially when you consider that the payouts to the artists is included in that less than $1 cost.
who would you want to please more? The guy who pays 1% of your paycheck or the guy who pays 20% of your paycheck?
I'll take the first guy, because the second guy offers me 20%, then changes it to 10% the day before payday.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Now there's an interesting comment. If I trusted that the moderators had the first clue about moderating I wouldn't have made the comment.
Good god, you are an elitist prick! You obviously consider yourself a moderation master and the rest of us just scum on the water
I did not deserve to be called an "elitist prick".
Try changing your tone a bit - you might find yourself a bit more welcome and people more open.
Until then, we'll call you what we like.
Jw
Wal-Mart does have competition in and around urban centers. I live in seattle, we have targets; sam's, k-marts; kohl's; and all sorts of specialized stores in the area. But I grew up in Oklahoma. In some of the smaller towns in oklahoma the wal-mart moves in, and everything closes. In a smaller population center, there is only room for one super store; and wal-mart almost always wins.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Hmmm, I have one partner who is destroying all my other partners, providing no real benefits to me, and is now forcing me to wreck my margins in favor of theirs. Sure they sell a lot of my product, but record sales are actually down since they got in the game, and big deal, if they aren't selling my goods others will, and people will still buy.
It's not like if they stop supplying to WalMart they're going to lose those 1 in 5 customers. The benefits are pretty clear, they'll be doing their other partners a favor allowing them to compete (partners which provided marketing push for them) and they'll have more of their products on the selves.
I beg your pardon but someone will always be paying below average wages.
See the thing about averages is that there's a bottom, a middle, and a top. Or a left, middle, and right. Or maybe a better way to put it is that to graphically represent an average there has to be two points on opposite sides of the represented average.
If Walmart paid higher wages, then someone else would be paying "below average" wages, etc etc.
And I know some people aren't taught this, but, there's always someone at the bottom.
Low pay is not illegal, it's not even unethical. If Wal-Mart raised their pay rates, they'd have to fire people. So ask yourself, do you want fewer people making more money, or more people making "less than average" money?
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
Wandering off topic, but...
:-).
What you mention about lack of courtesy does not apply only to Wal-Mart, nor is it a recent phenomenom.
I worked at K-Mart in the mid-80's (highschool and college years) and saw things that just destroyed any sympathy I had for the human race. I'd watch idiots take item A off the shelf, read the label or whatever, then place it back on the shelf a foot away in front of a bunch of item B.
I watched idiots take throw rugs off the rack, put them on the floor, then push their shopping cart over the rug as they walked away, not bothering to put the rug back. By he end of a bad day (weekend) frigging rugs would be stacked 5-6 deep in the aisle.
There are about 5 other things I could write about but don't want to get too worked up
Thanks for the clarification .. that seems so alien to me.
Over here in the UK we have some stores where there will be people packing goods into bags for you, and if you're a pensioner you might find an assistant walking around who'll help you carry stuff to your car - but that's about it.
At the end of the article, the Almighty Institute of Music Retail provides a breakdown of the $15.99 spent on a new album. What surprises me is that when you adjust the underlying model for online music sales, the numbers break down to $9.88, which assumes that the record labels maintain their $4.61 of overhead and profit. This leads me to suspect that, despite their assertations to the contrary, Apple does in fact make some money off the iTunes music store.
0.17 musicians unions
n/a packaging/manufacturing
0.8 publishing royalties
n/a retail profit
0.15 credit card fees
1.6 artists royalties
1.7 label profit
2.4 marketing
2.91 label overhead
0.15 retail overhead
9.88 total
"...What is good for General Motors is good for America." -Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense and fmr President of GM
I can't figure out why they would give into Wallmart.
Sure wallmart might currently sell 1 in 5 CDs sold. But if they drop stock because their demands are not met customers will have to go to other retailers and pay full price for the same disk.
Your going to lose some sales but in the end, walmart doesn't make the profit from the sale, and possibly loses a music customer who can't find what they want.
Apple free since 1990!
That's the reality. Besides all other opinions you've said the most feaseable reality, and now it's what I really think it will happend.
Congratulations.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Exactly, that's why I avoid shopping there. Maybe some other people don't know about their censorship, so I gave them reasons to not shop there as well.
20% market share is hardly a monopoly.
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
You don't have to violate RICO statutes to kill off your competition.
WalMart is the biggest monopoly ever, not just because of its number of stores and its corporate influence on justice department/politicians, but because WalMart influences everyones lives. Its a retail chain that sells everything for less, albeit by arm twisting the suppliers to sell for less and in the process killing the local economy. Not that I side with the Labels, they too are monopolistic and cold blooded killers of talent. So its good they are tasting their own medicine. What I would like to see happen is cap the number of stores WalMart can open in a county, cap the quantity of items WalMart can import from China, have a government run complaint cell where these suppliers can complain about arm twisting (that will build enough evidence for Anti Trust lawsuit) and last but not the least break up WalMart into W A L M A R T (thats 7) baby marts. I am not that afraid of the labels, because proliferation of P2P, secure P2Ps, pirated CDs, online music stores are already teaching them a lesson. -stegano
This wasn't framed as a gentle negotiation, it's a line in the sand -- you don't do this, then the threat is [your product is dropped].'
Does walmart ever conduct a gentle negotiation? They do this kind of thing all the time. I've even heard that there have been cases where they just started paying less for the stuff they bought, regardless of what their supplier was "charging" them.
~Warning!~ The above is encrypted using rot676!
I do not like how they change out the seasonal items earlier then other stores. It is in their best interest and actually impressive that they can manage the inventory that efficiently but it does not help me when I need a garden hose nozzle or chemicals for my pool in mid-late August. It works out in the end though as I can go to Target and get what seasonals I need for 50% off at the clearance rack.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
"Most independent stores I have gone to shop for music in are charing $16+ for a CD. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you." Have you ever owned a business?? 25% GROSS markup is what you need to keep the doors open and pay your employees. If you make less then you have do start doing evil things to stay in business (like WalMart)
If you're going to call someone an idiot, at least spell your insult correctly.
The problem you pointed out is not a spelling mistake, it is a grammatical error.
If you're going to try and belittle someone on their words, be careful of your petard, you may become irretrievably hoisted upon it.
</karma burn>
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
Wallmart is hardley a monopoly in the CD market I don't think an sane person can argue that 1/5 market share constitutes an monopoly, but you have to love slashdot editors for trying right....
I am no Wallmart apologist though. I think they are one of the worst things to happen to commerce in this country in a long time. They are the worst example of corporate wellfare. Wallmart pays people next nothing offers even many management level positions no benifets. They can do this becase it of Liberal Government aid programs that allow their employees to afford continueing to work there. Then the take in may cases obsene advantage of conserivative tax policy and employee overtime rules. When those arn't sweet enought they just higher illegal aliens. Then some how manage to worm off the hook through a conservative administration not wanted to do more then slap their risks for fear of hurting the economy or just as likely if different people were in office get off because of some human rights mumbo jumbo and feeling bad about putting illegal aliens out of work. In short not matter what your pollitics are if your at all mainstream Wallmart can and will take advantage. Maybe a good libritarian system with a crime/punishment bent could fix it.... well not really the point.
The point is Wallmart is now big enough to pressure others be it their employees or their suppiers into doing what they want. They are able to drop prices low enought to drive most better corporate citizens or small shops out of bussiness. Walmart and Sam's Club are fast becoming the only game in town in lots of places. They are not responsible nor are they charitable and really they don't represent the capitalist values this country is built on. Walmart lacks a sense of fair play and decency. They are not becoming domonate through being inovative and shurde but are simply takeing well know long practiced bussiness strategies and carring them to a point were they are simple willing to sink to levels nobody else is. Which is not to say they are the first organization to do this, after all its for these kinds of practices unions and consumer groups were created. The trouble is modern government has erroded the need and the effectiveness of these groups (government can't help us only personal action and responsibility can). Wallmart is so big it can push around these groups and much like Redmond is almost on a level were they can participate in a power strugle with government, and not come away to bloodied.
What I find facinating about this news is it shows a real fearlessness. The Entertainment industry owns enough people in government and is litigious enough, that a law suit can't be far off. Wallmart would not do this unless they think they can win. If they thing they can spar with *AA then they probably think they can spar with anyone one and we should all be scared. Given that they have sold Linux PCs in the past(do they still) I wounder if they won't attempt to bully M$ to spare give them a bigger pice of the end user software pie. Imagine if Wallmart could sell Office pro for $100. That could really hurt Online retailers and the office stores alike.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I've just never thought of a business giving consumers what they want as a bad thing. If all the people in rural/small-town America loved the small mom & pop stores and despised Walmart, why aren't there bunches of mom & pop stores starting up? Walmart isn't a monopoly and the reason so many people shop there is because they choose to go there. Ask most consumers what is the biggest factor in their purchase and the answer that comes back the most is price. Walmart gives this to them. People choose to buy from the store that most meets their needs.
Rampant Ninja related crimes these days...Whitehouse is not the exception
Sometimes being a consumer involves more than just the price of an item.
I imagine that if you could have received the same price breaks as B&N then you would have jumped at the opportunity. Then you would sell them at a lower cost to the consumer.
Assuming that's true, then you are doing what you counsel against. As a bookstore you are a consumer buying from distributers, but you always look for the better deals, just as the end consumer does.
The next argument usually made is, "We would have to just to survive," which is also made by the end consumer. If I can buy the same product for less, is it in my best interest to buy it for more? The store has to make the same decision, and the result is the same - it's not in the store's best interest to buy from a higher cost distributer, and it's not in the consumer's best interest to buy from a higher cost store.
This is capitalism. It's nice to believe in a rosy utopia where everyone gets what they want, but the reality is that our economy does not support that model.
To paraphrase the GPL people, "If you don't like it, invent your own currency and enforce your own economic model. You have the tools."
-Adam
what dog shit? they sell things other companys make. playstations and nike shoes and movies made in hollywood. cloths and food might be the only stuff that they have that isn't just standard stuff that every store on earth sells.
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
Why are CDs MUCH more expensive than cassette tapes? Overhead cannot be more for CDs. CDs cost very little to produce. Greed has to be the answer. As for Walmart being a monopoly, I have never set foot inside one. It's not I actively avoid going to one. I haven't had to. The alternatives are plenty & better. Why are they doing this? Are they trying to lower costs for every vendor or just them?
Sorry but I can't stand this slap at Wal-Mart or any other company. No where is it written, least of which the Constitution, that you DESERVE health care or that someone else must pay for it.
Wal-Mart does many of its employees a service by offering it at competitive rates. People and families who would never be able to obtain it anywhere else. Instead of dismissing Wal-Mart as such people need to realize that they insure a lot of people.
There is no such thing as free health care. If you want an example of government health care go look to Canada where there are wait times on simple procedures you can get here next day. Don't believe the hype spread by the lazy down here, go check Canada's own government statistics on wait times and operation availability. Want to see worse, go find their restrictions on who can what operation. Over 40% of Canadians in one survey expressed the opinion that their system was getting WORSE!
Government controlled health care can be seen in the latest flu immunization issues here. They are stating that only those under 2 and over 65 can get the shots for free. Such systems will have no problem telling you are too old for operation X, which several government run systems already do!
Get off their ass about health care. The number one thing I hate about Wal-Mart is that they use local governments to seize private property for their stores, property the owners didn't want to sell but some local government saw increased tax revenue and decided it was more important than the citizens.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
First the RIAA complained that people ripping CDs and distributing them was putting music stores out of business. Now, in this article, the RIAA trumpets the closure of music stores in the context of Walmart's price pressure on those businesses. Sounds like another excuse to me. Instead of whining about the changes happening to their business model, they should embrace the change and join the rest of us in the 21st century.
there are plenty of people that shop there because...their prices are incredible
Yes, incredible!!!! That video game that Best Buy is selling for 49.99 can be bought from Wal-Mart for just 49.87!!!! 12 cents!!!! Can you believe it!!!! Incredible!!!!!
The One for All 8810w is one of the most versatile universal remotes out there due to the fact that it is JP1 programmable. It also happens to be one of the cheapest JP1-programmable remotes out there. ($18-20).
It's an excellent remote for an excellent price.
Usually when I'm shopping for "basic" stuff, Wally World is the second place I stop. (Target being the first simply due to physical location - I pass by Target on the way to Wally World.) My local Wally World is a pretty decent store. (After all, it was only built 3-4 years ago.) Far better than the run-down K-Marts we have around here, which are total pits.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
But I think the biggest trap you've fallen into is the High Fidelity one - mistaking selling CDs for loving music. If you're a retailer who does it because you love the music and don't have a profit motive, then you have a hobby, my friend, not a business.
The problem I have is that I like the high fidelity business type. I love shopping at the record stores where the employees and owners are music lovers. I get great service, a knowledgeable staff, and more often than not buy something that I wasn't shopping for in the first place and am quite happy about doing it.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Hey, I'm not usually a supporter of Wal-Mart but good for them. If this happens, I may just start shopping at Wal-Mart, again.
Monopoly one, meet monopoly two
That's precisely what makes this so interesting.
I've always been under the impression that you don't mess with WalMart. (If you're a producer trying to get your goods sold, I mean.) If they tell you to lower prices and you don't, they'll drop your product altogether. Because of their immense size, they pretty much boss you around.
On the other hand, no one messes with the RIAA, either. And WalMart has a lot to lose here: couldn't the RIAA simply stop providing them with CDs? True, it might cut into their sales, too, but the RIAA could assert its dominance.
It's like the mob, only there's two of them. And one has just given an ultimatum to the other. I want to watch this one.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Um you're right about everything about the fast food, theres no loss leaders in fast food. I used to order stuff for mcdonalds 3 times a week. Our cost for a hamburger was 10 cents. Our cost for a cheeseburger was like 14. Cost for a big mac was I think maybe 29 cents. The most expensive thing was the filet o fish...a whole 60 cents. Trust me there are no loss leaders at mcdonalds.
There are certain requirements for a comfortable area. Lane width. How many times do they have the main lanes so stuffed with extra goods that you can't easily manuever a shopping cart around? Are products stacked so high that a normal sized woman or short guy will need help getting one down without risking a spill?
Many prisons are "over capacity". That doesn't stop them from stuffing more in. It just means that you get crowded.
I don't read AC A human right
How is this not a commune? Its like communism's evil twin!
The difference between a commune and communism is that one is voluntary, and the other isn't. There are various hippy communes around America in which some people choose to participate and some don't. There weren't too many voluntary shopping malls in the Soviet Union.
grep -ri 'should work'
"Only one of the three had ever worked in music retailing -- until that person moved to a new division in August and was replaced by someone who previously bought Wal-Mart's salty snacks"
I might pay $15 for a CD of the conversations between music retailers and Wal-mart's salty snack guy... sounds like a hoot!
I don't think there are any Wal-Marts in Chicago proper. I know of a couple out in the burbs, but I have yet to see one in or near the city.
But I *need* Walmart! Where else would I go on Friday nights to satisfy my prurient interests?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
There are people who don't live paycheck to paycheck?
Spoken like a person who probably has health care and a job were they are paid more then peanuts
Who goes to Walmart for High-End items? It's the low price on low-end items that brings people in.
Seriously, thing hard about where you buy things. Yes, I understand $2-3 more is a lot to some people, however, you are ultimately reducing your the choices and varieties of the music you hear and books you read.
So far as I can tell, buying online gets me lower prices AND more choices.
grep -ri 'should work'
Links, please? I'm so sick of "mainstream pop commercials" it's painful to even google for such sites.
TIA!
Maybe it's simply popular cause they squeeze every penny & make a good buy for consumers ...but at what price:
5 /2 5.html
..when i see stuff like brand new microwaves at under 40$ in supermarket stores, i seriously wonder. Not that the price is bad, on the contrary, it TOO good, and to who's expense?
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/200
--------
Even walmart aside
Well, your not doing a very good job of discouraging people from shopping there. It's always busy when I shop there ;)
Maybe they should sell more than one product! No rights are given to indies to make a profit for selling one product.
"The independants can't afford to compete with WalMart on the hits, but can't survive only on non-hits."
They can compete another way. If Walmart even sells Eminem, it would be the censored, clean lyrics version. They're run by Bible-thumping prudes. They wouldn't sell music with explicit lyrics no matter how wildly popular it was. Of course, you still won't have enough customers in a rural area to support an indie record store, but there's always mail order like Amazon or just downloading.
See this thing in my hand? It's a CD containing the recorded works of the world's smallest violin.
Watch out everyone! Garcia has a first post, and and it's going straight to +5! Stand back, It's going to be an awesome Thursday for garcia. His life is complete. Until the next slashdot article...
Don't get me started. For a few years, I lived near a major metropolitan area. I had moved from a rural (suburban) area. The first sign of lack of courtesy at stores was everybody too lazy or in a hurry to return the carts to the provided stalls. they just leave them right beside the car, or most likely right behind the next car, and drive off on their merry way. I remember when stores didn't even provide the courtesy cart returns. Morally sound people would do the right thing and roll their carts all the way to the store front (uphill, both ways, in the snow).
When I catch someone doing that, I usually let them know about it. I "scold" them in front of the other people and tell them how uncourteous thay are. Usually, they put the cart back.
If you have been employed for 6 months with Wal*Mart, you can elect to purchase stock at the current price. The company will match your purchase up to $1500 per year. Considering that most of the employees at my local wal*Mart, (1870), have been there for at least a few years, many also have stock options. So, you are stating that Wal*Mart is good for the employee, and you are bitching about it? You make no séance.
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
Who am I supposed to not buy from? Wal-Mart or the RIAA members?
Which am I supposed to hate?
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
Don't bug him now, he's carefully crafting his next +5 post.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Because, as usual, most people do not care about "evil" business practices. The other points you bring up are mostly a matter of taste.
How about: They make it too easy for the average uncaring buyer to take his dollars and vote for Chinese sweat shops with penny-wages and appalling work conditions.
chl
r. If I can buy the same product for less, is it in my best interest to buy it for more?
Maybe short term it is, but in the long term if it ends up destroying your local economy, then maybe not.
Go to ASDA Stevey, they are now owned by Walmart and slowly but surely embracing the business practices - including the 'greeter'. While you might *think* this is the poor cashier 'greeting' at their till (sorry, Scottish joke), it is infact the person at the door saying "Good Morning, Good Morning" and from time to time reluctantly dictating ill-prepared gems such as "Why not try our new Danish bacon, it's really great, you could, erm, make it into a bacon sandwich, or erm, have some for breakfast, mmmm, delicious" into a microphone which is broadcast throughout the store for their maximum embarrassment.
How about making the customers happy? Personally, I can't believe that 1 out of 5 CDs are sold in Walmarts. I can't stand their stores. I absolutely DREAD entering one.
As long as consumers like you continue to shop there, they have absolutely no incentives to change their business practices.
Many people complain that Wal-Mart is a big bully, but no matter how big a company it is, it cannot stand against massive boycotts by the consumers because it hurts their profits. However, it seems that for many, cheap prices and convenience outweigh their beliefs.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Seems more like Feudalism to me. Big king in far-off castle, store manager as vassel, serfs working the land (that only the king actually owns any of). Yep, Walmarts in small towns are fiefdoms.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
they arent someplace that I want to shop for music as its just usually a mess and full of people.
"Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." -- Yogi Berra
Learn to love Alaska
Hear hear!
:P
Speaking as a Brit myself, it always amuses me how the Yanks opine RIAA profits and excessive CD prices. It is not uncommon for us to pay £12.99 ($23) or £13.99 ($25) for a CD here, as you note - if prices dropped to more reasonable levels (i.e. £5 or £8), CD sales would skyrocket and remain high for quite some considerable time, I would think.
Of course, it's always been that way in the UK. You can get better prices by using mail order, which brings things down to the £7-£8 mark, but you may have to add delivery costs and will certainly have to wait some time for the items to get to you. There is none of the instant gratification of just buying the item there and then in a shop, unless you are prepared to pay twice the price for it.
Same goes for computer bits, of course. In Japan, I could walk into a shop and pay mail order prices and walk out with the product. In England, I have to pay delivery and wait at least until the next day.
Of course, fact is that the British just love to complain. We are incomplete without something to bitch about. If CD prices were lower, we'd bitch about the fact that we can't bitch about the high price of CDs.
iqu
I fully expect there to be lots more class-action lawsuits against the company in the near future, even with current ones they're getting worse if anything.
Anyone know what happened after they illegally tried to prevent worker unionization? I hear that lawsuits were filed, but I haven't heard any more.
Learn to love Alaska
Example: I used to work at Best Buy, and our employee discount for buying things in the store was based on the cost of those items to the store. For CD's it was actually cheaper to not use the employee discount (i think later on it automaticly gave us the retail price anyway). When i asked why this was i was told that CD's are actually usually sold at or below cost. The only reason they are there is to get the people in the store and then hopefully they will buy some nice accessories or a new CD player with them. So i don't know about Wal-mart but i know that for Best Buy (and probably places like Circuit City since their prices are comprable) CD's are for marketing value, not profit
Could you educate a simple Scotsman, what is a greeter?
.sig this
The Wal-Mart greeter is an insane old man who thinks he's conversing with a gingerbread cookie -- at least according to the recent (somewhat creepy) Wal-Mart ad.
I've been in a few shops in the UK with greeters. They do tend to be American owned though.
The one that springs to mind is the Warner Brothers store in Kingston, but I'm sure places like Gap have them.
I find them rather creepy really, I don't want to be told to enjoy my shopping!
1. The grand parent accused the OP of being a selfish, elitist prick, not a criminal. And being a selfish, elitist prick is not a crime.
:)
2. The OP has offered very little by way of evidence of being an intelligent person who makes rational arguments. "I don't like the music sold at walmart, therefore it is all crap and they must be lying about the fact that 1 in 5 CDs are sold at walmart"
This guy is best ignored... but insulting him is probably more satisfying
What kind of sick world do we live in when we can actually cheer a sweatshop Borg retail organization for their gambit to topple the RIAA? Even M$ can't bully the RIAA into DRM, but Wal-Mart has them scared.
Enjoy it while it lasts. Once Wal-Mart wins this pissing match, they'll have M$ sized monopoly on album sales, be able to re-raise the prices (with the extra profit in their pockets not the RIAA) and just to rub salt in the consumers wound, we'll have less artist selection than we do now because everyone must be plain vanilla to keep Wal-Mart happy.
The cure for consumers against the RIAA could well be worse than the disease.
When all of your wishes have been granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed - Marilyn Manson
So right.
Look they have done studies, on this and when the employees who work there can't afford to buy things from the store itself? Thats sad, and when there are no other retail stores in the area b/c walmart drove them out, thats sad. Those people have no other retail jobs to get, and can't afford to shop there let alone anywhere else.
Walmart sucks.
As for CD's Walmart drives down prices= artists less satisfied with profits = more artist leave big labels = distruction of Middleman filled record industry! yay. Ok, I'm just being hopeful.
Shick's Law: There is no problem a good miracle can't solve.
If you want above-average wages, go to college. Start a business. DO something.
If you're just going to show up to work when you're told and do a job *ANYONE* can do, you deserve the crap pay you're getting. That's life.
And, Americans agree with me, based on how they vote with their wallets.
paintball
It doesn't make up all of the difference but you should allow for that.
What ever happened to the idea that CDs were going to make the price of music lower?
The cost of materials is so low (pennies or less if you press in bulk) why are CDs still selling at the $15-$20 level?
You know I hate when the decision to become a horizonal monopoly instead of a vertial one comes back to haunt me.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
So where do all those people who shop at walmart work then? at walmart? or are they all retiries.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Umm, if I understand history correctly, "company towns" are the specter that made communism popular/ necessary in the first place. So the "Walmart town" is not really a twin of the commune concept, but it is related alright. And you got the word "evil" right.
Actually...it's not really a commune. More like an oligarchy. The ruling class owns the profits and the merchandise, employs the people and pays them just enough to get by, which the people only get by because of the low prices at Wal-Mart, and the people return their wages back to the ruling class. Effectively, the ruling class (Wal-Mart's owners) owns the people. It didn't take long for the freedom capitalism offered to turn right back into the same old cast system...
Those outsourced factory jobs everyone is blaming on Bush? A goodly number of them can actually be laid at the feet of Wal-Mart and it's predatory practices. Look what they did to Levi-Strauss, and L-S bent over and took it to gain acess to Wal-Mart.
This story about Wal-mart frightens me greatly, and it's just one of many.
...and to hell with those who critisize Wal-Mart for trying to get a better deal. My God, should they instead just pay whatever the record companies ask without even trying to negotiate? If you want to pay extra for the experience of buying from an independent shop, that's your perrogative, but some of us (1 in 5, apparently) prefer getting more for our money.
no, Wal-Mart isn't backwards... though,sometimes I wonder... Paris Hilton seems to think they sell walls. Its good to see Wal-Mart taking on the big dogs in the recording industry, but still, I feel their business practices are still questionable. Granted, it may seem like they're doing a favor for us, but in the end, they're still swallowing up little music stores like Blockbuster Music, Cactus Records, and others. Who would want to buy the same CD at Bob's Tunes where it's $8 (US) more than the one on the rack at Wal-Mart? And since all their marketting and sales figures are considered confidential and done internally, it would take a subpoena to get the records; provided they're accurate.
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
But the guy gets modded down...
I'd rather be sailing...
Incredibly priced dog shit is still dog shit.
Sure, but if you ever have a need for dog shit, why should you have to pay full MSRP?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Maybe short term it is, but in the long term if it ends up destroying your local economy, then maybe not.
I call red herring. This response is somewhat like saying, "Maybe short term it is, but in the long term if it ends up inviting nuclear holocaust, then maybe not."
Unless it's clear to the consumer that buying from the smaller company is better for the local economy, then there is no basis for discussion along these lines. If the small chain isn't growing, then the only local benefit it has is the salary of the employees. This may be marginally better per employee than the chain, but the chain may employ more people. It may be spending more on the retail location and local services (window cleaning, rugs, etc). By providing lower prices consumers can spend more money elsewhere in the community.
So even if there were more benefits to purchasing from the smaller outfit, there is no way to quantify them (ie, you could be hurting the local economy by buying from them, so it's not a good general rule to buy from small places) and even if it were bad it's impossible to know that it would 'destroy the local economy' as you so melodramatically put it.
-Adam
So losing the 20% of customers we had at Walmart theoretically means we lose them in other venues too, so soon instead of in league with our competitors, we're considered a "smaller" brand, along with all the stigmas associated. I'm by no means happy with the way this sort of marketing and business works, but it's whats become of giant corporations these days.
Assuming they want to stock enough to not lose sales to the store-next-door if they sell one of those 55,000 albums of which they only stock one
Then why not have a kiosk in each store where a customer can walk up, listen to some 30-second samples, order one of those 55,000 CDs, and then have it shipped either to the store or to the customer's door? Not everybody already has a computer and Internet access in order to access Walmart.com.
So develop job skills that will get you paid better than peanuts. It doesn't take much.
Health care should never have become an employer issue in the first place. Employers don't directly provide for transportation, housing, food, or clothing - they pay us money, and we choose to spend it on those things. Yet we NEED each of those things even more than we need health insurance. Families should be able to directly deduct health care costs from their taxes over and above the standard deduction (without itemizing).
I don't typically shop at Wal-Mart because I find their labor practices obscene ("we charge low prices by not giving our employees health-care, and thus making them a burden on taxpayers, who end up subsidizing their trips to the emergency room when they get the flu"), but when I have, most of what they sell does seem cheap, and the stores are filthy (of course, I live in kind of a run-down area, which I'm sure doesn't help).
Bagging aside, when Target was out of stock, I did buy a small TV there for $49 and it has held up for about a year with no signs of going bad.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
usually in communism, there's some sort of nominal promise that the communes and stuff belong to the People, not to the WalMart corporation.
That is, unless at least some residents happen to own a few shares of Wal-Mart common stock. Not everybody at Wal-Mart works in a minimum-wage position.
Well there's really nothing wrong with paying below the average in wages (not that I read the independent statistics you didn't cite). Seriously, somebody's got to employ those not qualified for earning an above-average wage. Then there's the retirees who are probably enjoying just getting out of the house and seeing new faces while earning some cash for antique shopping.
If not Wal-Mart, it's McDonald's, right?
And regarding health insurance, there is no law (yet, by God) requiring a certain level of insurance to be offered by employers. And the Constitution certainly doesn't say everyone is entitled to free healthcare. Insurance is a perk. If you don't like the packages offered, which it was your responsibility to inquire about when you filled out an application, work elsewhere!
You missed my point. Sure if you want to buy the latest trendy bestseller, you can get it cheaper at a box store. BUT when you want the hard to find book, or some unique title from a small press, good luck.
The small presses are not supported by the large chain stores, so when the small presses go under because people buy from the uber store instead of the small indie store, you ultimately have LESS choices in the long run, not more, b/c now those titles are gone forever.
And it's already happening, there are only about 4 major publishers now, you may think there's more but they're just a variety of names under the same corporations. There's only about 1/2 the independent bookstores than there were 10 years ago, and to someone who knows the industry a bit - trust me, there's less to choose from now b/c people have bought solely on price, and not realized the impact.
In the short run, you save a few bucks, in the long run you have less choices as publishers and distributers becoming fewer and fewer. And guess what, just like the MS monopoly the people here hate so much - those left standing are already exercising questionable business practices since there's fewer voices to raise an alarm.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
And /. is going to the dogs.
Or is it going to dogs?
Anyway, I don't give shit, or do I give the shit?
But who gives a rats ass? And who gives the rats an ass?
Let's not get too religious here.
and read one of the 71k articles
besides, what more evidence do you need besides the fact that 5 of the top 10 billionaires are walmart family members while virtually all of their employees are insuranceless toothless rednecks with no hope of ever digging themselves out of poverty thanks to the corporate money-caste system in power in this country
thank you for trying to justify your walmart patronage on moral grounds so i could bring you hurtling back to reality.
I'm not saying I don't shop there but I'm not deluded into thinking they're something Good (tm)
Every company does or wants to do this, just not as simplistically simple.
Anyone who has enough power in their industry will just do it more obviously.
Look at unions, the supply they sell the company is the labour, when your whole business hingest on their labour, they'll give in until the entire company/industry/country feels the pain.
Flip it around and this is just supplier lock in rather then customer lock in.
1.6% to musicians.
That means if I make music through the RIAA and sell $50 million worth of sales I still won't be a millionaire.
What's one million albums, a gold record? It must bot be monetarily valuable then.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
Why do you think Wal-Mart is moving to RFID tags? Soon, every box entering a Wal-Mart will have an RFID tag, placed there by the supplier, or Wal-Mart won't buy it. When that tag comes through the door, it will be immediately checked against the purchasing system. If there's no match, display screens will flash a warning to the stock people, the box goes back on the truck, and somewhere in Bentonville, a computer will log a supplier screwup.
How about making the customers happy? Personally, I can't believe that 1 out of 5 CDs are sold in Walmarts.
/. post implies), but I'm surprised the figure isn't higher. I'd venture to say more than half of CDs in Canada are sold by Walmart and its direct competitors (Zellers, which is not associated with but is almost a clone of the US chain Target--and Loblaws/Superstore, which is a national grocery chain that has electronic secions in its newer stores).
Twenty percent does not a monopoly make (despite what the
Interestingly enough, I've observed that music and DVD prices are 20 to 30% more expensive in the US than in Canada. I was talking to an employee in an American Best Buy store about that and he said he knew they were more expensive--he said the Canadian Future Shop stores (owned by the same company as Best Buy) set their retail prices to match the US stores--except that it is in Canadian dollars, which are worth 75 to 80% of US currency. Given the difference in retail price and the low markup I'd say RIAA has room to manoeuvre.
I can't stand their stores. I absolutely DREAD entering one. They aren't clean, they aren't friendly after you pass the greeter, and they aren't someplace that I want to shop for music as it's just usually a mess and full of people.
I think your problem with Walmart is local. That, or you fancy yourself too sophisticated for Walmart. The Walmart closest to me is sometimes tiresome to shop in due to its shear size, but the place is absolutely spotless and the staff, while they often have no clue about their merchandise except where you can find it, is always friendly. Maybe it the difference in culture and management as it is not a US located store. OTOH, I've been to Walmarts in Maine and Nevada and found they were not all that bad either.
Why not concentrate on making music available for less money somewhere that I might want to buy it instead of worrying about making sure Walmart is happy.
In this case the member corporations of RIAA are the sellers and Walmart itself is the customer. In regards to bulk sales it is RIAAs responsibility to make its biggest customer happy.
Most independent stores I have gone to shop for music in are charing $16+ for a CD. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you.
You really have never worked in retail or distribution because if you did you'd know that 33% markup is very low in the world outside the big box stores. Clothing is usually marked up 100% to 300%. Even most food is marked up much more than 33% (with the exception of common loss-leaders like milk and eggs). Smaller stores have to pay RIAA companies $12, then have to pay to ahve them shipped to each location, and have to pay rent, heat, electricity for their stores and have to pay the wage of the clerks. You have to sell a lot of CDs at $4 profit each to stay afloat. Recording companies, however, only have to lay out costs to record the album once--then they sell millions of copies at a 1000% markup.
RIAA has to cater to its biggest customers needs--it makes no business sense for them to say "screw you" and depend solely on 10,000 mom and pop shops--that would benefit nobody. I think its great that Walmart is using it's "monopoly" to drive down wholesale prices (counteracting what the likes of Microsoft and RIAA do). I certainly like this approach better than antitrust lawsuits, government regulation, etc. Unless a monopoly is abusing its power to the detriment of customers then the less lawyers, judges and politicians involved the better.
My biggest problem w/ Wal-Mart is that they don't pay their employees enough and don't give them health care, making them a burden on the state and the taxpayers and thus me. I don't want to have to subsidize Wal-Mart's low-prices by having my tax dollars pay for a Wal-Mart employee's over-priced trip to the emergency room for something that if they had health care they could have taken care of at a doctor's office or clinic.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
As long as it doesn't stink up my alley, and the barker is far away. Why should I care about dog shit?
Why do people love dog shit so much these days?
Walmart kicking labels around makes me smile. Monopoly one meet monopoly two indeed. I've wanted to smack around these record labels for pricing themselves out of their market and then being a road block to technical innovation for the last decade of recording industry antics. The recording industry has been pulling out their high priced lawyers at everybody, and everything including my kitchen sink. Hell, I want the Recording Industry to have to PAY Walmart to carry their merchandise.
They sell those things because that's what their customers want. That's Wal-Mart's real secret. They got started at the same time Target was and the first K-Mart store opened, but Wal-Mart outgrew each because they were better able to provide what their customers wanted. Don't blame Wal-Mart for exposing the extremely shortsightedness of the average American consumer.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Quoting from the article:
Frequently an argument is made that American culture is becoming bland and homogenized through forces like Wal-mart and McDonalds.
This is just one indication of just how cultural diversity gets clamped.
You could argue that Wal-mart's version of culture is just the one that sells, but that's not entirely what drives their selection of stock to sell. The upper managment of Wal-mart makes decisions that affect the direction taken by American and, increasingly, world culture.
And, by actively excluding alternative expressions of culture and values, Wal-mart alienates many. Notwithstanding all the recent feel-good sponsorship of NPR and folksy good-will commercials about reviving inner cities and providing Good Jobs ® wearing blue vests and still qualifying for public assistance.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Maybe 20% isn't a monopoly in the aggregate sense, but Walmart does have local monopolies and since they are found largely in rural areas, that's a big deal. Here in Cedar City, Utah, you've got Walmart, Lins (the grocery store), the local Ace Hardware, and a few specialty shops; Walmart is the only place to find certain items (unless you want to pay the gas and take the time to drive the 90 minute round trip to St. George). We used to have a Kmart, but that was closed. Walmart *is* a monopoly in rural areas: where people had few choices to begin with, now they have even fewer.
so now, uncle bob's music store in podunk, iowa won't be able to sell music at competitive prices, will go out of business, and wal-mart will have won again. its a win-win situation
Linux is to the internet as Duct Tape is to the Universe.
Heh, I am glad to hear someone else doesn't throw their money at those idiots. I always feel like the only one who is boycotting the "arts" cartels.
But about their stuff being garbage these days, I recently heard an alternate explanation for the dearth of good music we always talk about. I think it is worth considering: The author suggested our porn-oriented entertainment standards are what is killing music. I mean, every new star has to be a vixen starlet or one of those dancing teenage girlymen; she/he can't be just a brilliant musician.
Given that maybe two percent of females are really hot looking enough to get on stage [what's the ratio for guys, similar?], doesn't it make sense that only two percent of the good music talent is reaching the airwaves? So our own failure to separate our sexual aesthetics from our musical aesthetics is a large part of what is driving the crappification of music.
We seem to think ugly people can't sing. But we should buy porn when we want porn; and buy music when we want music. Any comments? I think he had a good point.
to continue the political side: if you're upset about outsourcing, wal-mart might be one of the last places you should shop. they used to have the 'buy american' campaign (10 yrs ago?). that has since been replaced with 'how much cheap shit from china can we sell.'
We just read two days ago about this exact same thing happening in Korea, where all the independent music stores are shutting down. And there they blame it on downloading. But here we learn it is actually Walmart's doing. It is a perfectly capitalistic phenomenon--probably the same stuff going on in both countries.
But no, let's blame it on piracy. Maybe that version will be in the news next week, after everyone has forgotten about Walmart's involvement today.
They don't pay many of their employees living wages either. Many of their employees subsist partially on some form of public assistance.....your tax dollars.
BTW, telling someone to learn a new skill is great, but what if your skill gets outsourced?
How many times does a person have to go back to school?
Who pays? Most individuals can't afford to.
Sooner or later the goverment would get involved and assuming that other externalities would allow someone to retrain everytime another profession gets outsourced you would end up with the situation of your tax dollars underwriting corporate profits.
But, what do they have that people buy so much of? Most of it is crap....and I couldn't imagine buying clothes there...etc.
I'm from the South...lived in AR, TN, TX, LA....so I've grown up with WM all my life...but, neither me, my family, nor most of the people I know shop there very much....I'd always thought of WM as about 2 rungs below KMart...more of the trailer park shopping level....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I think "fiefdom" is a more appropriate word.
The fact that he accidentally spelt a real, unrelated, word doesn't suddenly change the type of mistake he made. If he'd written "Potato" there, would you still have argued it was a grammatical error?
This isn't a case of just selling somewhere else. Wal-Mart is the largest retail chain in the world. It is the retail chain that is shopped the most.
If you are selling your Do-dad for $9.99 everywhere, including Wal-Mart. (Which sells more of your Do-dads then all the other places combined, thus giving you the greatest amount of total revenue.) Then Wal-Mart tells you that you either start selling the Do-dad for $4.97 or they will stop carrying your product and buy it from a manufacturer in China. What choice do you have?
You look at your books and you see that you either sell your Do-dad at the price Wal-Mart sets, or you lose most of your business and possibly go out of business. In either case, you are forced to cut costs by closing down factories and or moving operations oversea to take advantage of lower operating costs.
This is simple global economics it is nearly impossible not to understand, unless you are purposefully/willfully choosing to be ignorant about it.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
This is capitalism. It's nice to believe in a rosy utopia where everyone gets what they want, but the reality is that our economy does not support that model.
And there's the problem. Capitalism used to have natural limits based mostly on the speed of delivery and money liquidity. This allowed a lot of leeway for smaller shops to find meaningful ways to compete outside of price and supply.
Now, supply is limitless, money can be exchanged instantly and all sales are computer controlled to automatically maximize profits. As a result, wealth naturally pools up amongst the people who have enough wealth to take advantage of extreme efficiency.
Basically, capitalism is now unbridled and if you were lucky enough to amass enough wealth in the past you can now take over entire markets because there are no functional restraints in either the market or through competition law.
If you read back to the writings of early capitalists and their critics, they never envisioned a world where there was unlimited (for all intents and purposes) supply and near 100% efficiency. In fact, nearly every one of them said that situation would be to the overall detriment of society and would serve only to consolidate wealth in the smallest minority.
Walmart surely deserves all their employees' class action suits; the only people that I know who can enjoy working there are Limbaugh zombies.
But the pricing-oriented policies at Walmart are definitely a Good Thing for the rest of us, as the following poster comments. And bulk foods are an excellent idea, from almost every perspective. It is entirely YOUR fault if you don't know how to store pickles until you have eaten them! Every try a fridge, or sharing them with friends?
What if some of the distributors refuse to sell to Wal-Mart at lower prices? Wal-Mart can either pay the price, or stop doing business with those suppliers.
If the suppliers stood up against Wal-Mart, perhaps it will no longer sell one of every five CDs. If someone wants to buy a particular CD, they won't be able to get it at Wal-Mart. It might be good for the whole industry.
So you may find that different people have different experiences with going into Walmarts. Big city people will probably hate them (lots of negativity toward them here in Chicago) while the less populated areas will love them.
I have to say that the Walmarts in the Chicago area are pretty bad. I really don't like going to them. But outside of the Chicago area, I like the condition of most of the Walmarts. Even the De Kalb Walmart (60 miles west of Chicago) is pretty nice.
Big city Chicago has a different problem with Walmart: Unions. The unions control the city and would rather the people have no jobs than non-union jobs.
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
...and Walmart isn't [I don't think] tipping the election[s] by filtering everybody's news.
It's common for any retailer who controls a big chunk of a product's market to use that leverage to secure better deals. No one forced those retailers to wholesale all those CD's to Walmart.
Meanwhile, since when did selling 1 of every 5 instances of a product make you a monopoly? People must be getting those other 4 CD's by magic, eh?
Just confirms Slashdot's economic illiteracy.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
1. The GP used the term "insult". Would you like me to call you a "selfish, elitist prick"? No? That was the GP's point.
2 True. But you have to admit... there's a lot of low-quality (in terms of musical talent, etc.) music at WalMart. But a lot of people like that stuff.
I get my music from iTMS. Convienient, inexpensive, simple.
My other car is first.
Frankly I have little interest in buying contemporary CDs anyway. Walmart may sell 1 in 5 cds, but there is only 1 in 8 or 9 songs on that CD worth listening to, let alone purchasing.
iTunes and other services of the like allow me to buy the one song I want for around $1 USD. I'll choose that any day over $10-12 for really just the one song I wanted in the first place.
JA
I just want to bitch about all of the bitching about Wal-Mart on this page. Everything I hear that's bad about Wal-Mart is that they sell their product in large volumes at low prices. One of the ways they provide low prices is by demanding low prices for their large volume order from their suppliers. They also don't pay their employees any more than the economy makes them pay to have them work there.
This is bad? This is somehow Wal-Mart's fault? If you find fault with Wal-Mart for only these reasons then I suggest you re-evaluate your support of capitalism. This is just one fairly large conduit for capitalism making for minimized margins and hard working people barely scraping by for much of their life producing lots of good work in the meantime. This isn't capitalism failing, it's capitalism working.
I respect anyone who objects to Wal-Mart for moral reasons and doesn't shop there. I do shop there, and feel no guilt for doing so. I also support capitalism but not in place of religion or ethics. I think CD's should cost $5. This is a step in that direction. I'm happy.
I recently bought a season of West Wing on 3DVD's. It cost under $50. I don't have cable because I don't believe in their generally crappy programming or beating me over the head with advertisements. I think this was a good deal. Far better than $22 for 90 minutes of fluff. I am using Wal-Mart to boycott cable. Now you might be able to snub the RIAA by either boycotting their stuff OR purchasing it through Wal-Mart. Yay capitalism.
-theed
I particularly liked that Wal-Mart considers Puerto Rico 'international'. Did the US allow Puerto Rico to break away and become an independent nation?
I find it ironic that people think companies have some kind of moral responsibility to their customers. The system is set up in such a way that companies never have, and never will give a crap about their customers. The bottom line will always be how much money can we squeeze out of these faceless morons while still looking like we care. Eveyone is out for number one, this should be no surprise to anybody.
Yeah, but c'mon...a Wally-Mart job is pretty much just for high school and college students...working between/during school for extra money. If you're an ADULT working there or flipping burgers in hope of supporting yourself...well, you've made some serious vocational errors in your life. Minimum wage isn't meant to be a living wage...just like social security wasn't meant to be a complete retirement plan. You need to get an eduction and a real job.....if you didn't plan right...well, tough luck...and there's still time and opportunity, but, will be harder now...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"I don't see how he could have won...I don't know anyone that voted for him!"
If you look at the US economy as a whole, yeah, Walmart doesn't have a monopoly. But if you live three miles from a Walmart, and 50 miles from anything else... Where are you going to shop??
It's precisely equivalent to those telco/ broadband/ cable companies. Nobody is saying they aren't abusing their local monopolies. That's true of Walmart too--though their abuse happens to aim upstream at their suppliers as much or more than downstream at their customers.
Living wages are a myth, at least as far as public policy is concerned - they could possibly work if the amount of dollars in the U.S. economy was a zero-sum amount, but it isn't. Any hike in minimum wages causes a ripple effect through the economy, causing inflation, and you're back at square one - the living wage you passed just isn't enough to make a living.
My skill IS being outsourced. I'm evolving my skill set to stay out of the way of the outsourcing, but at some point my job may be completely outsourced. I'll deal - it's nobody's job but my own to ensure that my skills are marketable.
Pretty much everyone in the U.S. has the opportunity to go back to school once on the federal dollar (unless they earn too much, in which case they pay for themselves). That's all that is needed. A college degree can get you into a provisional teaching program, where you can be retrained into a job that pays a livable salary. Packing orders in a warehouse requires NO education, pays better than minimum wage, and can easily be a stepping stone into a corporate job. Opportunities are there for those willing to pursue them, and those who will not pursue them, well, how many times do you subsidize laziness?
making money hand over fist -> must not be doing anything unethical
Am I getting you right, is that what you're saying? So DeBeers, MS, Exxon, R.J Reynolds, we know those guys aren't doing anything wrong because they have lots of money? That's the most bizarre argument i've heard in a very long time.
Anyway, as for a good argument why WalMart isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread, despite their impressive wealth you can try this article: http://www.alternet.org/story/12962
You can refer to the book No Logo also for more information.
Really, there's a wealth of damning evidence out there. I don't think you've been looking.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
What are you yelling about, the whole point of complaining about Wal-Mart is to warn others of their practices so that people will be informed and can make their own decision about shopping there. Just because you think their shit don't stink doesn't mean people shouldn't complain about their bad experiences to warn others. I hate Wal-Mart, I never go there and I'll tell that to anyone who listens so that they too might be spared the agony that is Wal-Mart.
"CD's have a 100% return policy at all retailers"
Wrong... or at least, incomplete.
Unless you're a LARGE chain with a special deal (think Tower, Best Buy), the amount of product that can be returned without penalty is based on total purchases from that vendor... usually 7-10%. Anything above that gets hit with a restocking charge. (And by the way, the store usually pays shipping both ways.) So stocking a title and then returning it if it doesn't sell isn't cost free. (And this ignores arcane issues such as missing profits from sales that were lost because the store stocked an item that it turned out nobody wanted, instead of having one that would sell.)
This reminds me of the number of people you see at anti-globalization protests wearing T-Shirts they spent a lot of money on that carry nothing but a global brand's logo.
LOL.
"Man, Wal Mart sucks, it's too big, and I get all my stuff there because it's so cheap."
LOL.
Eat shit! 10 billion flies can't be wrong...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Apparently you're confused.
Stores don't set the prices that they buy at from the distributor.
Well, unless you're Walmart.
This guy is awesome! Good write!
Wal-Mart has 3500+ domestic stores, and nearly 1500 international units. They pull in over $60 BILLION dollars per quarter and $2 billion of that is PROFIT.
... about 2.5% increase in profits bringing them to approximately 8.2 billion/year or about a 3.4% profit margin.
So you are saying that Walmart only pulls a 3.33% profit margin. That's a pretty small margin. If WM is trying to make up 2 bucks on each disc sold, and figure they sell 100 million albums/year then we are talking about a net change of approximately 200M bucks, or an increase of
Anyone know what the profit margin for companies such as Tower Records and such are?
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
nope, you've hit the nail on the head; that's exactly what they do!
hey i noticed you used the cool little mark over the e in the word fiance. i also noticed you sign your messages bill. so i assume you are a guy. isn't a fiance a betrothed male and a betrothed female is a fiancee? just wondering if you knew that. i didnt know there was a difference in spelling for the two words wil i got engaged either.
steal this sig
I grew up in an area where there were massively wealthy or massively poor and far between (one of the three wealthiest areas in our state).
No kmart, no sears, small high-end stores and maybe one small mass-retailer, for over 150 miles. You either frequented the custom ski shops and bought 100.00 sweaters (in 1978 dollars), or you didn't. You were at the mercy of whatever was available, on the racks, or clearance. Imagine trying to find a specific size of clothing, or a reasonably priced winter coat that fits. Don't even talk about finding technology.
And despite whatever has been said elsewhere, the local businesses did gouge you and had little selection. You never saw the owners or their kids working in the stores, just the lowest paid kid or locals at a non-living wage. I now will always look for price as I think it keeps people honest, but always look for selection as well. Service has always been overrated.
"communism's evil twin" indeed. At the end, monopolies of any kind pretty much have to start to resemble each other.
Political monopolies, like communism (well the closest the world ever got was socialism, Soviet style,) and economic monopolies, like any one industry towm, are both prone to the same sort of infections: Corruption, greed and abusive relationships with the free market factors/forces.
Wall*Mart would be NOT wiped out but the entire export/import price balance structure would be righted with the stroke of a pen if imported goods HAD to be sold, and enforced through tariffs, fines and other punitive restraints, at the SAME price as the lowest local (not foreign) production cost.
However, Wall*Mart would NOT be able to exploit its relative advantage in going to foreign markets and importing everything for sale in its stores at prices below what can be produced locally.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I've stopped buying CD's at walmart becuase of their policy of selling bleeped music
If there was a conspicuous "EDITED" next to the price, as I see on most of Wal-Mart's rap albums, then you're in the wrong for assuming the album was unedited. However...
and then refusing to let me return the CD once I realized that it had been ruined.
If, on the other hand, the CD's label didn't conspicuously say "EDITED", then Wal-Mart sold you defective goods. Return it, and take the exchange copy of the same title. Then go back a different day, return that copy, get another exchange, until Wal-Mart realizes that every copy it sells is defective.
Shop there all you want. Wall Mart is a leading contributor to the down grade I see in american life styles. They are a typical big business that will do anything to make money with no thought to the consequences.
Check out the recently released statics on the trade deficit. Who is importing all this stuff from China. Everybody but Wall Mart is one of the big leaders in the charge. I know several people that were perfectly happy working in industries that have been replaced. They were not rich by any means now they are much worse off and often at ages where being "retrained" is just not possible.
Do we really need $40 dvd players in every room of the house? Do we really need a bigger store that now carries 20 instead of only 15 types of instant rice? Do we really need to underwear to go down another 10 cents. Etc. etc. etc.
Except for food, cars, gas and housing what I pay for everything has dropped in the last 20 years. And I do mean everything including CDs. But then I have bought a large number of used CDs. Again supporing a local business man and not some investor who never sees his customers.
What kind of arragent bastard are you. To save a few pennies you are willing to support an organization that has to interest in encoraging talent. Its OK to save a buck by importing products from a country that pays its employees in rice. The process requires the use of massive amounts of fuel to ship the stuff here increasing our fuel prices, pollution and our gas prices.
Come on answer. I have much more to say on the subject.
Query: if the Filet o' Fish cost you 60 cents, how come it is frequently the cheapest "large" sandwich on the menu? Not questioning your statement, just curious about pricing.
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
I would have thought in the age of Google that people would have the energy to do their own research if they doubt what is being said
But if it pleases you :
There should be ample supporting arguments on the first three pages of results from the first two links.
Well, to his credit it is an absolutely brilliant troll.
(this is AC because I'm at school)
Don't forget that online stores cost money too. Bandwidth isn't free, and neither are the steps needed to get music to and to run the store.
Also make sure not to forget that the RIAA is free to take as much of the slice as they want. Since it's online, they might as well just take as much as they can. It's their product after all.
The problem in while creating high school and college student jobs they have destroyed many other businesses. This includes hardware store owners, small grocers, and big range of positions in factores that used to supply to these. Check out their food section sometime. The last time I was there (it has been several years) I did not find one product of any kind that was locally produced. What does that say about Wall Mart participating in the community.
How about this?
Most consumers are either stupid or selfish and so are delighted to pay low, low prices regardless of any moral taint the products may carry.
Intelligently voting with *your* dollars will make no practical impact.
Were those shoes made in a sweatshop? How can I know? Besides, they're cheap!
Do those foods contain hydrogenated oils and genetically modified plant matter--wait, that stuff hurts me directly...
Were those electronics made by companies polluting the local wildlife (including those dark-skinned, uncivilized humans)? But who couldn't use an MP3 player *at that price!*
Do all these goods distributed large distances use subsidized petrochemicals that are perhaps speeding the collapse of society by draining the remaining oil unnecessarily fast and may be increasing the risk of respiratory diseases and global warming? Yeah, but check out this shirt!
Think locally (down to about the level of your pocketbook and belly), destroy globally.
But this isn't an issue with Wal-Mart per se, just capitalism as it stands. The problem is that consumer choice is not a positive driving force. Free markets don't maximize quality and efficiency per se, but instead the power of the producers. People are stupid or selfish, and if they manage to put some intelligence into consuming, that intelligence is subverted by advertising. In the end we collectively fuel an unstoppable destructive force that's pushing humankind toward disaster.
But we get good prices!
Well, I can see your first point about the local jobs...but, as far as the one quoted. Personally, I can't really think of ANY grocery store in any town I've lived in that has any local produce. Just isn't really done anymore. Krogers, Safeway..Albertsons..all the national chains I've shopped in pretty much bring everything in from other states...mostly CA and FL. Hell, even here in New Orleans...local grocery stores' seafood isn't usually from here...but, it is easy to go a short drive to the docks and buy directly from the shrimpers and fishermen. And sure..occasionally, LA or AR strawberries come in...but, I'd venture to say that most products in most grocery stores aren't local in origin....but, that's been my experience in the cities I've lived in so far...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I happened to stop into the electronics section while my fiancé did some shopping elsewhere.
Your statement of "don't shop there. Simple as that. " is fine as long as there's somewhere else left to shop.
But its goes against what's really happening when Wall*Mart moves into a geographic area with its thousands of truck loads of cheaper, foreign produced goods.
The local producers get wiped off the map, the same map that Wall*Mart now call its sales territory.
Also note that Wal*Mart would have NO competitive advantage in China, which is where most of their products originate.
That's why fresh food stuffs and drugs are only 'volume discount' cheaper, unlike other non-perishable items. They don't make it through the shipping process as well as a vacuum or CO2 packer container filled with preserved biscuits.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
This hypothetical widget maker is playing the wrong game ... if they are trying to compete on price alone, then they should partner with WalMart. If they want to be the high-quality "boutique" supplier of widgets, WalMart is the wrong partner. This has happened to many WalMart suppliers -- they want to make their play for the big market, and then act real surprised when they realize that that market plays on ruthless price competition. If you are not ready to play in that arena, stick with selling through MallBoutiqueInc.
Try to take an Opened CD, or software for that matter, back to walmart for a refund, . I dare you.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
Like they said in the article, Wal-Mart's philosophy is to sell things as cheap as possible - and I don't doubt that's part of the problem. Stockholders, on the other hand, have become millionares. What does this do to "as possible"? As cheap as possible while still making stockholders millionares? How does the stock value relate to the way that the employees are treated, the sourcing of the products from overseas and how those employees are treated, and what are they really doing to get the price as low as possible? It's not rocket science, you know...
Oh, oh. The mods are attacking. Dive! Dive!
He meant returns from retail to wholesale, not from consumer to retail.
The more posts I read here, the more thin argument s based incorrect on generalizations I see. Many people who shop at Wal-Mart seriously need to cut their expenses and will buy wherever is cheapest in order to get by. It's nice to take a stance that you will shop else where you get that "mom and pop store" feeling; but if you are in that comfortable of a position, you are in the minority. I worked at Wal-mart for six years and found that those cheap-labor jobs tend to attract exactly those cheap-labor mentality employees...but what people blindly refute about those wages is the fact that mom and pop stores aren't exactly paying $15/hour, they are paying minimum wage. Wal-Mart also actively hires elderly and mentally handicapped workers. Wal-Mart would not be debated unless you are first a logical person willing to make logical discussion. Wal-Mart can sell things cheap because they buy in mass quantities, have low overhead costs and low payroll costs. They push smaller stores out primarily due to the fact that small stores don't buy CD's 1,000,000 per purchase order. If you want to pay $50 at another store for a cordless drill or $45 at Wal-Mart; that's your choice; but don't assume you are getting a better product because you paid more...and don't assume that you're doing some sort of justice by spending that extra money for the exact same thing. Wal-Mart sells cheap Levis, for example, under a different name so that Levi Strauss can make money and not tarnish the name of the original jeans. Wal-Mart does not sell real 501 Levi Jeans, so the argument that Wal-Mart ruined the quality of Levis is pure ignorance. Levi Strauss created a line of products to make money, and Wal-Mart is one of the stores that sell them. I find that people who work at Wal-Mart as a career are high-school-level educated and are often people that fit in well in the Wal-Mart culture. The Wal-mart employees can become a second family for many people; something you may get on a much smaller scale in a small store. If you want to complain about the wages; educate yourself, get in shape, and find some initiative, and go get a job doing something you want to do. Some people work at Wal-Mart because that is what suits them best...you aren't helping them any if you triumphantly march to another store to buy your daily goods.
"This is the first time a big player has attempted this sort of hardball move on the labels."
Not true in the least. Slashdotters have Wal-Mart to thank for the record labels being punished for price fixing (as in the popular Slashdotter refrain, "the record companies are evil! They've been busted for price fixing!"). Here's what happened, in a nutshell:
- Wal-Mart started selling CDs at sub-par margins or as a loss leader to get people into the stores to buy other high-margin items.
- Record chains like Tower Records freaked out, as their primary business was selling CDs and they couldn't compete with a Wal-Mart which had a huge store of fishing rods and cheap clothing to make up the bulk of their business.
- The record companies helped fund the advertising for Tower as well as two other chains (TWE and MusicLand, I believe) in exchange for Tower et. al. agreening not to display prices in those ads that went below a certain point. FWIW, this is called a "MAP program," for "minimum advertised price," and is prevalent in tons of other industries.
- Wal-Mart got all pissy and threw their weight around with the government.
- The government told the record companies to stop, and to send checks to consumers.
- Lots of other industries, including the computer peripheral industries, still happily continue MAP programs... until that point that Wal-Mart tattles on them, too.
- Tower Records subsequently declared bankrupcty. Enjoy buying your music at Wal-Mart, folks.
That's about as hardball as you can get.Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
In this context (as a purchaser, not a seller), it isn't even possible for it to be a monopoly. The correct word would be 'monopsony'. But why let little things like the meanings of words stand in the way of a good anti-eeevilll-business rant?
I once saw the Canon EOS Digital Rebel, a high end consumer digital camera, at Walmart.
So they do sell some high-end (for consumers, anyway) stuff.
-Z
It's funny how things have come full circle in merely a century. But the U.S. has been moving towards this for quite a while now - Walmart being in the fore of the whole thing. Basically we've moved from company towns, to many small businesses, which have again been swallowed up by large chains. Now instead of one lage company owning a town, the town is owned by no one, but everyone is fed from the hands of a few large businesses.
"Making a profit on a 33% mark-up is gouging?"
By comparison, Wal-Mart's markup on stuff other than CDs ranges from 30% - 50%. Best Buy's margins on computers and computer peripherals ranges from 25% - 60%.
To answer your (rhetorical) question, 33% is most certainly not gouging.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
In 10 yrs we'll all be buying music on media other than CDs, and if we want the full CD pkg (after we already own some form of the music), we'll pay the extra $ to get a collectible, or some form of Cool Thing(tm) for our purchase.
:-)
CD's will be more expensive, but we'll buy less, and get more for what we pay for.
Oh, and we won't be buying at Wal-Mart, and the Lables won't be distributing them.
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
See the thing about averages is that there's a bottom, a middle, and a top.
... (whir)(click)(buzzz)(ching!) ... The correct answer is 4, which is neither above nor below any of the numbers in the list. Thanks for playing. Try again.
Okay. What is the average of 4 and 4 and 4? Let's see
Its about time somebody had the courage to face the recording industry and threaten to drop their product if they dont lower prices. Ever since the RIAA started suing little kids and grandmothers, I have no respect for them. I only wish other large corporations would follow suit.
Downloader:
"Jou wanna go to war?"
"Okay, say hello to my little friend(wal-mart)"
What's with all the minimum wage comments? Do you guys blast mcdonalds, burger king, target, kmart, ames, bradlys, stop and shop, price chopper, food town, a&p, acme, edwards, and whatever other giant company that pays teenagers shit for cash to do shit for brains jobs? If you work in "retail sales" you get minimum wage. Are you supposed to get 50k a year ringing a register?
.75 cent raise every year or some shit like that. One woman had worked there 5 years, and at the end of my first year I was almost making as much as she was because the state minimum wage was increased, overwriting her raises.
What's funny is in high school I worked part time at a stop and shop grocery store for minimum wage for 2.5 years before college. I had to pay 5 a month to be part of a union that I didn't care about at my age. I got something like a
I came back from my first year of college to work there the summer. I would have had to start over with my "sallery" and union dues. So instead of making around 5.50 an hour I got a job at walmart doing the same thing for 7.50 an hour and longer hours and even a stock purchasing plan. On top of that, I was able to go on a leave of absence while I was at college, come back and pick up at my increased sallery range for the next summer.
But jesus, why do you think they call them minimum wage jobs? Cause it's work that mentally handcapped people can do just as skillfully as you can, it's mindless, boring and repetative. On top of that, you have to deal with jackasses who want you to kiss their asses because they're a "long time dedicated customer".
So ok, maybe walmart is bad for the economy and we don't like superstores putting shitty mom and pop stores out of buisness by offering more products and cheaper prices, but it's not a sweatshop. It's teh same as every other giant retail chain out there.
Walmart told Levi's the same thing, make your product cheaper, or we drop your products.
The result? Levi's had to close their remaining american plants and shift their entire production overseas.
Should the distributer really be making all the company calls? If more labels said screw walmart, walmart wouldn't have 20% of retail CD sales.
33% is actually on the low side for markup. Standard buisness practice is to mark everything up by at least 100% or more. There are some products which of course don't fit this practice, but in general every point of transaction tries to go up by 100%.
Reserved Word.
You have to realize that those are direct costs of the materials, and have nothing to do with the costs they accumulate. They have so many costs you never think about: salaries of employees, utilities bills, equipment, maintenance, advertisements, food that is never sold, coffee lawsuits, taxes.
None of those are included in your 10 cent hamburger cost. The only time you can even begin to think of it that way is when you sell *1 more* hamburger than you normally would, assuming its not because of an additional promotional advertisement.
Fix Your Own TV - RiddledTV.com Avoid the Landfill
Some record companies are wondering if they should play hardball. They know that big stars like 50 cent draw people to Wal-Mart. They just don't know if Wal-Mart is for real when they say lower your prices or we won't sell your CDs anymore. That could mean loosing big bucks in the recording industry considering that 20% of their sales come from Wal-Mart. The big question... Will Wal-Mart stick to their guns and buy CDs from record companies for less or not at all? Would they actually decrease their CD selection and make room for more DVDs and Games? Wal-Mart is definitely playing the tough guy here... now we just have to wait and see if the recording companies risk it and throw the hardball right back at their face or comply to the low cost demands. I'm sort of thinking that Wal-Mart meant what they said and will stick to their guns. After all, CDs are only about 2% of their business... it's not like they have much to loose; but they know that the recording companies do.
They both buy US government bonds in large quantities as part of a deliberate policy to suppress the relative value of their own currencies. Since the Renminbi can be exchanged 8 to 1 against the US Dollar when it should be more like 6 or 4 to 1, Chinese goods appear much cheaper than they really are.
When this situation reverses (and China has finally agreed to float their currency), the US won't take all of the punishment itself as it will be mitigated in the middle run by the shrinking of the trade deficit.
It's funny to me that they don't sell explicit music, yet they sell R-rated movies, M-rated games, and books with, um, "mature" subjects.
Has Wal-Mart ever actually responded to this?
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Another thing to put on the list of "things that are fucked up about San Angelo, Texas" is that Walmart actually has a better selection of high-end consumer cameras than the circuit city there does.
Pity that Walmarts that open in rural areas drive local businesses out of business, putting many people out of work and destroying a significant part of the local culture. Wal-Mart doesn't offer anything that the previous shops didn't - it simply does it in a fashion that allows no competition.
Just a tip: small towns are much more convenient than big cities, by dint of being small. You can actually get out and walk to where you want to go, and the prices will probably be a lot cheaper than in the city, too.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
If a job is so undemanding that high school and college students can do a satisfactory job, then it doesn't make sense for a full-time adult to do it - they should be doing something else more productive.
Why either or? Why not both?
It is true that if you could only do one, go for the place that hurts (their wallet)... but there really isn't a reason to BOTH complain AND shop elsewhere.
Main reason it's not all that effective to just shop elsewhere is that Wal-Mart (in this case) would have less of feedback to affect their future operation. And if your goal is to make them change their behaviour, it's good to also complain.
We've just finished putting out 500 CDs which we sold to the public at NZ$15 (this is in the region of US$10-US$12).
The way we did it was to apply for funding for a group of people making a local CD production.
This was easy to achieve because local governments like community projects.
The next step was to find similar artists who would submit a song for the project. Once we had around 30 people submit tracks, we stopped more coming in and started choosing tracks. (most people sent a whole CD full of songs).
I did the mastering with a friend in our town studio (collective studio - 7 people all pay a little bit of rent and everybody has submitted some equipment).
Another friend did all of the artwork.
We played a release party which was enough to pay all of the artists on the CD.
Now we have only a few CD's, but enough money to do either a run of 2000 or 4 runs of 500.
This means that we can ignore people like the RIAA, and WalMart and continue to build our worldwide word of mouth network. It really helps having community radio stations on board.
So what my message saying?
Get a group of people together, you will make more money from your CDs, your customers will get CDs for less, and you can accept donations from people who would rather burn/download your music.
We can therefore totally remove the monopolists from the equation, help the consumer, and help ourselves (the artists).
Cheers and hope this helps somebody...contact me if you want any help with the above
-={ Security does not exist - give up }=-
Wal-Mart has also brought their business practices to the banking and finance arenas. They have their own line of ATMs and their own money orders. I fully expect to see a Wal-Mart Bank in the near future, with convenient lending terms for purchases at their stores.
I have not shopped at a Wal-Mart (or Sam's Club) in several years, even at the lowest price. I can't afford to let Wal-Mart become the only retailer in town. Much of the specialized knowledge contained in smaller stores (gardening, paint, food preparation) disappears when a retailer of 50+ years closes its doors. Smaller businesses are more willing to help you find that specialized part, or give a time-saving tip they learned the hard way. And, to be honest, I'd rather pay a little extra for my goods and services and know I'm directly helping keep a place in business.
Capitalism is ruthless when taken to the extreme. When the acquisition of currency is the only measure of success, the system will find the most efficient and effective ways to extract them at every opportunity. When it comes to price, the economy of scale (high volume, low price per unit) trumps all other competitive advantages. At this point in history, Wal-Mart is the largest reseller of goods. And companies in a position of dominance are not benelovent for long.
Wal-Mart does this all the time, and it shows in the quality of goods they sell. Try buying identical VCRs, eletric shavers, etc, from Wal-Mart and a competing store that sells it for more. Suppliers aren't stupid.
Wal-Mart forces them to sell for cheaper. So they make cheaper crap for Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart buys enough at a time that it's profitable to switch over the manufacturing plants to build cheaper crap temporarily.
Go get iRate.
Yeah, right.
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It sounds to me like you live near Nashville. Possibly Murfreesboro. Am I correct?
Close, but off a bit, I'm near Knoxville.Whatever it is that people buy a lot of, of course.
I don't go to Wal*Mart much because their locations aren't terribly nearby. Every time I do, though, I find that their grocery has managed to undercut Kroger by 5-20% on 95% of the items they sell (and I'm not just buying WM brand). Doesn't sound like much, and isn't worth the drive every time. But then I don't have, say, kids.
When you're buying diapers by the crate, paper towels by the truckload, and food to fill up three teenage boys, that 5% starts to be a LOT of money. So they go to WM.
Besides, think about the median person in life. This isn't something most /.ers ever do. In all likelihood, they've met very few of them in their life. Before I got into health care, I had met very few of them - the people, for example, who gut chickens, package screws, can vegetables. The people who do the millions of boring, repetitive, miserable jobs out there. They don't have a lot of money, and they're not very bright (or they'd be doing something else). They don't have a lot of insight into the future, and though they can follow a train of thought laying out consequences, they can't come up with it on their own. All of these add up to "not a lot of disposable cash". So when they go to WM, they find a large selection of very cheaply priced and surprisingly well-made (really, compared to what they had access to before) items.
There are lots and lots of them. Probably a third of the US population has a life not terribly different from this. It doesn't matter that you don't get much money from each one - there are a hundred million of them. Make $10 off every one of them and you've got a billion.
I concur. Here in Starkville, Mississippi (a college town, no less), people go to the Super Wal-Mart all the time, for everything. There are plenty of local stores closer to campus, and there is an old downtown area, but most of it is run-down and dying. The reason? Wal-Mart is newer, cleaner, more spacious, cheaper, and has more selection.
A couple weeks ago, I had to buy CD-Rs. There's no Best Buy or CompUSA in our town, only small stores and Wal-Mart. I thought about where would have CD-Rs... the local computer builder? Radio Shack? The local CD shop? The video game store? All of those are iffy, probably overpriced, would have little selection, and would probably be wasting my time if they didn't have what I wanted. I actually went to the local CD shop before going to Wal-Mart, but they didn't have the selection I was looking for.
The same with weekly groceries. Last week, I went shopping for random household items, and went to Wal-Mart. In the span of my hour or so there, I bought food, a cheap-o keyboard and mouse for an old computer, a screwdriver, and a HEPA filter. If I had used only local retailers, I would have visited the local grocery store, Radio Shack or the local shop for the keyboard/mouse, ACE or something for the screwdriver, and who knows where for the air filter.
Being in this college town, the students (especially freshmen) are also mostly transitory. They don't really have the desire to build relationships with local shops, or have much desire to check out the local hardware store for their hammer. They know Wal-Mart has what they need, will be competitively priced, and will be relatively anonymous.
Here, Wal-Mart is popular because of convenience, atmosphere, selection, price, and a host of other reasons. Let's face it, for a lot of young people, it takes effort to get to know anything other than Wal-Mart, and that effort may not be worth it.
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Anyone know what happened after they illegally tried to prevent worker unionization? I hear that lawsuits were filed, but I haven't heard any more.
I haven't heard anything, but I expect more. I was required to watch a video about why Unions are bad as part of my training. (Of course it's not called that but the gist of the video is unions are bad, Wal-mart's Open Door Policy is better.)Comment removed based on user account deletion
That is over-simplified "we are just like any other animal without brains to use for planning future" 'capitalism'; model that doesn't have much to do with reality.
Really, it's like saying that since humans (like all animals) have very strong and promiscuous sex drive, and capabilities to kill competition, we should just fuck around freely without worrying about consequences, and kill anyone weaker than outselves given half a chance. I mean, that's Evolution, isn't it?
You are just claiming that because of underlying default rules, no one should try to figure better long-term strategy. That's just ignorant. In case of sex and violence, there are reasons why human communities have created moral codes and legal systems to restrict basic urges, due to their causing instability, and on longer term benefiting no one. By same token, one's behavious as consumer need not be based on simplistic price in - decision out logics. If you truly think that mechanics are such that it does make sense to buy from someone with higher overhead, but that provides more (larger selection, friendlier and/or more knowledgeable staff, local stores etc. etc.), there's nothing there that's "against capitalism".
Now, go ahead and act like amoeba if you want; but don't come preaching others that they should devolve back to ignorant state.
My, my, my...quite the Democrat aren't we?
I take it your next logical conclusion is to make decisions for these people, because you know what is good for them and since you are obviously smarter than they can ever hope to be.
This is precisely the kind of down talking and pandering that exposes you for the insecure prick that you most certainly are.
Just because someone has a boring repetitive job and might be potnetially locked into it due to circumstances in their life they are not intelligent and "don't have a lot of insight into the future?"
I hope I never meet a prick like you. You sound like you deserve a good asswhipping.
Not even close. Best Buy makes between $50 and $200 on each computer, most of them are about $100. Cables on the other hand are marked up to an extreme degree. $1.50 cables selling for $28. Best Buy doesn't care if you buy a computer from them or if you buy a new release cd/dvd from them. They make no money (they even lose money on new releases) on such transactions. If you buy cables and ink and service plans then you'll get treated like gold.
...finally, the whore of all the earth challenges babylon...
Do you think they will sell ringside tickets?
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to govern any other" -John Ada
Funny, don't think I said minimum wage.
McDonald's, Buger King, and all the fast food chains pay *comparable* salaries, and offer similar benefits. Same with the other retail outlets
Wal-Mart pays *less* than the average retailer, and has pitiful benefits. What's more, they put their competition out of business, or seriously bite into their business, displacing the workers, some of who end up at Wal-Mart, working for less and with worse benefits. You don't see a problem?
So no, it's not at all like other retail chain outlets. And insisting on employees working overtime without paying the employee for it... I'd consider that sweatshop material any day of the week.
Does Walmart say "We want your profit margin to be X?"
Or do they say, "We want our price to be X?"
If the latter, and their X is below your cost to manufacture, you're screwed.
If previously, you've been increasing your company based on the increased profiting you suggest, then you've become increasingly dependant on moving that number of units. You probably have large debts in capital expenditures required to produce that level of output. You *need* to be making some certain amount of dollars to pay for those loans. You don't have the option of simply scaling back production and selling to the smaller markets again for the higher price, you're simply screwed.
Welcome to the American dream.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
The record companies are the ones doing the editing.
Wal-Mart won't carry the explicit CDs; the record companies may produce an edited version for Wal-Mart (that they will carry) because of the amount of sales Wal-Mart does.
Have you ever even been to a small town? Walmarts usually employ more people (and with benefits too!) than the stores they replace. Also, selection and prices both are better. The only people generally hurt by Walmart are the proprietors of lousey stores (usually the city counsel). This is capitalism; I shop at Walmart because they have the products I want at the cheapest price. Small towns are NOT convient; very little is in walking distance and there is virtually no selection of retialer; if there was it would be a large town.
its Monopsony 1.
Thank God, for ... Walmart. (shiver)
Supply and Demand. If I have a monopoly on widgets, and I try to sell them for $1,000,000 of profit I may sell one and make $1,000,000. But if I sell them for $1 I might sell 10,000,000. Monoplies charge exactly the price that will maximize their profit. This is what competition avoids.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
music store.
Wal-Mart will get the record distributr to give them a volume pricing for every piece the buy over some large quantity.
The quantity will be too large for small music stores to compete, so wall-mart gets there lower price plus all the sales from the music stores that get put out orf business.
Now, if the refuse to lower there price and drop CDs, that will be a huge win for the small music store.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
in this corner, a RICO engaging in price fixing, while remolding copyright law and freedom of expression to facilitate said fixing.
in the other corner, a corporation that is removing economic value from world-wide commerce as a whole, while concentrating what surplus value is left in it's own pockets.
"I don't think there is a music supplier in America who really enjoys doing business with Wal-Mart," says one major-label rep. Oh yeah? I don't think there's any supplier that likes doing business with Walmart, because virtually all of them either lose money or barely break even doing it... they do it only so that some other sucker doesn't take their shelf space to gain market share.
I'm really hard pressed to find a favorate here. If I were a record exec, I'd have no problem telling Walmart to go screw themselves, and defending that position in a stockholders' meeting. As a Walmart buyer, I'd have no qualms screwing the seller to the wall.
Luke, help me take this mask off
If walmart wins, Their profits go up and as the prices on the shelf remain essentally the same. WE see nothing from it (or very little), hence we loss along with the record label.
If the Record label wins. They just continue to show that they can dictate everything to do with music as they always have and they win, walmart losses and WE loss too, (same lossing as we do now).
So no matter the outcome, we loss in this pissing match.
They also card you for ANYTHING coded "Mature", and will not sell it to anyone under 18. The business model seems to work for them. As for the "developing artists", Wal-Mart isn't a specialty retailer, it's a mass marketer. It's not the kind of merchandise I'd be looking for at a Wal-Mart in the first place: for THAT, I'd be looking online, because the local record stores also shill a slightly-larger number of "established" acts and genre CDs (i.e. Folk, Jazz, Soundtracks, and back catalog items) that don't move as quickly as the latest top 40 trash. . .
I work for a small indie record company and we normally sell at 7 - 8 bucks to retailers (when we deal with them directly). They normally charge 18.99 for our stuff, but sometimes even more. We make much, much less for one CD than the retailers. I think the average profit is less than $4 bucks per CD for us. And our recording budgets are very small and we don't give bands advances.
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
Interesting. Yes...maybe I have lived a bit of a sheltered life...my parents didn't start with much money..grew up in a pretty middle class environment..and assumed that was the norm. I have trouble imagining that the people you listed (fish gutters, laborers) are the median or average American. I would guess these would be the class of people to shop WalMart, but I don't usually think of them as the majority of people in the US...I may be wrong, but, I tend to think of the avg. person, being middle income...I myself consider myself upper middle income...and can't see a real need to go to WalMart very often. No one I know shops there very often.
On the other hand...I do like Sam's Club. I like buying in bulk. I like to make my annual run there for toilet paper, and I think everyone needs a gallon of mustard...hahaha.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
> Wal-Mart sells 1 out of every 5 retail CDs. Monopoly one, meet monopoly two.
One in 5 is a far cry from a monopoly.
Mostly because pricing isn't a function of costs, but of demand. Frequently demand is manipulated to bring them into sync, but not always.
For instance, high profit items (like super sizing it) are advertised and pushed, but this particular high cost sandwich isn't pushed at all (except during Lent).
In this case, if the pricing were a straight function of cost (where the fish sandwich was 2 times the cost of the Big Mac), that value meal would now fall outside of their ~$5 lunch setup they have now. So, they deal with a lower margin on that sandwich and make up for it by pushing more super sizing.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
It couldn't happen to more deserving group (RIAA and the record labels). CD prices have stayed high despite decreasing technology costs and loosing two price fixing lawsuits. Maybe the threat of loosing the ability to sell their music in a major retailer will make them rethink their prices.
Greedy bastards.
Every time a Wal-Mart opens... and Okie moves to Seattle!
Maybe that was Walton's plan after all.
Wal-Mart's markup on stuff other than CDs ranges from 30% - 50%.
Where are you getting your numbers?
33% is most certainly not gouging.
I think the above statement is a misconception. Who is to decide what numbers are "gouging" and what numbers aren't? Why are we even talking about "price gouging" regarding such a luxury item?
33% is wildly high for some businesses, and very low for others.
Buying from a major label is sort of like buying name-brand clothes. You aren't really getting something better, you're just getting something more popular. The music is good because the radio and all the clubs overplay it, not in spite of that fact. Serious musicians don't care about that, but to the average person (myself included) the pop music is kinda catchy and gets stuck in my head. There are many similar examples, like how people will pay a lot for diamonds, but if de Beers flooded the market nobody would want diamonds anymore.
Price is not some arbitrary value which should be manipulated. It's the indicator of the current supply conditions and current demand conditions. A hotel room during a disaster (like a flood or hurricane) is highly demanded, but the supply is relatively low. When the price rises, it forces a more efficient use of the resources available. Those in need of space will be more likely to stay with friends if they can, leaving the hotel space for those more in need. Large families who might normally reserve two rooms might get one instead, leaving a room open for another family. Families might get the necessary portions of their house fixed and move back faster (again leaving room for another family), without waiting for their house to be restored to perfect condition.
Of course, all the efficiencies mentioned above would be called "price gouging". When the government steps in and prevents the price from rising naturally, it becomes a race to see who can reserve hotel rooms the fastest, and creates a shortage. Then, the families most in need might be left on the streets while families who could be staying with friends are enjoying a two-bedroom luxury suite.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
Obviously, that's backwards logic: if B&N or Walmart adds RFID, it still won't trigger any reaction by UPS dropping the wrong box off at an indy shop that's running without RFID. They're proximity devices, not *magic*.
For a CD with maybe two decents songs yeah it's gouging, but I am not sure it's the Wal-Mart doing the gouging *cough record labels *cough *cough. A 33% mark-up, is as you pointed out, not that bad.
Wal-Mart doesn't demand censored lyrics because they are Bible thumping prudes. Wal-Mart demands censored lyrics because they sell better. Parents, for instance, are far more likely to buy their children CDs that don't have explicit lyrics stickers on them.
You ever wonder why it is that your local CD shop carries the censored versions of the CDs? The answer is that even in a record store (which generally don't count soccer moms as one of their primary customer groups) censored CDs generally compete very well with their uncensored versions. By just stocking the censored CDs Wal-Mart cuts down on their inventory significantly and does a better job of catering to their primary customer.
Wal-Mart sells 1 out of every 5 CDs. Clearly they must be doing something right. You might like the uncensored version, but that's not true of the "average" CD consumer.
I'm looking for people who specializes in math and sociology that could possibly to put together a formula that demonstrates how a corporation's evilness is directly proportional to its size and/or income.
And I bet that walmart is doing this out of their genuine concern for the people instead of edging out the competition. Anyone want to bet that if they get their way that the prices won't drop? I took a sociology class back in college that was all about walmart, its impact on society and the workforce, its business practices/ethics, and its ability to sway politics/governments/personal opinion. All I have to say about it is that even the most tinfoil anointed slashdotter doesn't know the half of it.
n/a packaging/manufacturing
It costs bandwidth to "manufacture" a copy on your hard drive. Bandwidth costs money.
Did you notice how all of those "percentages" added up to 9.88?
You can't watch an R-rated movie in Walmart, nor can you play an M-rated game. However, you can listen to a CD at walmart before you buy it. That's the diff I would assume. What's a book?
Walmart is not a monopoly. There are other choices. And you don't have to buy music from RIAA members either. There are other choices. And it is a good thing that Walmart is pushing the RIAA crowd around.
--Slashdot: News for Turds. Stuff that Splatters.
"I've worked at one, appalling is about the only word that comes close to describing how management treats employees."
I work at one now as a manager. I *envy* the hourly people. An eight hour day, guaranteed lunch, two 15-min breaks. Sounds like heaven. At every store I've worked in, we fall all over ourselves trying to kiss hourly ass lest one of them shout "UNION!" Yeah, this has nothing to do with CD prices, but you'll never convince me we're hurting anyone when we've got it worse.
The other thing is that Walmart's chief competition, K-Mart, Krogers, etc., are all pretty much the same as they are. Yes, they also compete with hardware stores, etc., but their main competition is the other discount stores. For that matter, how many local hardware stores pay health care benefits, etc.? Small businesses are notoriously bad about purchasing health care benefits.
The main difference that I have found between a retail chain like Walmart and better paying stores is that the employees of the retail chains don't get paid commission and don't spend all their time trying to sell you the most expensive product. Instead, they concentrate on stocking the shelves. Now, if you want to have your hand held while you purchase, you should go to a specialty store and pay their premium. Just don't tell me that I should.
This is one of the biggest myths of Capitalism -- nobody has a responsibility to maxmize profits. Your only responsibility is to provide your investors with a reasonable return on their investment. In many industries profit maximization can have nasty side effects, up to and including the destruction of the industry itself (think of forestry and fishing).
Lee jeans were much nicer, although now I'm in San Diego and wear shorts year round.
One thing I can recommend to other vendors out there is innovate innovate innovate. If you make the same thing and sell it to them year after year, the price will -never- go up. More likely, they will wonder why the price has not gone down, as you should have poured some of their capital into efficiency and larger bulk purchasing. If you sell them something new, and kill off the old ones, you can maintain your margin.
Maybe, but I doubt it. In my Wal-Mart, at least, you're not really listening to the CD, you just scan it and it feeds you a couple 30-second selections from the CD. It'd be trivial to feed edited clips when you scan an unedited CD.
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Better put you tin foil hat on. Walmart has the right to sell what they want.
You don't want to comprimise yourself to Walmart.
Don't.
How dare you not give Walmart the right to pick how they do business
Thats great math and totally dumb selection of realistic data points. I challenge you to get a sample of 1000 randomly chosen humans all having exactly the same height. So thanks for jerking. Come again.
Ahem brother!! I consider Walmart a primary and very visible example, but the truth is while Walmart is the agent, the issue is consumers. Most consumers have been taught that price matters more than quality. After years of conditioning of discount stores, people often want the best for the lowest cost.
But let's face it when you have half of the Walmart employees working 40 hours a week, living in weekly rate hotels, trailer homes, or sleeping in their cars. Purchasing food at your corner "alcohol store with minimal food and candy, then you have an economy that is failing. When your work force is the working poor, who are basically individuals that can't afford to buy clothes at Walmart even with employee discounts, then you working class is practically worthless.
A working class so poor they can't afford to purchase the goods or pay the taxes that a middle-class to wealthy society needs to make society function for both its wealthy and its poor eventually creates a society that cannibalizes itself. A "wealthy" society needs a middle-class, but our middle-class is falling farther and farther into poverty and corporations like Walmart are the primary agent but consumers are the cause. Ironically, its the middle-class slowly killing itself.
Yes. The first time I encountered that was with a small battery-powered TV set that I had purchased that was ostensibly made by Zenith. I think I bought it at a local stereo store. It was slick, had multiple input and output jacks, worked great. Later I wanted to buy another one as a gift, and found what I thought was that set at a Wal-Mart. Turned that it was only the case it had in common: the display sucked in comparison to the original one, it still had the holes in the side where the extra video and sound jacks used to be! They were filled in with blanks, but still. And the irony was that it cost about $20 more.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I, for one, welcome our new Wal-Mart overlords.
in the mid-late eighties ... Albums ... ~$10. The CD versions were ~$20. Over the years CD prices came down a bit, ~$15 these days.
How much do bread and milk cost now compared to then? Normalized to the Consumer Price Index, the price of recorded music has fallen more than most people give the labels credit for.
If ever there was a company with the power to get away with just-in-time CD manufacturing, Wal*Mart is it. For 10 years we've been hearing about how it would be soooo easy to set up a company that uses a computer with a large hard drive to burn music CDs on demand. The main reason it never caught on is because the labels don't want to do business that way and it's illegal to do it without their consent. Something tells me that Wal*Mart could gain their consent one way or another. That would give them the ability to "stock" all 60,000 CDs without adding any more floor space. Their marginal cost would be less than $1 per disk (including materials and depreciation) plus whatever fee they can convince the labels to accept.
Step 1: Be Wal*Mart
Step 2: Squeeze the labels
Step 3: burn disks on demand
Step 4: PROFIT!!! (For once the list is complete...)
Most consumers have chosen to prize price over quality when the price difference is substantial and when other convienances exist.
This is a major point, but it's much worse than that. They are capitalistic vampires, draining the economic lifeblood of many cities and counties... and are in a monopoly position as prime vendor. I'm not talking about urban areas or metropolitan suburbs, but the real one-highway stop small city out there in BFE.
I suppose you're right. To roll a six-sided die three times and have it come up a 4 each time is a --- what did you call it? oh yeah --- totally dumb selection of realistic data points. What was I thinking? That could never happen in the real world.
I don't know how to feel about this. I mean, it's easily awesome and I absolutely love it.
But then, I'm scared.
Hold me?
Wall-Mart and Culture ......
Oil and Water
Heaven and Hell
Good and Bad
Right and Wrong
Black and White
On the other hand this is an excellent opprotunity for Apple and other online stores to compete in sectors where Wallmart simply does not stock the music or even have clue.
Yes, don't blame the companies lack of any kind of morals just because their cust^Wconsumers lack it too.
Its called reality.
In reality, there are generalizations. He is being very generous by saying it is only 1/3 of the population... statistically, it is more than that which fall into this typical category which he has described.
Nobody said they can't decide what to do with their money. But you are a hypocrite to think that people like this don't exist. If you believe what you say, you are surely conceited.
This is just utterly false. When a walmart opens up in a small town every mom and pop shop must compete with a shop bigger than all of them combined. They overflood the market and the local supply is significantly larger than the demand. Since walmart can (and does and has been proven to) cut their magin to nothing in small towns which they are new to, the other shops go out of business usually within 1-2 years.
All this happening while that local walmart store runs into the red ink, and it is all perfectly "legal".
Only when demand is very high (on the virge of a small city) does walmart have to compete for the consumer. In small towns, they drop their prices and everyone goes out of business. It has happened literally thousands of times in this country.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
...it would be China's 8th largest trading partner.
scary.
Walmart has so much purchasing power with wholesalers that this current story is just everyday business. However, this time they happened to target a branch of the media, who tend to yell and scream louder than most industries when *anything* happens to them.
[
But how many job gains/losses can be attributed to WalMart doesn't Wally need some distributors/wholesalers to keep them in supplies?
Don't Wally need some IT/Transportation infrastructure? Hmmm who can provide that maybe other companies that have Wally as a client?
This is like saying "big" government is killing business when infact having a war used to be one ways out of a recession/depression. Putting people to work is the ONLY way out of a downturn in the economy, albeit through the old "busy" work of Hoover Dam or through WWII,the Cold War or Space program.
Each dollar the government spends or gives to citizens is IIRC "respent" 7-8 times over and I would imagine that each dollar Wally spends is probably respent 3-4 times each time adding to the collective coffers of each person that handles that dollar.
Profits are a misnomer there are no real profits in economics in economics you spend what you have to to "make" money so what if you only spend X amount and keep the rest your X amt of dollars just bought your wholesaler's daughter a new set of teeth which the dentist spent paying for his new mercedes which kept 2 other people in a dead end assembly job which now has enough purchasing power to possibly buy his/her children new braces.
Yea this is probably flawed thinking but what else can you do with money besides spend it? (Investing is also an expense as you are loaning someone your profits to respend "your dollars" in making something else that some other fool can spend their money on...
Come to think of it; it is all a giant pyramid scheme hmmm maybe Ponzi was on to something.
"Wal-Mart demands censored lyrics because they sell better."
There's economics involved, but it's not because the censored CDs are so popular with fans of the music and their parents. They can't afford complaints from the core customer base which is rural and conservative. They can afford to lose a few music CD sales in exchange for not pissing off customers who buy a whole lot more crap than CDs.
I live in St. Louis. There is a new Wal-mart that just opened near me today, and the lot is ALREADY jammed full of cars. (That, followed by reading this, has left me in a disgusted mood.) Pathetic. However, you're right -- most of them are not that good. Before this new one opened (I'm assuming it's clean as it's brand-new, but I haven't been in it yet) the only one that I know of that has a reputation as being clean is the one in Fenton, which is way out of the way for most visitors to the area.
i am a soviet space shuttle
A SKU -- or a Stock Keeping Unit -- is just a method of keeping track of a product, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is a new model.
As an aside, have any of you people ever heard of a 'new technology discount'?
This is basically where the record company charges the artist a fee (per unit) to cover the cost of implementing new methods of production and distribution. Some of the largest record co.'s paid for their CD manufacturing plants almost entirely with money raised this way.
Up until a few years ago, I believe it was not unheard of to still see this type of clause in a recording contract (yes - this was about 20yrs after CD's were invented). Some contracts have tried to include Internet distribution as a 'new technology discount'.
I am giving this example as a way of demonstrating that the record industry as a whole treats artists quite poorly in many cases.
If you really believe artists will not suffer further as a result of this sort of action by Walmart, then you are deluding yourself. The base royalty artists receive is based on the price paid by shops for the CD's.
For example, 10% of 7 dollars is less than 10% of $10. I'm sure I don't need to explain this.
In a general sense, a huge customer putting downward pressure on the price they will pay to a supplier (of any type of product) is bound to put downward pressure on expenditure by the supplier. You can't get blood out of a stone.
If I lower my prices to sell you something, the FIRST thing I do is work out how I can maintain my margins by lowering my costs - that's business.
I can understand how the early capitalists may not have foreseen the future (or maybe they did and that's why they were capitalists ;-).
That doesn't bear on this discussion, though. Capitalism wasn't "designed". It was observed and analyzed. Current limits set in place by various governements are set up when observations conclude that an unregulated aspect of capitalism is bad for [the economy | the consumers | the workers | a political career].
Capitalism has no inherent natural limitations of the kind you are talking about.
So what you are really complaining about is unequal income distribution. However, the "American Dream" is based on the idea that there is an unequal distribution, and that under capitalism one can rise from low income to high income with a good idea/hard work/well executed thieving.
Sam Walton did not start off with huge capital, and by saying that one needs to be 'lucky in the past' in order to succeed today you are saying there is no way someone couldn't do the same thing today.
Pre-Walmart no one thought K-Mart and that-other-big-chain would ever topple. Who are you to say that an enterprising group couldn't eat Walmart's lunch? If you were succesful in putting limits back into capitalism that mirrored the effects of the 'natural limits' you mentioned, would that also limit the ability for other people to enter the market? Do you think Walmart couldn't get around them?
-Adam
The SuperWalMart in Cedar Falls, Iowa (population ~20k, including university students) had a "Weight Loss Center" next to the snack bar when it opened. Given the location and the clientele, it went out of business in less than six months. Heh heh heh.
The point isn't that Walmart is invincible, it's that we have crossed a point where companies have no natural limits to the level of efficiency or the scale of market capitalisation.
Capitalism used to at least have the pretence that it empowered a large middle class and that gave more leisure time and choice over personal destiny. Now, social benefit is entirely removed from Capitalism. Haven't you ever heard presidents talking about how Capitalism beat Communism? That's a social and ideological view to it. But in reality, companies beat Communism, not because of ideology but because Capitalism reached the point where it could "beat" any social organization other than itself.
Companies like Walmart have an unbridled license to privatize and control every aspect of our daily lives, communal property and environment. Worse, they have the power to resist or actively discourage government regulation which is the only vestige for injecting social responsibility back into the system. People talk about being able to choose where they shop or what they buy but that is patently untrue for a huge percentage of people around the world. Worse, many of these conglomerates are the only viable employers. In essence we have reached a point of saturation where it is nearly impossible as an individual (especially one who is poor) to resist the influence of the system. In addition, through corporate tie-ins with education, people are conditioned to accept the slave-mentality that modern day capitalism thrives on.
Just to jump back to your point: Sam Walton my not have started with a lot and it doesn't preclude someone else beating him at his own game, but all that does is switch one devil for another. The big problem is that we've gone so far, without some kind of SOCIAL regulation en masse, the end result is obvious.
Just what the hell is wrong with telling others why you do not use a particular product or shop at a particular store?
To the grandparent, I can say only this: This is a Wal-Mart forum. If you do not want to talk about Wal-Mart here, YOU ARE FREE TO GO ELSEWHERE.
"Bible-thumping prudes" If you think that Eminem isn't ridiculous and isn't filling kids heads with filthy notions I think I would call you an 'oblivious idiot.' Granted, I'm not for censoring in the slightest, but I am glad Wal-Mart has the gall to stand up and and tell people that crap doesn't belong in a supposed 'all american family' type store.
But if you make a new product, it will be a new SKU. So you might have a bunch of unique SKUs for Wal-Mart versus other stores.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
You found three-ply tissues?? WHERE?! The best I can find, even at the Dollar General, is two-ply...
Damn our corporate masters!
...I'm just not sure who it is:
A. People that buy something random because it's cheap
B. Record companies that think that just because Walmart doesn't sell it, fans won't find it somewhere else.
Actually, give their track records, probably both.
"Where are you getting your numbers?"
I sell products in the high-tech industry to Wal-Mart. I also know what margins my competitors offer to Wal-Mart, and I know the margin structure at many major retailers in the US. I know retail.
"I think the above statement is a misconception."
The context is the hypothetical example of the indie record store owner marking up CDs 33%. It is certainly not a misconception. It's a complex equation, but given typical costs for rent, employee salaries, utilities, shrinkage, and so on, 33% is right in the ballmark for a storefront retail establishment. As I mentioned earlier, at Best Buy, margins for most products start at about 30% and go up from there.
"Who is to decide what numbers are "gouging" and what numbers aren't?"
I do, in this context, because I have extensive background on the realities of what it takes to run a storefront business. Not all Slashdotters have a resume that ends with coding or system administration.
"Why are we even talking about "price gouging" regarding such a luxury item?"
Because some guy incorrectly claimed that an indie record shop owner with a 33% margin was "gouging." Several people were quick to point out that he was off the beam.
"33% is wildly high for some businesses, and very low for others."
Correct. Some cats have long hair, some don't. Some stars radiate light on the red side of the spectrum, some don't. Some girls sleep with you on the first date, some don't. Some languages let you overload operators, some don't. Differences are what make life great. However, in this context we're discussing whether it's "gouging" for an indie record shop owner to add a 33% markup. It is not.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
then they will within a year be selling 2 of 5 CD's as they will be able to crush all of the competition. There is no difference in a CD bought at different places. If a person can save 25% or more going to Walmart, then it is a done deal. There would be no reason to buy CD's anywhere else.
This in turn gives Walmart further leverage over the record industry until they lose all pricing power, and Walmart will dictate the price of CD's. There is no incentive for the RIAA to give in at all. If they give in now, forever will Walmart control their destiny.
The only way to manage that is to do things at the absolute bare minimum that you can. And for low income folks that means shopping at Wal-Mart. They're not consciously enabling Walmart to keep them down, they're trying to stay alive.
That's what's so disgusting about the situation. The poor are invariably forced to fuck themselves over in the long term, just to eat in the short term. And people wonder why there are Communists older than 20...
(But I do get what you're saying. I suspect you're thinking, as I was, "it's easy for the broadband-affording Slashdot elite to implicitly *criticize* poor people's lack of insight from the comfort of their $300 task chairs.)
Freedom: "I won't!"
Only the 501s will do. All other jeans fall off.
Maybe it's because I don't have a fat ass, I dunno.
Perfect!
They can compete another way. If Walmart even sells Eminem, it would be the censored, clean lyrics version.
Actually, from experience in the games industry, the way it works is that you make a 'safe for Walmart' version, and then it's too expensive to produce the uncensored version separately, for such a small proportion of your sales compared to Walmart. So in the end, the Walmart version is the only public version, and the other version just gets taken home by the developers to show their friends what might have been.
The insurance co says we'll pay $xx for the procedure. Hospitals either accept it or else get no customers with that insurance agency.
So if they card you for videos, games and books, why can't they carry uncensored (but labelled) versions of the music and card people when they buy it?
This is funny. There's a brand-new giant SuperWalmart near my home, one of the latest stores with groceries and everything else. It originally had a CD music section however they just yanked out out (keep in mind, they just built it to begin with) in favor of selling more consumer electronics in that space.
The only CDs left in the store are one small aisle of latin music, because the area has a large Spanish-speaking customer base. But everything else was removed.
I suspect Walmart would be happy to entirely quit selling CDs but heck, if they have to keep selling them, why not ask for a better deal? Either they get a deal and keep selling or they kick the bums out and sell more DVD players. Walmart wins no matter what happens.
3.3% is pretty decent for retail. Your average grocery store would be thrilled to get 3.3%. Most grocery stores struggle to get more than 1.0% profit. Anything beyond that is gold.
although i have no real issues with walmart as there is plenty of competition out there ...
.
and this being done to riaa is amusing but these tactics are not new
as walmart uses this startegy for the myraid of goods they sell.
this power they have is a good and bad thing as it lowers prices and makes goods more acessible to all classes . but at the same time it undercuts manufactures abillities to make profits thus driving manufactures to find ways to cut costs which in turn leads to out sourcing the labor to cheaper countries . and you can see how this gets ugly real quick
the problem lies in the fact that you cannot regulate what wallmart is doing as it would hurt the free market
even though at the same time what walmart is doing is not healthy for the free market either
the only thing can could be attempted is a public education campaign on why these practices are bad the damage there doing to the econmy and the potential long term effects of such practices
and maybe then the consumers could force a change with out harming the free market
but the problem with this is getting the consumer to accept that they will have to pay higher prices
to support a fair and free market.
Music the Paint dancefloor the canvas your body the brush
Ahem. Shit flows downhill, always, and most of the artists live in the lowliest swamps. They will hurt, believe me.
The only difference this time is that the labels will also suffer a bit. But the biggest pain will definitely be felt by the artists, you can count on it.
I had the luck to work for a German software company in the Frankfurt area and live in Germany several years. I got used to going to the towns weekly market and buying directly from the farmers and/or their co-ops. Luckily living california several of the towns here have the same thing. The truely fresh stuff tastes better.
We pick it like you flick it,
We pick it like you flick it at Booger King.
(Parody of BK's slogan at the time)
Taco Bell -> Taco Hell
Pizza Hut -> Pizza Slut
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
No one is forcing you to buy from Walmart.
By that same token, no one is forcing any manufacturer to sell their shit at Walmart.
How many people here shop in Walmart? My guess is it's not that high a number. Too many whiny liberals that think big business is all bad.
To all you whiny liberal college pukes that complain about big business... How did your parents pay for your college? I bet they borrowed from their 401K. What stocks and bonds are in your parents 401K? Take a close look. Microsoft, Walmart, IBM, Coca-Cola, and hundreds of other stocks are what your parents are going to retire on.
Then there are the whiners that say that there aren't any jobs left in the US. Well, you've legislated this country to death... and lawsuits too! It's so bad that no medical company wants to operate in the US for fear of lawsuits. No one wants to make medicines. And they certainly don't want to do it in the US at the high labor rates, and paying $1000 a month for health insurance.
Fucking liberals are the reason that no one wants to invest money in this country anymore. But I digress.
Walmart is ghetto. Too many manufacturers won't sell their stuff at Walmart, and they don't care. Do you know why? Because most Walmarts look like a prison cell. Police standing around, trying to prevent thieves. Shitty products at low products. I bought golf balls there several weeks ago... it was on the way to the golf course, and I had very little choice. I got to the check out, the box was supposed to have a dozen balls, it was missing 4 balls... one from each sleeve so if the checker looked, it appeared that they were all there, but the box felt light, so I pulled out a sleeve, noticed that the balls were loose, opened it, and discovered the theft.
That alone made me want to never shop in Walmart ever. Can you believe that someone took the time to open each individual sleeve, remove one ball from each sleeve, and then close it up? $19.99 for a dozen balls. They took 4.
Some cats have long hair, some don't. Some stars radiate light on the red side of the spectrum, some don't. Some girls sleep with you on the first date, some don't. Some languages let you overload operators, some don't. Differences are what make life great.
Holy crap, I am going to use that for some Alanis-esque song lyrics.
Can you give any specific examples, like say approx cost to major retailer for a 1 meter cat 5 cable vs their price to consumers?
If they make so damn much, why is it that everyone say retail stores, *mart, costco, safeway, etc only make 1 - 2 % (gross, I thought) ?
Thanks for your insider insights.
>>If youre buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I dont feel bad for you.
Spoken like somebody who has absolutely no idea how retail works. I do, as I own a retail store. Generally, the markup on an item is 100%. If the wholesale cost is $5, the retail price is $10. Discounts are offered to the retailer when they buy in large quantities, meet certain annual quotas, purchase promotional items, or negotiate a better deal. However, the average is a 100% markup.
The profit margin on CDs and movies is very slim. Many stores (e.g. BestBuy) actually sell at or near cost. They are trying to lure you in with cheap music in the hopes that you will buy something larger, with a greater profit margin (e.g. dvd player) while you are there.
WalMart's efforts to force the record companies into giving them a price point that will allow them to sell at $10 is a very bad thing. On the surface, yes, it looks like a good thing for the consumer. However, as only WalMart is in a position to make this kind of deal, other retail stores will lose their ability to compete. Regardless of the price difference, they will still have to carry the inventory - the cost of which is paid up front in the case of smaller, independent stores. Stuck with inventory that won't sell, the end result will be that the small companies will go out of business.
To be clear, they must purchase the CDs at a higher price than WalMart can get them for. They must sell them at a higher price than WalMart will sell them for. And as much as we would like to romanticize the idea that the independents will prevail due to the great variety of titles that they carry, the truth of the matter is that the consumer only cares about the bottom line; the price. Again, I know what I am talking about as I own a retail store and find myself dealing with this exact same problem. The problem isn't limited to just WalMart. Home Depot, Lowes, Target, and others have a similar effect. But while these stores have a considerable impact on existing, local commerce, WalMart has the muscle to nearly wipe out local businesses and they are abusing their power at a level that could only be considered unfair trade practices.
The more dangerous precedent that is being set here is that WalMart has become too large and now has the ability to force any industry to provide it with extremely favorable price points. Especially in light of WalMart's extraordinarily aggressive expansion efforts, it is quickly becoming impossible for small business owners to maintain their livelihood.
Don't believe me? Then consider this: there are currently more than *3,000* WalMarts in the United States. That's more than 60 per state. They are building at a rate of 300 new stores per year. In the area that I live, there are three WalMarts within 12 minutes of each other. The net effect of a new WalMart opening on the local economy is a 25% decline in revenue over 5 years to existing merchants. WalMart has been credited with the loss of over 9,600 grocery stores between 1992 and 1997. These aren't just mom & pop stores, either. The list includes PathMark, A&P and Grand Union. Large chain stores such as Ames, Montgomery Ward, Winn-Dixie, and Caldors have also fallen victim to WalMart. (Forbes, Sept. 6, 2004)
Hell, WalMart has been killed off by WalMart. Due to their expansion plans, WalMart has cannibalized more than 370 existing WalMarts. Often times, as owner of the real estate, they will not allow the discarded buildings to be sold by other companies, preferring to leave an empty hull to rot rather than see another company in there. Entire towns are being destroyed as WalMart turns them into ghost towns, leaving behind a trail of stores like some people leave empty beer cans along the side of the road.
And this is supposed to be good for commerce?
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
8,097,165.99
Still not enough to wrap yourself in platinum and colored diamonds, but not on the median holding a "Why lie, I need beer" sign either.
2.91 label overhead
0.15 retail overhead
And folks, this is what they are really fighting for - to maintain their lifestyle - $2.91/CD overhead is for all the hookers, mountains of blow and stacks of hundred dollar bills to light their cigars with.
Note that retailers also have fat cats at the top, offices, IT spending, warehouses, inventory costs, plus they have stores and lightly paid monkeys to work there, lots more costs than the labels, yet they only need $0.15 to cover it, hmmm what is wrong with this picture. 0.15/2.91 = 0.00515463918
Just because the owners know and love music doesn't mean that they don't deliberately use that love and knowledge as a commercial tool - it's pretty useful when you're targeting that second segment of the market.
The key question is: would they still be doing it if it weren't profitable within their target market? Answer: either (a) no or (b) not for very long, unless they have another income to subsidise their hobby.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
Wal-Mart sells shelf space to record companies and beverage makers. It then "allows" one supplier in each department to have favored status. This favored supplier is the category manager, responsible for maximizing Wal-Mart's profit on the shelves allocated to the category of merchandise, regardless of the profit realized by the supplier.
Good point, weave. I didn't know that the quoted US price could be gross, rather than the UK net retail price.
Unfortunately as you say it doesn't make up for the fact that we're being ripped off.
A UK CD costing 12.99 UKP includes VAT (that's sales tax) of 2.27 UKP, so the pre tax retail price is around 10.72 UKP. If the UK shops were retailing at the UK equivalent of $9.72 plus tax, then that would be 5.40 UKP plus VAT, making a net retail price of 6.35 UKP. That's less than half UK average price.
UK retailers dare not cut prices to these levels, because if they did we'd know that we had been ripped off for all these years, and the political fallout would be huge. But then hey, this is Blair's Britain! We are being ripped off.
$0.17 Musicians' unions
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties
$0.80 Retail profit
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists' royalties
$1.70 Label profit
$2.40 Marketing/promotion
$2.91 Label overhead
$3.89 Retail overhead
Maybe I am stupid, but I see plenty of profit in here. They have already included allowances for manufacturing, packaging, distribution, marketing, as well as profits for the artists, the retail chain, the label, the publisher, and a piece for the union.
This covers all the input costs to manufacture and sell this product. So explain to me this: why should I pay an extra $6.80 per album for so called "label overhead" and "retail overhead". These costs are already covered. This sounds like the same bullshit accounting the movie industry uses to avoid paying profit sharing to partners and taxes to the government.
As much as I would not like to work for, sell to, or compete with Walmart, this is a good move. I hope Walmart is successful, and until they are keep on downloading!
No, you're right. You got me.
If everyone were paid the same then this wouldn't be an issue at all.
Communism now!!
Damn pinkos.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
May the consumer beware?
Thank you. We need more people to look at the whole two sides of the story, not just the part they find convienient.
Sounds kinda like idea behind the USSR.... Did you notice how well that whole social / economic model worked out?? hmmmm.
i'm used to nice clean friendly wal-marts from the chicago burbs, but haven't found a conventient wally-world once i moved to the city. have they put one (or more) up since last i looked?
;)
regardless, i've never bought a CD at wal-mart, target, k-mart, or any other super-department store, because they don't have the selection i'm looking for. i've even had difficulties finding what i want at rock records downtown and even the, oh what's the name of that place that closed last year or a year before that in the river entrance to the ogilvie station and got replaced by a bank? can't remember. but i still want to walk into that bank and ask for a CD and express dismay when they try to sell me a certificate of deposit and not a compact disc
It's kinda like how it is the schools fault that students dont do their homework, or learn right from wrong. Or how the coffee was too hot, and I got burned. . . . . . No one wants to say---> 'Well, that was me, sorry, my bad'. . . . . No more of this---> 'It's the goverments fault, or that big corporation, or that rich guy's fault. ' I just hope... no, expect that my kids will have a better sense of responsibility then most of our cuurent society. I belive that enough people have finally noticed this hole in societies standards, that we need to decide how to fix it. We've spent enough time thinking of -- Oh, it's there! Solutions are required now. I say we need solutions, and offer none. How the general public thinks, and acts, makes no sense to me. We say one thing, yet do another... Does anyone else have better insight to how/why this happpens and how to fix it?
All good things...
I was correcting his math, not his economic philosophy.
So, you equate "equal pay for all" with "communism".
: a theory advocating elimination of private property, b : a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed.
From Merriam-Webster,
Communism -- 1 a
You are batting two for two.
WalMart employees also tend to depend on public assistance more than the workers they replace. W is notorious for leaving healthcare to the state. And since the workers make 30% less than the workers they replace at other retail outlets, that means they qualify, because they are poor (thoughtful, that).
So welcome to the working poor, for families on the edge of desperation. And don't mind retirement, you can look forward to being a WalMart greeter in your golden years.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
I don't about you, but when I go to Wal-mart, it's to buy something I need or something I saw advertised.
Then, while you are at the store, you see BrandX at $9.72, why that's less that $10, I'll buy that.
(for myself, for my SO, for little susie's b-day, etc...)
Then there's people who go who just to see ``What does Wal-mart have out on sale today?''
Wal-mart blows stuff out the doors, because people buy stuff they might not otherwise because the price is right.
If I'm not mistaken, wasn't one of the things about communism that the same jobs all got paid the same money? Or do I have that confused with Marxism?
I mean, it's great you got Communism summed down to a one liner - dictionary.com does the same thing with Marxism. But if I'm not mistaken, Marx wrote more than one line about his theories.
Either way, "equal pay for all" is still an impossible concept.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
I guess it varys from store to store. Like i said from my experience, the walmart in pittsfield, MA, payed more then any other retailer in the area. Also, I worked closing shifts, so I often had to work overtime, and couldn't leave until the manager let us go, which sucked. But I was also payed time and a half for any time after 10pm.
I only worked part time, so I don't know what kinds of benafits varios retailers have, so they might suck. Also, once walmart drives other retailers out of buisness, maybe they are lowering salleries and doing whatever else. I don't know.
I was just mentioning my personal experience as to those two facts.
Maybe equal pay for all won't work. But, look at the current system. I've heard many capitalists say the same kind of thing --- there has to be a bottom and a top. Fine. But, you must then accept the social consequences. As the top shrinks to a point, and the bottom swells into the millions, the net result will be disintegration of the social fabric. Watch it happen before your very eyes.
Furthermore, do you think that all of the CEO's who get paid 6 and 7 digit salaries actually EARN that money? Was it all just hard work finally paying off? Or do these business magnates resort to lying, stealing, violence (by proxy) and bribing politicians to make laws favorable to their bank accounts? And if that's so --- and it is --- then as the saying goes: what's good for the goose is good for the gander. To make up for the tiny paycheck and reduction in personal freedom, the little guy is justified in stealing from the rich.
Our system is falling apart. Consumer debt is spiraling out of control. Our national debt is spiraling out of control. Do you think all of this debt is ever going to be paid? What happens when people/countries don't pay their debts?
Ohhh.... so hard to choose.... head exploding...
...you're locked into the wage slave mentality. Yes, walmart offers "mcjobs", and if you think you can do better than you should. But here's the thing: Walmart doesn't have 'hard jobs'. You're either a cashier, clerk, stock person, or janitor. None of these positions require much skill, educatoin, or quite frankly, exertion. That's the very definition of a mcjob, is a low wage low skilled position, If you want more money, better benefits, et al, you need to make yourself worth it to an employer. You need to acquire job skills that go beyond working a ten key, swiping cans over a scanner, or pushing a broom. And before you bring up the 'buying a house, raising a family', don't. I know single mothers with three kids, openly gay men, and teenage moms in the same or similar circumstance that are doing it and have done it.
As for me, yes I'm young, no I'm not buying a home. I am unemployed and a full time student scraping by on roughly $200 a month total. So I know it can be done.
If the cost of saving your life is more than the future taxes we'll make off you, it's in the government's interest to let you die.
Disturbingly true, isn't it? Especially for the old and the highly impaired.
You can argue that the HMO, by not having to take life-insurance, Social Security disability and death benefits and the like into account is just externalizing some of the costs of its decisions. This is true, but it does not mean that it is not rational or even essential to cut losses; you could make the HMO pay those excess costs and you'd still have a point where it makes the most sense to withdraw care.
People already do that when they're paying their own bills; they may have the money for treatment, but they'd rather leave it to their family. This is not so different.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
There are 4 WalMarts in my area. The one I go to all the time doesn't clutter up the aisles, has LOTS of space, lots of staff, quick check-out, and always has something on special that the other ones don't. Managed by an extremely competent manager.
One of the other ones, on the other hand, is a disaster to try to navigate, or find anything, the specials suck, and the lineups at the cash are terrible.
Mind you, I find the worst offender is Ikea - you have to literally go from one end of the store to the other because the cashes are at a seperate exit, and you can't get there any other way than by going through a meandering series of aisles. So even if the item you want is 10' in from the entrance, you still have to walk a quarter-mile. I pity anyone with reduced mobility or visibility.
I was overly harsh in calling it the median person; actually, now that I look up the numbers, 84% of Americans over age 25 have high school diplomas, though only 27% have bachelor's degrees.
Your average American, then, probably isn't your plumber, your electrician, or other high-paying blue collar service pro (he's probably in the 23% between median and college). But I did exaggerate a bit. Still, I hedged to 1/3, and I think I'm probably right about that.
Anyway, try out a new Wal-Mart supercenter in an area not likely to attract scummy people, and you'll be surprised at the stuff they offer, both quality and price. I still don't buy my clothes there, but you can't beat it for a great price on staples that you don't want in Sam's quantities.
As a generalization, absolutely. Starting out in bad circumstances won't do it: I've met people who started out in Podunk, Missibamuckyseesas, won junior college scholarships, studied hard, and went to medical school. They lived in a shoeboxes on campus the whole time they were there. They didn't go out and party, because they didn't have the money. But they won't be poor like their (single teenage mom) parents.
The urban kids - those are the most likely to be doomed. Come up with a good idea for fixing that, I'm all ears. But most poor people are poor because they don't plan ahead. What else would you like me to call it, if you can't foresee the (entirely predictable) consequences of your actions? ADD?
> They also card you for ANYTHING coded "Mature", and will not sell it to anyone under 18.
Ah, so there is something they do right.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
I call red herring.
Hmm, thought that was bring up a completely unrelated point to distract from the topic at hand, which is the best interest of the consumer. I don't think i deviated from that.
This response is somewhat like saying, "Maybe short term it is, but in the long term if it ends up inviting nuclear holocaust, then maybe not."
Again, what's the problem with discussing whats in the best intrest of the consumer short-term vs. long term? There is such a thing as cause and effect, and some effects may take longer to show.
Whether its clear to the consumer or not is irrelevent. A child might not understand something that is in their best intrest, but that don't mean that its not.
If the small chain isn't growing, then the only local benefit it has is the salary of the employees.
Not having growth isn't a bad thing. Its not always grow or die, its possible just to exist, neither growing or lossing.
Which could be a great benefit. This is actually the basis of arguments against Walmart. Do you think replacing 20 $8/hr jobs with 20 $5.25/hr jobs helps the local economy? Marginally better definatly, but if your making those kinds of wages the difference between 8 and 5 per hour can be significant.
By providing lower prices consumers can spend more money elsewhere in the community.
Some consumers, yes. Those that lost their jobs (including the owners, etc), at best have the newer lower paying job. I doubt any of those people have more money to contribute elsewhere. The lose of many small businesses also will hurt the tax income. If you charge less for something, there's less sales tax paid. If you pay your employees less, there's less income tax paid. Local governments will probably raise property tax to offset the lost tax, meaning that everyone in the area now has less to spend, not more.
So even if there were more benefits to purchasing from the smaller outfit, there is no way to quantify them (ie, you could be hurting the local economy by buying from them, so it's not a good general rule to buy from small places) and even if it were bad it's impossible to know that it would 'destroy the local economy' as you so melodramatically put it.
Sure there is, tax generated, average income of all the smaller shops (higher is better), where the profits of smaller shops go to (probably a local bank and/or reinvested in the area). You could probably look around and find some towns devistated since Walmart arrived, it shouldn't be hard to look at the numbers. I don't have the resources to quantify anything, but I bet someone is studying it.
(Going off information from my Japanese class)
Worse is Japan, where usually in a department store they have a greeter at EVERY FLOOR.
Usually, it's some sort of woman, and they're always shouting "irrashaimasu!" at you.
People say it's annoying, but they leave the area and come back to the US, and they feel it hauntingly missing.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!