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Amazon and Walmart Are In An All-Out Price War That Is Terrifying Big Brands (recode.net)
gollum123 quotes a report from Recode: Last month, Walmart gathered some of America's biggest household brands near its Arkansas headquarters for a tough talk. For years, Walmart had dominated the retail landscape on the back of its "Everyday Low Price" guarantee. Walmart wants to have the lowest price on 80 percent of its sales, according to a presentation the company made at the summit, which Recode reviewed. To accomplish that, the brands that sell their goods through Walmart would have to cut their wholesale prices or make other cost adjustments to shave at least 15 percent off. In some cases, vendors say they would lose money on each sale if they met Walmart's demands. Brands that agree to play ball with Walmart could expect better distribution and more strategic help from the giant retailer. And to those that didn't? Walmart said it would limit their distribution and create its own branded products to directly challenge its own suppliers. But this time around, Walmart's renewed focus on its "Everyday Low Price" promise coincides with Amazon's increased aggressiveness in its own pricing of the packaged goods that are found on supermarket shelves and are core to Walmart's success, industry executives and consultants say. The result in recent months has been a high-stakes race to the bottom between Walmart and Amazon that seems great for shoppers, but has consumer packaged goods brands feeling the pressure.
But much more of Amazon (avg maybe $100/month), I hope Wal-Mart at least holds its own. Because Amazon is destroying brick-and-mortar retail across America, which in turn is doing a bad number on both suburban malls and town centers.
During a boom when nearly everybody has a good job, there's plenty of business for both online and brick-and-mortar retailers. But when times are hard, people are counting dollars and Amazon wins that game. Not because they're always cheaper, but because they're cheaper in tactical ways - for example, they drove Tower Records, HMV, and Virgin Records out of business by discounting most pop music titles by 35 percent, only to jack prices back up to near-list after their competitors went out of business. Amazon is ruthless. They're not the consumers' friend, and they're certainly not the workers' friend. But they are very good.
Walmart. If the companies cannot undercut themselves then Walmart won't stock their products.
Guess which department doesn't create value when it comes to making products for the shelf? IT.
The second is ultra expensive health insurance making robots cheaper
http://saveie6.com/
I used to be willing to shop at Walmart, but with their race to the bottom it's become an unbearable place to shop. Their rock-bottom pricing gospel has always attracted people who can't afford to pay anything more than that. Of course this includes many decent people of modest means and quite a few thoroughly unpleasant people. It used to work out well enough when the stores were reasonably staffed and they could keep things in check, but now it seems most of them are being run by a skeleton crew and the damages of the resulting circus are being considered just a cost of doing business. With Amazon, you never have to see these people and suffer the misery of queuing for 15 minutes just to check out. With Walmart, the experience is horrible. So if I'm looking to cheap-out on regular supplies, you can bet I'm going with Amazon. That's why I think they will win out in the end.
Speaking as as big Amazon spender who does practically no shopping at Wal-Mart brick and mortar or online, the very best thing that can happen is that Wal-Mart will hold their own in this war. One thing we know is that when faced with a virtual monopoly in any field or domain, large corporations will screw over the consumer again and again.
A race to the bottom in prices is bad for the rank and file employees at Amazon and Walmart and bad for product quality. Corners will be cut in both. We've seen the heart of Walmart and Amazon, and it is us the customers, apparently buying on price alone.
At what point does this race to the bottom on prices result in nothing but garbage products?
We're already seeing a major quality drop for a lot of day to day items. I'm all for less expensive products but if they're all junk, what's the point?
Walmart is now offering free 2 day shipping (above a certain threshold)
Returns are free in store (no shipping).
Now what's the difference?
They're driving prices down, mostly. Shipping is always an issue, especially with small items.
Fresh produce, meats, etc will be the province brick and mortar for the near future.
The little independent grocery store near me manages to beat the Walmart a mile away on price and quality for meat and produce. But, having seen what's happened elsewhere, they are the exception.
If only we could get this kind of competitive pressure to occur in the healthcare market!
Wal-Mart isn't that cheap, is it? I work close to one, sometimes I drop by because it's convenient or I have a little time to kill. Every single electronics item is going to be cheaper at Amazon, sometimes substantially cheaper. The coffee is cheaper at just a Safeway. The art supplies are somewhat expensive.
The coffee creamer is at a good price, and they have a bunch of shitty $5 T-Shirts. I didn't realize what the "Everyday Low Price Guarantee" meant...I see now they match Amazon prices, which is a cool thing to find out.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Lower prices are terrifying? That's one sensational headline. Is Slashdot trying to take over Gawker's business?
We'll lose money with every sale, but we'll make it up in volume.
I would think that if the big brands are being shut out, isn't this a great opportunity for small, regionally manufactured technology products to be brought in and promoted?
It would seem that company with a very low-overhead and just in time manufacturing (ordering components when the PO comes in and shipping within the 30-60 days of the contract) could be a viable business. It would be tough for Apple, Sony, and other big brands, but if these companies handle the logistics as well as the promotion, I would think high quality, low cost products which are built in the US (which would make Mr. Trump happy) could be the result of working with them.
Anybody have any numbers at Amazon and Walmart that I can call?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
If you even bothered to read the summary, the branded products at Walmart have been given "other cost adjustments". That means they are lower quality products compared to the "same" model at other stores. Walmart is a disease.
Are you willing to risk identity theft with a strip to a store?
Target, Home Depot, TJMaxx/Marshalls, not to mention all the skimmer incidents...they were all huge and pulled from the store info not the online.
Yeah, it sounds easier to hack into the online storefront but there are usually just a couple of servers and all run by relatively well paid and mostly competent IT staff.
There are thousands of branch stores, all setup by competent people but not really well maintained and any trouble shooting is done by either some manager who is fairly clueless about the technology that makes it all work or the young kid in the store who plays the most video games.
Personally, I'll take SSL/TLS over a $15/hour on premise retail employee for security for large chain stores.
I know some people who work for Amazon. And they have very little to say about it that's not good. It's a challenging company and you have to constantly be learning their new technologies. But my friends there love it, and are treated very well.
Long time ago, I had a few friends who worked for Walmart. Working there is a dead-end job with no real prospects. The company treated them like crap and they hated every minute.
Easy enough for me to pick which one I'd prefer to win.
Imagine all the people...
All you have to do is find the heart of the Wal-Mart, and destroy it.
Just take care not to be standing underneath after it starts to implode. The results are rather grody.
This space unintentionally left blank.
But seriously - the non-brand stuff is just awful quality. Jeans and shirts don't last. Socks fall apart. I got tired of taking stuff back... Who wants a guarantee that they continually have to use?
If I were running one of these companies that Walmart is leaning on, I'd just say "go ahead and make your own competing products". the more crap Walmart sells, the more their customers will eventually figure out anything they sell is garbage.
The only thing I go to Walmart for nowadays is glasses and contacts - and that's because I actually like that particular optometrist.
#DeleteChrome
I don't know why I would ever shop at Walmart...
Actually, late at night, Walmart's are the best place to see Aliens, not illegal immigrants, actual extraterrestrials. http://www.peopleofwalmart.com...
Because the prices are lower or at least comparable, and they'll price match anything anyway.
Because I'm not such a neurotic aspie that spending 15 minutes in the vicinity of other human beings is an unbearable torment.
Because my self esteem isn't so degraded that I need to use being too good to shop at a certain retail outlet as a signal of my worth as a human being.
But - above all - because I don't have to wait days for my shit to come in the mail.
When Amazon gets that same-day drone shit really going (with low enough shipping costs) I'll look to them as a possible walmart substitute.
What do you think of these stories?
Amazon: Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon's sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers (February 23, 2014)
Amazon: Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace (August 15, 2015) Quote: "The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers..."
Amazon: Amazon Under Fire Over Alleged Worker Abuse in Germany/a (February 19, 2013)
Thats cute. I have been getting 2 HOUR deliveries from Amazon for a year and a half.. I even use it when i go on vacation. I have soda, water and snacks delivered right to the hotel.
Good-bye
Odds are that a long time ago the friends you had were Walmart sales associates, and today your friends are Amazon techies. Just for fun compare the same kind of job levels and you'll be surprised how Walmart employees at the bottom of the pyramid have more opportunities than those at Amazon.
Almost all top managers at Walmart HQ started in Walmart stores. How many top managers at Amazon started in the fulfillment centers?
lucm, indeed.
Look at a rubbermaid mop bucket at Home depot. Then look at a rubbermaid mop bucket at Walmart. Then tell me their is 'no evidence'.
Walmart is notorious for squeezing so hard, they get a shitty, brand destroying version to sell.
Then you get 'brand destroying' enterprises like MTD mowers and you get a true shitstorm of junk.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Sounds like the problem solves itself.
Why either as long as eBay exists?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
No doubt about it, Walmart IT is sophisticated. I've heard stories about how they monitor weather and when hurricane is approaching, fill shelves with extra beer and pop-tarts. Oh, and at a higher price too in stores more likely to have people around who will stock up and ride it out.
Walmart always pays low prices. It's part of their game. They dominate the low-end retail sector and prevent brands from selling to that market unless they cut prices and quality to match Walmart's demands. If the brands don't play, Walmart gives cheaper ones better shelve space and then returns unsold inventory tot he manufacturer for a refund.
They are like any other retailer in that they charge what the market will bear.
Example: Walk in to the TV section. In the hallway before it, you will see many cheap and/or refurbished TV's. As you walk in, you will see better ones at a slightly higher price. Walk further and they have their best sets at full retail. Did they pay full wholesale? Probably not.
As I see it, Walmart isn't a destination. It's what happens at 2am when you are done partying and need to buy something to eat.
The war ended, as the last two humans on Earth, locked in desperate combat, struggled to slay the other, but each succumbed to exhaustion at the same moment.
Peace, then reigned, and goodwill was triumphant.
Like this?
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Rubbermaid-Commercial-Products-Brute-10-Qt-Red-Bucket-FG296300RED/202649172
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Rubbermaid-Professional-Plus-Round-Brute-Bucket/16622204
Sure, same basic product, but different part numbers; the labeling and packaging is probably visibly different in the stores as well. BTW you can get the crappy model on amazon too.
The walmart one is good enough for 99.9% of us, and anyone who needs a better bucket probably knows not to cheap out in the first place. Some of us don't want to spend double for something made for more heavy duty jobs than we'll ever need it for. And no one's forcing Rubbermaid to manufacture it or do business with walmart at all if it's unprofitable or "destroying their brand". If it were they could sell it under a different brand name altogether.
Not every product from every brand needs to be "premium"; not every car Chevy sells is a Camero.
You rich people talking about 'ethics' and how employees are being mistreated make me laugh. Only rich people care about such things. The poor people that actually have to work at such shit jobs will be happy that they can buy products cheaply no matter where they come from because otherwise they could not buy them at all. It is amusing to see the astroturfers going to war with each other here. Does anyone else really care about this? It's a good thing and lets hope it continues without either side winning. That would be a win for everyone else. A race to the bottom is really a race to the top for everyone else.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
> Has something like this ever happened before with 2 of the largest retailer companies?
It's ALWAYS happening. Walmart's history specifically includes conquering K-Mart (they were once equals), dueling with Target, and early in Walmart's history they competed directly with the largest retailer at the time - Woolworth's / Woolco. Woolworth and Sear's both built the tallest building in the world at different times, when each was the leading retailer.
The grocery industry is a constant cage match between a few major players. Kroger is the third-largest retailer in the world; they operate about 20 supermarket chain brands. Kroger's main competitor is Albertsons, which has 2,400 stores (about half as many as Walmart).
I don't know why I would ever shop at Walmart as long as Amazon exists.
When's the last time you ordered three fresh hand selected apples, a hand selected head of lettuce and other fresh fruit and vegetables from Amazon.com? And before you go yelling about buying those somewhere else, Walmart is close to putting the only other grocery store within 30 miles of me out of business. Not everyone lives in the burbs with three or four grocery choices withing five miles of their house.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
We're not all 1%ers that can afford to spend ten times the cost of a bottle of water on shipping said bottle of water. Not to mention the environmental costs of shipping individual products to individual homes vise a truck load of the one product to a single location.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Walmart is notorious for squeezing vendors to provide goods for a lower price, or more product for the same price.
This is why you can walk down almost any aisle in Walmart, if you can find one which has actually been stocked, and see what seems like every third product sporting "BONUS! NOW 30% MORE FREE!" stickers and packaging. This is not being done because the vendor is thrilled to give away 30% more for free, but because Walmart has threatened them to either provide a better value in terms of more product for the same price OR pay Walmart to carry the product OR provide some sort of deal on making a private label version of something Walmart needs, OR if none of those work, Walmart will evict them from the shelves.
If you are a vendor who derives a huge percentage of sales from Walmart, you have to think hard whether it makes sense to throw away all those sales or do as Walmart demands and come up with a bonus package or provide some other service Walmart wants.
In most cases, Walmart demands sales results from everybody. If you are taking up shelf space, and even if your company paid for it, you better sell product, or Walmart WILL kick you. They may also demand that jobbers be sent in to do stocking, but this mainly happens to soft drink and snack chips. In my area, Utz bought shelf space but the stuff didn't sell and they didn't want to do "Bonus! 90MILLION OUNCES FREE!" bullshit and eventually Walmart kicked them out.
Which kind of sucks since the stores are supplied by 1099 contractor route salespeople who can't offer better deals to Walmart because those decisions are made at a much higher level, and then they get kicked out and lose what sales they were making there.
Sig for hire.
Now tha tyou posted those two Rubbermaid buckets, it's easy to see where they cheaped out. Check the strengthener collar at the top, and at the places where the handle is attached. These are "small things", but if you're familiar how plastic reacts to continuous bending, it's obvious the lack of these is going to shorten the lifespan of the bucket significantly. Perhpas not significantly enough for you, but at some point, you will have to spend money on another similar bucket earlier if you buy the Walmart edition.
If you fill up that Walmart edition bucket and lift it up, the weight of the contents is going to make bucket collapse inwards from the points where the handles are attached. This will eventually cause the bucket to fail earlier. The materials are probably cheaper too, which contribute toward early failure even more.
Walmart 2-day shipping is a lie. There. That is the difference.
When you order from Amazon with a two-day delivery, you can reasonably expect Amazon will hit that goal, pretty much all the time. It's extremely dependable.
When you do an equivalent order from Walmart, well... they may not even ship it for two days, and it may ship ground from halfway across the country, and may show up for in-store pickup in five or seven days.
I ordered a TV with two-day delivery a couple summers ago, so not during Christmas or any rush period. Silly me, I assumed two-day meant two-day. In reality, they shipped it via Fedex Ground from over 1000 miles away, and it took five whole days, not two, and then I had to stand in line in the store for 45 minutes behind people doing returns and buying Western Union and money orders, just to claim my item, which they initially could not find. Mind you, it was a 40" TV so not small or anything. It turned out they had been using my TV box to prop open the door to the pick-up area.
More recently, I tried to order a smartphone for in-store pick-up. It was supposed to be at the store and I could just walk in and get it, but I did pick-up just to save time. Paid for it online before the store opened for the day and waited for the email to come pick it up. Never got the email. So I called them. And well, they never bothered to go fulfil the online orders that morning and the stock they had, including the one I had already paid for, got sold when the doors opened and regular customers came in. And now they were out of stock and sucks to be me. Nobody in the store gave a shit. Online is a whole other department and nobody in the store felt any responsibility to do anything for them. At best, they worried only about their own store stuff, not online orders, so nobody even cared that they had failed to secure an item that had been paid for. Oh well.
This happens so often, the online side instantly refunded the money the moment I asked. That's the only thing that actually happened as promised. Refunds.
tl;dr Walmart has grand goals to be like Amazon but they drop the ball in making it happen. Their ads promise what they can't deliver, so no, it's not equivalent
at all.
Sig for hire.
It costs me five dollars (or more) to drive to Walmart and back. Plus I may spend more than I intend while I am there.
Clickety Click
Real brands stay the hell away from WalMart. You never see NIKEs in them, for instance. They never want to be pressured to lower their quality to make some price target.
What this hits is the off-brands
I live in Seattle you insensitive clod! Amazon employs half our city!
Well yeah, but it's still only a cleaning bucket. You don't expect it to last forever, and you'll probably replace it with something new and shiny long before it outright falls apart anyway. Who cares if the math shows you'll save 50 cents a year on average over the next decade using the good, expensive one instead of repeatedly buying new crappy ones?
That's not to say there aren't areas where quality is important for everyone and buying shitty walmart junk is a terrible, possibly even dangerous idea (many types of sports equipment for instance, bikes especially), but in many cases cheap, generic crap is perfectly serviceable. In fact sometimes the walmart stuff is still more than we really need, which is why dollar stores are a thing.
"Sales Associate"?!?! You can put a fancy name on them, but they're still just kids who can't subtract in their heads without using the computer.
Seems way off topic to me. We do have plenty of other retailers out there even if Walmart and Amazon off each other.
A little disposable income does not make you a 1%er
Look at a rubbermaid mop bucket at Home depot. Then look at a rubbermaid mop bucket at Walmart. Then tell me their is 'no evidence'.
As long as the Walmart bucket is "good enough", I prefer to save money.
If I need a bucket to take on an expedition up the Amazon I might pay extra.
But to clean my kitchen floor, the Walmart bucket will suffice.
It doesnt cost me anything above the cost i already pay for Prime. All i have to do is order a minimum of $20 and the prices are mostly competitive with my grocery store. I live in an upstairs condo, so i get all the heavy stuff delivered like water, soda, pet food, etc. Your 'environmental costs' comment is laughable at best. Thanks to the rise in delivery services, i rarely need to drive anymore. My car sits for weeks at a time, where before i would have to drive it at least once a week, usually more.
Good-bye
How come I can buy dildos, dongs, vibrators, etc. on Amazon but I can't do that with Wal-Mart? This is a show stopper in a lot of people's books.
Speaking of witch, I used to hang out with BeauHD right after he got his GED and he liked to show all of his guests his rather "large" dildo collection. "Great for size queens" he told me!
Almost all top managers at Walmart HQ started in Walmart stores. How many top managers at Amazon started in the fulfillment centers?
Maybe that's why Walmart is losing.
The result in recent months has been a high-stakes race to the bottom between Walmart and Amazon that seems great for shoppers, but has consumer packaged goods brands feeling the pressure.
It's never good for shoppers. Prices will drop, but it is highly unlikely the difference comes out of the pockets of the CEOs or the shareholder profits. It will come out of quality, safety, worker sales or worker numbers, all of which sooner or later cycles back to the disadvantage of the shopper.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
In the minds of the radical left having any money at all makes you part of the 1%. Heck, to some of those idiots even having a job is enough to qualify.
I don't know why I would ever shop at Walmart...
Actually, late at night, Walmart's are the best place to see Aliens, not illegal immigrants, actual extraterrestrials. http://www.peopleofwalmart.com...
I shop there because because there's room to park my semi-truck. You could probably land a flying saucer there, too, at night.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
So you went from WallMart to Amazon as the sole provider of your needs. The old King is dead, long live the new King.
Remember what you said is also vaid for Amazon:
One thing we know is that when faced with a virtual monopoly in any field or domain, large corporations will screw over the consumer again and again.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I'm only speculating, but if I was a manufacturer of a desirable brand of widgets and Wal Mart came to me and demanded some price below which I couldn't make money, I would be inclined to come up with some new sub-brand or SKU that was deliberately cheaper to make and then offer THAT to Wal Mart instead of my "good" brand.
Or maybe some subversive version of this, where I moved the good product to a new "platinum" SKU and just junked the quality on the old one.
That way I can preserve my product quality, which presumably has something to do with my brand's success, and keep selling that to other vendors willing to buy it.
I make similar statements to my extended family. Shoes are the obvious example: Yes, you can buy a 12.99 pair of shoes at WalMart or Payless or similar. And they might last a year or so. I buy a quality grade, and am still wearing those shoes a decade later. . .
The problem is, when people live close to the line, they claim that they can't afford to buy the high-quality brand. But they all have the latest smartphone and a big LCD TV.
It's all about priorities.
I suppose there is no suitable car analogy?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The problem is, when people live close to the line, they claim that they can't afford to buy the high-quality brand. But they all have the latest smartphone and a big LCD TV.
No, they don't.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Why either as long as eBay exists?
Why buy anything when you can just steal it?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If you are a vendor who derives a huge percentage of sales from Walmart, you have to think hard whether it makes sense to throw away all those sales or do as Walmart demands and come up with a bonus package or provide some other service Walmart wants.
With all this cost cutting and pressure on suppliers, I wonder how much of the so called obesity epidemic is due to replacing better ingredients with cheaper, more fattening alternatives.
Example, I've had the same damn $300 work boots for 5 years!
Which means that, five years ago, you have $300 of disposable income. Meanwhile, someone else who didn't had to spend $40 every six months on cheap boots that fell apart by the end of that time. At the end of the five years, they've spent $400, you've spent $300 and your boots are still fine, but that doesn't help them if they didn't have $300 to spend on boots at any point. To make things worse, they're now had to spend $100 more of their income than you. This is one of the bit reasons why poverty is difficult to escape.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Some brands will cut corners to survive. Those that won't will be offered buyouts from new owners whose whole business plan is to acquire a brand that built a reputation, and liquidate that reputation by cutting corners and slapping the brand label on it.
Clearly the solution is to go without any boots for four years, save the $40/six months, and then buy the good set. You'll appreciate the good boots all the more for having gone without, and they'll be four years newer than the schlub who bought them straightaway. But you can't do that, because silly, job-killing regulations require footwear on the jobsite.
All these years when the whole country was talking seriously about main street being decimated by Walmart, did they pay any attention? Did they not see the threat posed by the power of Walmart over the distribution channel?
Some did not. Some did. Those who did figured, "Well it will take Wal mart X number of years to threaten the big brand I manage. My stock options will vest in Y years. X is greater than Y. So let them have their way."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Brand destroying? I had an expensive Troy-Bilt mower from Lowes. It had a Chinese Briggs and Stratton engine on it. After three years, a connecting rod end cap bolt came loose, a bolt that is normally held down by a metal tag, the cap went through the crankcase and destroyed the motor. I looked for a new motor from Brig and from Honda. Both are made in China, If I have to have a Chinese motor, then it might as well be a Predator from Harbor Freight. After buying the motor for $104 from Harbor Freight, I looked up the cost on Amazon. Amazon wanted $169 + shipping ($30) for the same motor at the least expensive point and $350 + shipping at the most expensive point. Harbor Freight has these motors manufactured for them by Chingyon-Lifan in China. The same company manufactures the Honda GC Motors that sell for $269 at my local parts importer, and also manufactures the Briggs motors. While the Honda parts interchange with my engine, the Briggs parts do not. As a result, for the cost of the motor and the blade adapter, I have the mower back in commercial service for about 1/4 the cost of a new mower. But Amazon, nor Walmart were of no help whereas a Chinese Importer (Harbor Freight) was of great help. I now have a fine running Tredator.
Last week I needed to buy a replacement pair of headphones that day, so I go to the Walmart website and find a pair for $40. When I get to Walmart I the in-store price is $80. I tell the lady at checkout the price on Walmart's website is $40 and ask her to fix the price. She tells me I will need to buy it on the site and choose the in-store pickup option and come back in two hours. I told her that is fucking retarded and to stop messing with me. She said that is the only way, so I get the manager, and he tries to pull the same shit. I said I think I'll drive the extra mile to Best Buy because they have it for $40 as well. They tell me, no, no, don't do that we'll price match Best Buy. I told them "no thanks I'm going to Best Buy. You idiots will price match Best Buy, but not your own website. If you asshats knew Best Buy did not carry them you would force me to order on the website and wait two hours, or fork over $80. You're literally worse than Hitler; if I had one wish, I'd use it to give you taste buds in your asshole." The guy had a pissed off look on his face, and I left Walmart with a raging 24" metaphorical boner because I got to use the taste buds in the asshole line on someone that deserved it.
That was the first time I visited Walmart in five years and my fucking last. I ordered the pair I wanted on Amazon because neither Best Buy or Walmart carried them. Now I'm left wondering how many people paid $80 for $40 headphones because they did not check the website. Seriously, what other store refuses to price match their own fucking website on the spot?
Funny story. Walmart has shipping centers and warehouses in every state, and some states have several. I would have believed your story except for the following: returns and money orders are conducted at the front of the store while pickups are conducted at the back of the store. If you are buying from a merchant selling through the Walmart website, then you might have had to wait for the retailer or wholesaler to ship it, but that would not be the fault of Walmart.
Of course Amazon is trying to be Walmart 2.0. Walmart was trying to be K-Mart 2.0, and K-Mart was trying to be Sears 2.0. (do you know, you used to be able to buy houses and cars from Sears?)
Amazon has the massive advantage of not allowing customers into their warehouses, so those customers never have to see the sacrifices of aesthetics to functionality and never have to see the breadth of customer that rock-bottom pricing attracts. Amazon will win because you can sit at home and imagine all of Amazon's customers are just like you: clever consumers looking for convenience and a good deal
On the other hand my cleaning bucket is nearly 10 years old already and I have a reasonable expectation that it will last the rest of my life
https://www.manufactum.co.uk/s...
If you look in the right places you can get still buy versions of most stuff that will last. What I have personally been unable to do is buy a clothes horse of the same quality as my mothers. Her's is 50 years old and still going, everything I see in the shops is flimsy junk. I suspect I will end up making a copy myself.
Why use analogies when there are actual examples to link to?
Walmart is also facing EXTREME pressure on everyday items for grocery as well. My family shops as much as we can at Aldis for things like milk, eggs, bread and other items. Milk for instance is almost .30 cents cheaper than Walmart.
So, lets say you do some amount of cleaning. You use this bucket once a month over a 10 year period.
The Walmart bucket, due to these engineered defects lasts 2 years. It cost $5
The Home Depot bucket, which looks similar, lasts 8 years. It costs $7
The cost of ownership for 10 years for the Walmart bucket is $25, the HD bucket is $14. Plus the aggravation of having the bucket fail 5 times over that time. You've probably switched brands because you know the original one didn't last.
The bucket example is simplistic. In computers or electronics it is often more severe. HP, for example, would ship nearly empty print cartridges with their printers. Canon would ship printers that had less tolerance on print heads and nozzles. HP's computers would have 30 day warranty(vs. 1 or 3 years) and be missing some components like cooling fans or use super-cheap power supplies. For TVs, Westinghouse would not license the MPEG decoder required to watch digital cable (QAM), and would force users to purchase it separately, even though it wasn't noted on the box.
Your sig quotes an a.t legend. Hats off to him.
I can see the fnords!
Oh shiat. That's Sean McAfee I'm thinking of. My error.
I can see the fnords!
The race to the bottom creates casualties along the way.
While they're busy selling lowest-possible quality products, the acceptable-quality products are losing sales to them. Many times the moderate product lines can't even stay in business, leaving only a few over-the-top/boutique brands for the 1% and the bottom dweller products for everyone else. Once the moderate competition is dead, prices go way up on the poor quality products. So you and I end up with overpriced terrible products with the only alternative being to ridiculously overspend on a luxury product. And few manufacturers want to re-enter the market, because nothing will stop Walmart from simply dropping the prices to anti-competitive levels.
Search for Walmart and Gedney or Walmart and Schwinn for some really tragic stories of good companies being trashed and hundreds of jobs being lost because they tried to do business with Walmart.
One of the funniest differences between men and women: women brag about how new their shoes are, while men brag about how old they are!
While they're busy selling lowest-possible quality products, the acceptable-quality products are losing sales to them. Many times the moderate product lines can't even stay in business, leaving only a few over-the-top/boutique brands for the 1% and the bottom dweller products for everyone else. Once the moderate competition is dead, prices go way up on the poor quality products. So you and I end up with overpriced terrible products with the only alternative being to ridiculously overspend on a luxury product. And few manufacturers want to re-enter the market, because nothing will stop Walmart from simply dropping the prices to anti-competitive levels.
Unless, of course, we don't buy those products. If however, people choose to buy those products, then it looks to me like they value price over quality. At that point, who am I to disagree with their decisions?
That home depot bucket is on it's 4th owner because it got left behind when you moved and the new owner loaned it to a neighbor with a leak and forgot about it. An eight year bucket doesn't do alot of people much good.
Cheap storage VM.
I don't claim to know what's going on in jolly old England, but I occasionally hear about NHS doctor shortages:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
Doctors in the US have incentive to go through a very expensive and time consuming education process, because they are some of the highest paid people in our country.
Are doctors in the NHS system similarly incented?
I think it's a great idea. Sorry salespeople.
âoeOnce every three or four years, Walmart tells you to take the money youâ(TM)re spending on [marketing] initiatives and invest it in lower prices,â said Jason Goldberg, the head of the commerce practice at SapientRazorfish, a digital agency that works with large brands and retailers. âoeThey sweep all the chips off the table and drill you down on price.â
Your friends work in Amazon warehouse jobs? If not, how is this anecdote even remotely relevant?
You mean like Packard-Hell? I recall an article saying they simply had parts bins of ram, video card, etc and what was the cheapest got dropped into the bin for the next PH build. Quality varied significantly.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
To people living paycheck to paycheck, someone with savings looks rich. They are better off then the Majority of Americans. citation: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wh...
Cheap storage VM.
Yep, that is precisely what happened to me. I had a cheap bucket (brand??) probably from Walmart that barely lasted anytime. The next one I got was super thick and it's been working well for years.
Personally I'd rather manufacturers default to making better stuff instead of junk. Most stuff I buy isn't disposable, it is something I want to last a couple of decades so I don't have to go through the hassle of shopping again.
And shopping for some things on Amazon is getting terrible... too many choices (bad ones) to sort through. Try shopping for a kid's bed on Amazon... let's say one that won't break in 12 months. Good luck, it will take you weeks just to go through the 10,000 choices of junk.
Anecdotal I know, but I have never had an order where Amazon said delivery would take 2 days that did not arrive xin 2 days.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The auto industry is long-known for having taken the "Beat the supplier over the head with price" approach. It was a monumental failure and the Japanese auto makers, who collaborated with their suppliers on various price improvement mechanisms, were monumentally successful in quality and price. This will fail and Walmart will crash. The question is who else will go down with them riding the coat tails.
Granted, a portion of the blame here also resides with PayPal, but still extremely frustrating. I burned up almost all the minutes on my then pre-paid flip phone with Walmart and Paypal trying to resolve it.
Side note, it is hard as fuck. But even with a decade in prison, and a felony record, I now have a great job, a side business, bought a new car 2 years ago and now own a home. All in a bit over 5 years. It took a lot of luck, good friends, and a pile of hard work. So if you are unemplyed, have strikes against you etc, don't give up.
Silence is a state of mime.
"And so in October 2002, with a colleague, Wier kept an appointment with a merchandise vice president for Wal-Mart’s outdoor-product category. ... The Wal-Mart vice president responded with strategy and argument. Snapper is the sort of high-quality nameplate, like Levi Strauss, that Wal-Mart hopes can ultimately make it more Target-like. He suggested that Snapper find a lower-cost contract manufacturer. He suggested producing a separate, lesser-quality line with the Snapper nameplate just for Wal-Mart. Just like Levi did."
https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart
The main problem that US healthcare has is that they are not required to publish their price schedules, and they are allowed to engage in discriminatory pricing.
And so far, not many legislators have the spine to even mention this matter.
This is why you get an invoice (if you have health insurance) and it says the bill for you recent visit was $500, but the insurance discount was $450..... And you may have had to pay the co-pay of $15 or $20....
It's not unusual for the insurer discount to be 90% off the cash price,,, so when you read of US medical providers "losing money", it's not unfair to ask of they're losing the cash price money or the insurance discount money...
The problem not often mentioned with socialized health care outside of the US, is that to control costs they usually engage in rationing healthcare.
They schedule a given number of a certain procedures a year, based on their budget, and that's all they do. No matter what.
If they're doing 12 heart transplants this year (one per day, for the first 12 days in January) and you are the 13th person, you have to wait until next year. If you make it that long, that is.
So a lot more people suffer with a much worse quality of life while just waiting for a slot to come up, and a lot of people with life-threatening problems die while waiting for a slot when there's surgeons and operating rooms standing empty most of the year.
In many countries you can't even offer to pay your own money for the care, since that would destroy the "fairness" of the system.
So you never get a bill--but then, a lot of the time, you don't get health care either.
{-and I guess that's fair, in a way--but not the way most people would imagine}
Canada is frequently used as a better of health care than the US--but heath care procedure wait times in the USA are measured in days; in Canada it's measured in months. Some people forget to tell you that part.
http://globalnews.ca/news/1886...
Dollar General, for when you don't quite need the quality of Walmart
Not really. It is called learning to live within your means, sacrifice and savings.
I know...old fashioned concepts but they still are valid.
I'm not poor (I've been the broke student starting out tho)....and I'm not wealthy, but I do upper middle income ok.
But even in my pooer days, as even today...I quite often have some things, some necessary like tools, other are plain outright toys...but in many if not most cases, they are of higher quality and build than what most of my peers have.
How?
Well, I tend to have a clear image of what is important to me. If I want "X"....I generally spend a LOT of time researching the shit out of it...I find what I consider to be the best in class. I see how much I have to save to get it, and decide on what things I currently spend money on, that I can do without for awhile so I can save at a more rapid timeline.
I buy what I want and I am happy, no buyers remorse....and hey, the best isn't always the most $$, but when it is, I don't cheap out.
Yes, some people come by and go "OOOooh you must have a lot of $$". Well, no that's not the case. I just drank a little less, didn't go out as much, and cut corners where I could to SAVE money....and also be patient to wait on a good deal when it pops up.
I try to have a little savings in a "toy" savings at all times. I put at least a tiny bit away...for that semi-impulse buy when a great deal pops up for a very limited opportunity time.
For the most part, I try to have cash on hand to buy most any of these things. Even then, I will often keep that cash standing by....and use a interest free payment on these things (mostly with Amazon store card 6-12 months). That way I pay things out and can keep that cash on hand in savings earning at least a tiny bit of interest.
But living within ones means, sacrifice....if you can exercise at least a modicum of self control...life can still be good.
I've been doing this since I was a young teen...doing neighborhood jobs saving for a year to get what at the end was a HIGH end skate board. I've been building my stereo since I was about 12yrs. What I have now blows away what others have....many of them have Dr. money which I certainly do not...yet, they are amazed at how my stereo sound. I've been building it for years by saving, swapping out parts as deals came along, etc.
It isn't hard and geez, I am NOT the most disciplined person around, but fiscally I do try to exercise a little common sense.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Shop "from the road" and get it a couple of days later, versus walk into a store and walk out in a few minutes with your stuff.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
$300 over five years is a miniscule amount of money. If you had any discipline, you'd be able to save the $300 at some point and then get the boots.
Problem is, Americans don't have discipline. Even rich ones. Our waistlines are evidence enough.
I discovered this with a Black and Decker vaccuum. "Same" product, perhaps half the price at Walmart. Hmmm... turns out the only difference on the package was an added letter to the model number and some suspicious electrical rating difference that I can't recall. Buy both, take apart, and the motors are different (lower power)! Return Walmart version. The only thing I buy there now are Christmas lights, which for some reason are stupid cheap. Oh, and their solar garden lights beat the Dollar Tree price by 3 cents and you don't need to swap the harsh LED for a soft white.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I can't drive to amazon at 2AM and get snacks right now...
I make similar statements to my extended family. Shoes are the obvious example: Yes, you can buy a 12.99 pair of shoes at WalMart or Payless or similar. And they might last a year or so. I buy a quality grade, and am still wearing those shoes a decade later. . .
The problem is, when people live close to the line, they claim that they can't afford to buy the high-quality brand. But they all have the latest smartphone and a big LCD TV.
It's all about priorities.
My dog and I walk about 5 miles a day. I try and walk / take transit whenever I can. I go through high quality shoes in about a year :(. Though I literally wear them until I wear a hole in the sole (the uppers all look great). I envy you. Though I average about $10-20 a month on gas right now.
is what you're referring to, and it's mostly B.S. Papa John's could give every employee usable health insurance for .25 cents a pizza + the cost of their yearly Super Bowl free pizza promo. Giving farm workers a livable wage ($15/hr) would add .06 cents to a pound of potatoes.
All that automation means labor isn't as big a part of the equation anymore. It also means we produce more than enough. There's enough food on earth to feed everyone. We don't have a food problem, we have a distribution problem.
My point is: The race to the bottom is real, but it's not because we're so damn efficient or Walmart's prices are too low. It's because we allow it. We abandoned a large percentage of our populace. Largely because it irks us to pay taxes to raise them up and because we're afraid of losing freedom to the large organizations needed to do the raising (e.g. gov't). The ironic thing is we lose more than those taxes as the ruling class bite into our incomes and we lose more freedom as they clamp down to keep us under control.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
From your linked article: "Nine percent of those earning $100,000 or more each year felt they usually or always live paycheck-to-paycheck, while 23 percent of those making between $50,000 and $99,999 also described living paycheck-to-paycheck, and 51 percent of those earning less than $50,000 met the description."
I have sympathy for low earners, and I understand why a lot of them live from one paycheck to the next. Been there, done that. But 1 out of 10 earning $100K or more? That sounds like a combination of poor money management skills combined with low impulse control. Even in high-cost areas, $100K+ should be enough to accumulate an adequate cushion (again, been there and done that) unless you're saddled with student loan debt and you're wearing out your credit cards.
I'd say about 5% of mine take three days.
Maybe less, I'm estimating.
If I complain, they always take care of me, but often I feel bad, as the credits are disproportionately generous.
I only complain now when stuff doesn't come Sunday and I really needed it for the weekend.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Speaking as as big Amazon spender
One thing we know is that when faced with a virtual monopoly in any field or domain, large corporations will screw over the consumer again and again.
What the fuck is wrong with you (and people like you)? Seriously, are you that stupid that you can't follow an idea from one sentence to another? Are you just so selfish that you're fine with consumers being screwed over, so long as you can get your widget $0.02 cheaper? Why would you acknowledge that companies like Amazon are awful for people, yet still use them all the time. What's wrong with you?
I don't respond to AC's.
So, do you help the companies by not buying from both Amazon and Walmart?
#DeleteFacebook
The difference is you have to walk into a Walmart with all the other Walmart people there.
I wouldn't call those things brick and mortar stores.
#DeleteFacebook
Sure, that decision is easy to make, if you know that boots A will last 5+ years and boots B will last 6 months. But you never know what you are going to get, unless you put extensive effort into researching options, and then you still aren't sure. You could easily spend 10x as much buying gold plated turds.
Isn't the whole line of AmazonBasics their branded products? https://www.amazon.com/b/?node...
Except for O'Reilly, people don't usually buy books based on brand (publisher's name), but that doesn't mean the books that Amazon sells aren't branded products.
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I take it you've never experienced real poverty? $300 over 5 years ($60 a year) might seem minuscule to you, and honestly it doesn't seem like much to me either, but to someone who lives paycheck to paycheck and has to constantly choose between, say, buying groceries this week or paying the water bill so that it doesn't get cut off again, saving money can be virtually impossible.
I know it's popular these days to brush off those in poverty and accuse them of either making bad choices, or squandering their money, or being lazy, but some of the poorest people I know are also some of the most disciplined. It takes more discipline than I have to live off of white bread and sliced cheese for three days so that you can pay an electric bill, or to stay home on a Friday night because the $4 that you'd spend on bus fare or gasoline to visit a friend across town is needed for the laundromat, but those are the types of choices that people in poverty have to face every day!
To someone in the middle class, $60 a year on shoes doesn't seem like much. What about clothes? A winter coat? Furniture? Blankets for your bed? And god forbid you want some luxury item like a vacuum cleaner or you have an unexpected medical expense.
The major manufacturers should tell Wal Mart what they should have told them years and years ago: "Go f**k yourself!"
Shoes can be resoled, although it's not necessarily a good idea.
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Maybe they have 6 or 7 kids?
Cheap storage VM.
Am I the only person confused as to why we're discussing mop buckets on slashdot in such detail?
I suppose there is no suitable car analogy?
Wal-Mart and Firestone both sell the same brand of tires and Wal-Mart is cheaper. However, if you read the fine print, the Wal-Mart version is not as puncture resistant nor rated for as many miles as the Firestone version. Some people say that's fine because everybody knows they get what they pay for. Others are saying that the Wal-Mart version falls below industry standard to the point that they are effectively scamming people by even offering it.
Shoes can be resoled, although it's not necessarily a good idea.
They can but most shoes are not designed for this and then it becomes a question of how long the new soles will last and how much it would cost to replace them. It's just easier to buy a new pair of shoes every year.
I don't know why I would ever shop at Walmart as long as Amazon exists.
Because most of the stuff on Amazon these days is counterfeit, that's why.
There's not much point in buying on Amazon now; you should just go to AliExpress, where you can buy cheap, largely counterfeit junk straight from China without Bezos getting a huge markup.
Retail is bad. Cashiers can't earn a living wage at premier places like Lord & Taylor, either. Singling out WalMart is at best inaccurate.
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I bought a pair of New Balance brand trail sneakers and found the quality I got at Amazon to be disappointing, so I returned and went to a brick and mortar store instead. This being New Balance every shoe has its own number so I knew I didn't want that same version of the shoe. I went back to Amazon with the numbers that I thought were well made shoes and not one was available on Amazon.
my boots cost me $60 (Hi-Tek). the last pair i literally put over 1000 miles on them. the dude wants $80 to resole them so i just paid $60 for a new pair. its sad, but its the way it is.
Troy-Bilt is one of a dozen-plus garbage brands made by MTD.
And sadly, Snapper eventually ended up in Walmart, years after that article was written.
So you'd remember what the sun looks like,
and how to park between the lines. And other things you hadn't quite forgotten. So tell your doctor, It's not total amnesia; I'll remember how to deal with your bill, doc.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Walmart 2-day shipping is a lie. There. That is the difference. When you order from Amazon with a two-day delivery, you can reasonably expect Amazon will hit that goal, pretty much all the time.
I haven't ordered anything from Walmart, so I can't disagree. But when the last 5 out of 5 Amazon Prime shipments arrived late, that was the end of my Prime membership. I usually buy things off of Ebay, and the last Prime items I bought from Amazon were all available from Ebay significantly cheaper, I paid more because I actually needed them quickly. Now I just assume all fast shipping times are a lie.
Not really. It is called learning to live within your means, sacrifice and savings.
I don't think you understand poor. Poor is when your means are not sufficient to live, the sacrifices become overwhelming and the savings are not existent. Today, that is defined as under $231/week (2017 US FPL) and often much less. At that budget level, sacrifices are more about "prescriptions vs food", not "cable bill vs new car".
The "boots" analogy was pretty good. Maybe a bigger one will better resonate with an "upper middle income" mindset. Imagine 10 years ago you had $25,000 to invest in solar cells on your McMansion. Meanwhile, your neighbor did not have the necessary credit rating, so he continued to pay his $250/month electric bill. Now that the investment has paid off, your electricity is "free" and you were able to use the net savings for a swimming pool. Your "undisciplined" neighbor, on the other hand continues to pay his electric bill and has no pool. That is why it is so hard to escape "middle income".
Maybe they have 6 or 7 kids?
Like I said, poor impulse control.
I'll have an easier time getting to the door & checkout if lib kooks like you aren't in there.
One thing we know is that when faced with a virtual monopoly in any field or domain, large corporations will screw over the consumer again and again.
As a consumer, this is great! I'm going to watch with a big tub of popcorn as WalMart, Amazon, Target, and Costco all duke it out.
If I worked for General Mills or Procter and Gamble, I'd be a little apprehensive right now. This is gonna be tough. But as others have mentioned, customers vote with their wallets for price over quality. For commodity items like facial tissue, I'm totally willing to have large faceless corporations scratch and claw to offer me cheaper prices. This is the free market at work for li'l ol' me. Yay!
Depending on the area, $100k can be tight for a family with 2 kids.
Cheap storage VM.
This has been going on for a LONG time with WalMart. For electronics, look at the part numbers - they are different for WalMart, sometimes with just a "-WM" on the end of the normal part number. Why on earth would an "identical" product sold there have a different part #? Because they are such a big retailer it is worth it for the manufacturers to make an 'identical' product but cut corners in whatever ways will cut their costs to meet the price demands.
They have been doing this for a very long time. You can't just magically get a product for cheaper than other places. If you buy anything used, like on eBay or CL, always check the entire part number.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Alternatively, the walmart bucket lasts you 5 years, and the Home Depot bucket lasts you 6 due to it's superior construction. Your math suddenly changes.
Or what if the walmart one lasts 50 years, and the home depot one will last 75, do you even care at that point?
"cheaper quality" isn't always a bad thing, it's only bad if the difference in quality actually affects you in a negative way more than the cost difference between the 2 does.
We could engineer a bucket that would last 1000 years. But why would anyone pay for it when they know they won't be using the bucket more than 50 years from now?
Meanwhile of my last 5 Amazon purchases, 2 never arrived at all, and the other 3 took over 5 weeks each.
At least at Walmart I can just go to the store and get it.
Because e.bay costs 2-3 times as much as either walmart or amazon?
The difference is that when I order stuff from amazon it shows up 80% of the time, and gets refunded the other 20%. When I order stuff from AliExpress it shows up 20% of the time, and refunds are almost impossible if it doesn't.
At a past job an on-site supervisor bought a yard tool from Wally World, same brand and model as the ones we normally used from Regional Box Store. The tool broke the first time he used it. He was a bit of a character, and ended up out in the street kicking it around and shouting at it, because he was so sure it should be the same as the normal ones. Later he came to understand it wasn't a universal conspiracy to make his day awful, just a different quality tool. He thought that it was "impossible" that they would sell a different tool with the same model number, so we checked the package; slightly different package, same model number, same UPC code. Different plastic code, different plastic mold! Definitely less plastic.
There was a famous one in the 90s where they were selling "Made in USA" clothes, because those red state poor folks loved those flags. Of course, it was actually all made in China, and then they had to take the fraudulent labels off. Average shopper there thinks they "switched" to Chinese products to save money, and has a whole spiel about how it is libral conspiracy to destroy `Merica.
There was also the famous case of the name brand pickles that at the other stores never had a partial pickle, you would get the amount on the label rounded up to the nearest whole pickle. And a good thing too for pickle lovers, because if you can a half a cuc it gets soft. But at Wally World, that "same" jar of pickles would have exactly the weight on the label, with a partial pickle to make it work. Yuck.
If people want to buy a product that cost 15% less to make than the cheapest version sold at other stores, and they charge 5% less for it, that isn't a very good deal for any product you would buy more than one time in your whole life. It isn't any of my business if people shop there, but they shouldn't be surprised when the item they purchased breaks. Unfortunately, most of these people are so dim that they'll blame only the brand. But eventually, each of those brands suffers real consequences from it.
If you even bothered to read the summary, the branded products at Walmart have been given "other cost adjustments". That means they are lower quality products compared to the "same" model at other stores. Walmart is a disease.
It's not that bad. Here, Walmart is competing with Amazon. So even if the Walmart products have corners cut to make them cheaper and crappier, that's still better than stuff on Amazon which is mostly counterfeit these days.
and you'll probably replace it with something new and shiny long before it outright falls apart anyway.
That's not to say there aren't areas where quality is important for everyone and buying shitty walmart junk is a terrible, possibly even dangerous idea (many types of sports equipment for instance, bikes especially), but in many cases cheap, generic crap is perfectly serviceable.
I buy shit like that one time, and if I buy another one it is because I wanted two, or gave the first one away.
Pathetic.
The difference between a cheap bike and a cheap bucket is that when the bucket fails, it turns into trash. When the bike "fails," it just gets new bearings and grease and is as good as new. Maybe a shifter breaks and gets replaced. The bike is 100% serviceable, so of course it is an example of cheap crap that is serviceable. Very few items in that store are serviceable, though. Not sure what imagined dangers there are in a cheap bike. A cheap kitchen appliance or bathroom accessory is a lot more dangerous. Heck, a portable radio is more dangerous than a cheap bike.
I pay for Prime anyway. For my town,this comes with Prime Now - free 2 hour delivery. $20 minimum, tipping the driver is suggested.
Prices on everything from a single bottle of Mexican Coca-Cola ($0.59) to toothbrushes are cheaper this way than at Walmart.
So I'm saving money and being lazy at the same time. (They even deliver beer)
Kid-proof tablet..
Citations needed.
Kid-proof tablet..
Yeah, they do. I know I might be rarer on Slashdot than others around here, but I'm a blue-collar slob who spent 10 years working in a warehouse. I've seen it first hand every day.
Sure, there's people who drive beaters and have roommates, but ultimately they do find ways to get what they think is important. Having the latest smartphone and big LCD TV is more important than financial stability and retirement. Among people who live paycheck to paycheck, if an emergency arises, they always manage to get money together "somehow".
And from other examples in the discussion, it's as if they are not just offering the same brand but the same model of tire but the manufacture of the Wal-Mart tire uses inferior products which cannot even be determined before purchase.
As a previous resident of Club Fed, good on you!
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Bah...my ex-gf Firestone tires lasted one year, my Michelin tires lasted four years...Firestone is shit.
Actually the box stores use contractors to be hands-on support that calls into the contracted service company. Store people are not allowed to touch that shit. Now if we could get the store people from using the server room as extra storage space...
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
How about explaining it then rather than just whine that I don't get it?
For the record: The good rubbermaid mop bucket will last a lifetime. The crap one will break the _first time_ you (unless a girl or vegan) try to wring a mop with it.
I own the good one at home. had an employer that tried to get the cleaners to use household kitchen 'mops' in a factory, they eventually bought the crap rubbermaid one. Then they had the bright idea of having engineering fix it. Yeah, that worked, we bought the good one for them.
I bet rubbermaid didn't make the crap one until wallyworld demanded it. Once they had paid for the molds, they foolishly sold it elsewhere.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
My favorite article on the subject is now almost 15 years old. December, 2003: https://www.fastcompany.com/47...
Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.
Of course, U.S. companies have been moving jobs offshore for decades, long before Wal-Mart was a retailing power. But there is no question that the chain is helping accelerate the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries such as China. Wal-Mart, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s trumpeted its claim to "Buy American," has doubled its imports from China in the past five years alone, buying some $12 billion in merchandise in 2002. That's nearly 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States.
I'd love to see an updated story with new numbers, and that covers Amazon.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Come on, editors! 200 comments and the summary still has this shit:
vendors say they would lose money on each sale if they met WalmartÃ(TM)s demands. Brands that agree to play ball with Walmart could expect better distribution and more strategic help from the giant retailer. And to those that didnÃ(TM)t?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
On Amazon you have to pay shipping. Always! Its expensive, since you're shipping _one_ item in the mail.
It may not be what you want. You can't hold it, touch it, feel its heft. You might have to send it back, at your expense.
Really? I don't even know anyone who shops at a Walmart. I never have. I've been in one once, and that was a frightening enough experience for me. Who are these people? I thought it was all just deplorable southerners who were stupid enough to shop there.
At least you're not an elitist.
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
Exactly.
By locally. It's where your community is. I have no Walmart, no Amazon, no Costco community. I live in a real town with real people. Costs a little more, but they're more important than someone's "shareholder return".
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Often that's about being from a wealthy family that gives them gifts. The smartphone and TV make good birthday/christmas gifts, shoes are less exciting.
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Home depot has a car analogy, but walmart only has analogies about bucket analogies. The ones at walmart are cheaper but don't last as long because they don't have as much plastic inside them.
Man, you really need that seminar!
I guess Amazon is currently trying to change that and stop the counterfeiters, which is probably good for shoppers looking for brand-name products, but makes it harder on individuals trying to sell personal items. I recently wanted to sell my own used Lenovo tablet on Amazon. In the past, it hadn't been a problem to sell phones and such, but now it appears they expect even individuals to GET APPROVAL FROM THE MANUFACTURER! (as in letters of approval, for an individual to sell their own personal property!) When they told me that, I basically told them to go to hell.
Nobody is forcing these companies to work with Walmart. When Walmart makes demands that mean these companies can't make money no matter what they do the right decision is to walk away, not sign the contract with Walmart. But they sign that contract and more and more companies continue to make that mistake. I'll feel bad for the ones that walked away and couldn't make it, not the ones that stayed and failed.
Grandpa, that's called wikipedia. This is called a conversation. Take your meds and go inside before you slip and fall.
And if you remember this conversation when you get there, and you still want to know more, just type your question into google. The little gnomes inside will find the citation and provide it to you! This is the magic of the future, grandpa. You don't have to understand it. Just listen to the gnome.
Depending on the area, $100k can be tight for a family with 2 kids.
Any income can be tight regardless of kids or area if you don't have a budget and the discipline to adhere to it, and you're unwilling or unable to curb your appetite for what the marketeers want you to view as "the finer things of life". In 1976 I worked in Manhattan, commuting from just across the Hudson in New Jersey; single-income household with a wife and one child, on a salary of $15,000 (equivalent to just over $60K in today's dollars), and while we weren't living high off the hog, we were comfortable and were able to put some money aside in savings. Of course, given the era -- no cellphones, no cable subscription, no ISP.
Why are people born into poverty generally stay poor? Why are people born into wealth generally stay wealthy? "Poor people teach their children to be poor; rich people teach their children to be rich." You could blame the parents, but it's generally poor people all the way down.
There are outliers, but to a large extent people are a product of their environment. The parents are christian; the person is probably christian. The community is conservative; the person is probably conservative. That's the reason elections (in many places) are intentionally not based on majority votes; people who live near one another generally have similar views.
Parents do what they can to give their children the best chance of success. But if "you did it all on your own," are you saying that all the effort your parents, teachers, and anyone who happened to help you along the way, was wasting their time on you? You would still be just as successful without their efforts?
http://www.economist.com/news/...
http://www.economist.com/news/...
Bah...my ex-gf Firestone tires lasted one year, my Michelin tires lasted four years...Firestone is shit.
Sounds like you got them at Wal-Mart.
I did eight and a half years myself. Just over one year out, hoping to start a business. Good to see someone who made it. Congratulations.
Amazon delivers in one hour.
I live in Europe.
We have a 25% tax that is already included in the price of all goods.
why would you buy vegetables at walmart?
do you like eating plastic and preservatives?
You didn't get it. That's not the same thing.
not that's is relevant to the story, but maybe you should look into how Sweden reinvented their education system and gave kids access to calculators as young as possible. Result? they're a leading country in many disciplines, including math.
Subtracting without using a computer is not a value-added skill.
lucm, indeed.
why would you buy vegetables at walmart? do you like eating plastic and preservatives?
Did you not read my post? There is only one other place within 30 miles to buy groceries. I do shop there for all my meats and the majority of other groceries, but they don't always have what I need. Sometimes I have to go to Walmart, and I soon may have no choice.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Sounds like someone's well versed in the Sam Vimes Theory of Economic Injustice. Bravo.
Mop bucket, most of the function is in the wringer.. The good one costs about $150, the crap one costs $75, but the crap one is single use at best.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's not the same thing.
And your point is? I think I made clear at the beginning that I didn't get it. But who knows, maybe if people will keep telling me I didn't get it a bunch more times, then I'll realize yet again that I didn't get it.
If you have a mailing address, you have Amazon available. It is equivalent to the mail-order industry, which has been around since the 1880s.
No.
The mail order business didn't follow you around from store to store, taking notes and building a dossier on you.
They had real catalogs where you could search for something. Amazon, and to a lesser extent, eBay and Walmart/Costco/etc have search engines that are almost totally worthless, and might hit the broad side of a barn with a laser.
Mail order catalogs generally represented stocked merchandise with the mail order company as the primary fulfillment house, not acting as the agent for hundreds of thousands of others.
Mail order companies evolved with each new issue, and the online merchandisers are continuously updated and changed to reflect market conditions, and to harass the competition. The price can change several times in the same hour, whereas catalogs of mail order companies had one price, not mega-foolishness that gnawed at both customer patience, and the ability for competition to plan in a reasonable way.
There are many more inept comparisons, and so fie to your statement that these two industries are "equivalent".
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
It takes more discipline than I have to live off of white bread and sliced cheese for three days so that you can pay an electric bill,
Someone who's interested in saving money shouldn't be eating white bread and cheese. They should be eating rice and beans, which are much cheaper per calorie. Eat just rice and beans for a couple weeks, and you will have a good chunk of the $300 you need for the shoes which will save you money in the long term. Is it fun to eat just rice and beans? No, but the key is, you only have to do this ONCE. That lets you save up a little money, which you can then use to make a more efficient (but initially more expensive) purchase the next time. That, in turn, lowers your cost of living, and from then on you can save a bit of money without eating just rice and beans. The effects of being disciplined compound themselves over time, and over the course of years, this allows an able-bodied and disciplined person to escape extreme poverty. As an example, immigrants in NYC's Chinatown frequently start out living in horrible conditions, 10 or 12 to a single apartment, but as they save up money they are eventually able to move to a nicer place elsewhere.
Is it poor people's lack of discipline "their fault"? Well, I'm sure discipline is affected by one's genes and upbringing, neither of which one chooses. So in that sense, no. Yet it's still true that a more disciplined person, in the same situation, would likely not remain poor. So we shouldn't use "lack of discipline" as an excuse to cut the social safety net, but we should still point out and encourage the benefits that discipline brings.
To someone in the middle class, $60 a year on shoes doesn't seem like much. What about clothes? A winter coat? Furniture? Blankets for your bed? And god forbid you want some luxury item like a vacuum cleaner
To a large extent, those are luxuries. Yes, everyone needs some clothes, plus a winter coat, and probably a blanket. But most people have massively more clothes than they really need. And one can live happily without extensive furniture or a vacuum cleaner. Billions of people do it around the world.
or you have an unexpected medical expense.
That is indeed a major problem in the US. Thankfully it does not really exist in every (other) civilized country.
Well yeah, but it's still only a cleaning bucket. You don't expect it to last forever
The hell you say. There's no reason why a cleaning bucket shouldn't last for decades. I have a number of buckets that are over 20 years old.
It's not just the price of the bucket (or buckets, in the case of the cheap one). There's the opportunity cost when a bucket breaks. There's my time spent purchasing another one - and if I group purchases to amortize that (as pretty much everyone does), that's more opportunity cost. There's the psychological friction when the damn bucket breaks as I'm trying to clean something up. There's the lousy old bucket going to the landfill, as part of our wonderful "throwaway culture".
But then I don't buy Walmart crap, so I don't accrue any of those costs.
A little disposable income does not make you a 1%er
No, though depending on how you define it, it's not that hard to reach the 1% bracket in most parts of the US. Not long ago I looked up income distributions for both of the states where I maintain residences, and my wife and I make enough to put us in the 1% bracket (by household income) in both.
Now, we're both professionals in advanced positions in our respective lines of work, but our joint income is still at six orders of magnitude. We're not "rich" by any popular definition. (Yeah, I just said we have two houses, but one of the is really a cabin and the other is in an area with very low housing prices by industrialized-nation standards. As in "buy a house for less than the price of a car".) Our lifestyle is firmly middle-class. Our toilets aren't even gold-plated. But at least by the household-income-by-state measure we're 1%ers.
Sure. Particularly if, say, one kid's in college. Or the parents have student loans. Or there are medical expenses. And so on.
$100000 / year is really not that much money in the US today. Take off Federal and state income tax and deductions for FICA, 401(k) plans, health insurance, etc. The average monthly mortgage payment in the US is over $1000, and in some places much, much higher. Add to that home insurance, property taxes, and for recent buyers PMI. Figure a few hundred a month for a car payment (and if there are kids, for many families it's practically impossible to get by without two vehicles), and quite possibly several hundred a month for car insurance.
Now you could easily be down to under $1000 a week, and we haven't even considered occasional expenses like car repairs or equipment for school and other activities. Money for recurring necessities - food, clothing, utility bills - is already looking tight.
Ramen to that! I went to a Walmart ONCE years ago. Have never been in one since. Amazon rules and NO FAT PEOPLE wearing barely anything! FTW!
There's nothing wrong with MTD mowers,etc. They make most brands stuff. Take care of your stuff and it lasts. My snowblower is MTD and it's 20 years old this winter.
I'm wacky, when I go to a store I use CASH. Silly me!
My primary point was that, for over 100 years, it has been possible for a larger, nonlocal company to compete with local stores. Also, the practice of "drop-shipping", where one company takes orders and then pays other companies to actually ship the merchandise, has been around for decades. The companies that actually ship the merchandise are termed mail-order fulfillment companies, and I worked for one such company back in 1989.
When margins weren't tight, the catalog prices set the prices for local merchants, too. Worked both ways.
But local merchants can't compete with the mind-boggling purchasing power of the big online merchants. Mailorder fulfillment evolved really well, eventually using EDI over x.25, then an entire classification of electronic merchant amalgamation.
Local merchants formed buying coops.
This all said, while mail order started a long time ago, the clash of titans we're now experiencing is a race to the bottom and the fundamentals are indeed different, and these differences still amount to disqualifying them as "equivalent".
There are some similarities, no doubt. In my mind, the fulcrum between dissimilarities and similarities sides with the differences.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
That would be a win for everyone else. A race to the bottom is really a race to the top for everyone else.
More accurately, it's a win for the general interest, and a lose for special interests (the manufacturers who are squeezed).
A true test of character is whether you vote against policies that help a special interest at the expense of the general interest -- even if that special interest is YOU.
Oh, and what you call a "shit job" is, to the person who does it, the best job they can get. By definition. If they could switch to a better job, they would.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
There's no way in hell the private industry can do it cheaper when they have to make a profit and report to shareholders
Why not apply that argument to every industry, then?
All auto manufacturing should be taken over by a government agency -- there's no way private industry can do it cheaper when they have to make a profit and report to shareholders.
Intel, AMD, Apple and Samsung... their fabs and engineering activities should be taken over by a government agency -- there's no way private industry can do it cheaper when they have to make a profit and report to shareholders.
Food is an even more basic human need than healthcare. So all farming, food distribution, and restaurants should be taken over by a government agency -- there's no way private industry can do it cheaper when they have to make a profit and report to shareholders.
Actually, because they have to make a profit is precisely why private enterprises have demonstrated time and time again that they are more efficient and innovative than government agencies -- which use other people's money, coercively obtained, to continue their operations.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Who gives it a fuck? We are not all manginas here.
I still think that is quite clear, even if you don't. I too respond in kind. Sounds like we have common ground. Please let's communicate.
Please let's communicate.
Haven't we?
No. Sorry, I'm not continuing with this any more.
Yeah, tell us more about how awesome you are. That totally helps people.
If your intention is to brag, bravo!. If you have some sort of desire to help or influence people, your failing.
Cheap storage VM.
Yeah, tell us more about how awesome you are. That totally helps people. If your intention is to brag, bravo!. If you have some sort of desire to help or influence people, your failing.
I'm not trying to help or influence people either; just making an observation. I feel sympathy for people who live in poverty due to circumstances beyond their control, and those people need to be helped. I don't feel sympathy for people who are lucky enough to be making a decent salary but dig themselves into a debt hole because they have an itch they can't afford to scratch, but insist on scratching it anyway.
I'll have to look him up. Assuming he's the kind of person to fuck his accountant while a whore does his taxes.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
LOL, the only 20 year old MTD snowblowers are in Florida. MTD makes the _worst_ junk on the planet. They have to buy a new brand every 3-5 years because nobody buys the last one. With each new brand the letters 'MTD' are printed smaller and in more hard to see places.
20 years ago they had just started to learn how to be really 'toxic cheap'. Your snowblower is junk, but the new MTD is _even_ worse.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Why, you're you of course. Except now you are a you with only a single option: "shit product for a bargain price" -- soon to be "shit product for the same price I used to pay for a decent product".
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
Except now you are a you with only a single option: "shit product for a bargain price" -- soon to be "shit product for the same price I used to pay for a decent product".
Or you can choose to pay more for said decent product.
That mentioned that mid-market products get priced out of the market by cheap knock offs whose price eventually gets raised to match the mid-market goods that were driven out, except the quality never gets put back in?
You're making the broad assumption that the mid-markets were better quality. Why is the cheaper product winning in the first place?
For whatever reason, a lot of people prefer low price over quality. I've seen nothing in this thread to even show there is an actual problem. If instead you want quality, you don't buy it at the retailer shaving all these costs.
For example, from a much earlier post:
Look at a rubbermaid mop bucket at Home depot. Then look at a rubbermaid mop bucket at Walmart. Then tell me their is 'no evidence'.
In other words, one can buy a better product presumably for more from Home Depot. There are probably other mop buckets sold online or via catalogue of far higher quality, if you're willing to shop for them too. So it is not an actual problem that Walmart sells flimsier mop buckets. Just pay more for what you really want.