On Walmart

I do my usual grocery shopping on Sundays and always at HEB since the alternative is Walmart.  Today, because it's Easter Sunday, HEB was closed.  I was kind of expecting it and I should have done my shopping yesterday when I was there for buying BBQ supplies, but alas.  Thus I was forced to go to Walmart.

One of the reasons that I avoid Walmart is the type of people attracted to the store.  For instance, every time I have gone there I've had to deal with people in the parking lot that probably shouldn't be allowed to drive.  Once someone followed me to my parking space and yelled at me for cutting them off, an act that I couldn't have committed as that when I turned in front of them they weren't even moving and I had been waiting for them to move so I could go.  In addition, once in the store I typically have the pleasure of avoiding people of avoiding people that don't look sanitary.  While I understand that I'll have to deal with all sorts of things as a pharmacist, when I'm purchasing my groceries, I at least want the impression that a homeless person hasn't already been touching them and spreading disease.  I can't have such a reassurance at Walmart.

Further, I've found the children of Walmart shoppers to be the least behaved of anywhere that I've ever shopped.  Children by their very nature are vectors for all sorts of diseases.  They tend to think of Walmart as a playground and run about everywhere, touching all sorts of things without their parents even attempting to make them behave.  As that I'm not a parent, perhaps I'm being harsh on these parents here, but if everything works out in other stores, it should work out here too.

Another thing that has consistently bothered me about Walmart is that most of their products are unique.  By this, I mean that they force manufacturers to make special product sizes for theirs stores so that price comparison is more difficult for most people to register.  You may be buying a box of tissues for less, but there are far fewer tissues in the box than the discount merits.  Besides being wasteful from a packaging standpoint by reducing the contents to pretend you're saving money, it's also wasteful from an economic and environmental standpoint.  If a manufacturer has to make two different product sizes rather than one, they have to have retool factories and make multiple sizes of things rather than one uniform product.  Further, less in a package means that the packages is thrown out sooner, meaning the energy that went into making the package is used faster and also the landfill it goes into fills faster.

Perhaps on the the greatest reasons I don't like Walmart is their business model.  They are a major part of the reason we have such a miserable trade deficit by purchasing most of the things they sell from oversees, particularly China.  Once upon a time Walmart advertised that their products were made in America.  That's a long dead concept when they decided that minor increases in profits were more important to them than their home market's economic health.

Ultimately, I can't reconcile Walmart's current marketing where they claim that they want to help you by saving you money.  They aren't helping you if they kill manufacturing in this country and kill local businesses (another result of their existence), destroying our jobs market.  The typical claim is that people don't want those jobs in manufacturing anyway.  I'd hazard a guess, however, that with unemployment percentage in the double digits that many people would be quite happy with those jobs.

On the plus side, Walmart does help us out on Wall Street based on their success in some countries overseas.  Too bad that Wall Street profits rarely make it to the general population and don't actually produce anything.