aceventura3

I was having a discussion with a liberal friend and she was going on and on about how "the evil corporations" are destroying the environment and ruining the lives of people around the globe. And I finally realized why we see things so different.

I don't give corporations human traits. Eventhough the law gives corporations some recognition usually reserved for people, ie.: the ability to be sued or to file lawsuits, etc., in my view corporations are no more human than the paper corporate charters are written on. Base on my view corporations can not be inherently good, bad, evil, honest, dishonest, disloyal, unpatriotic, or anything else like the way she was describing corporations. People can be all of those things and the people runing corpaorations can be those things and run corporations in ways that we can characterize. But the legal title of a business has no bearing in how PEOPLE run the business.

She seemed to think that people are the victims of corporations. I think people are victims of other people in this context. She seemed to think that it is o.k. to define a corporation with thousands of people employed, in hundreds of various divisions by the acts of a single person or division. I don't. I look for the bad people who did bad things or people who made mistakes. Realizing this fundemental difference, I was able to begin to understand some of her points rather than thinking she was clueless.

I curious about how some of you see this?

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Willravel

In my humble opinion, a corporation is an excuse for people to be evil. Haliburton itself isn't evil, anymore than a stapler is evil. Those men sitting at the top of the company deciding what is fiscually responsible is more important than doing with is morally or ethically responsible are the real "evil" (though I wouldn't use that word exactly). If I ever used the term eviol corporation, I was speaking of those members who were able to put their conscisnce on the back burner and allow greed and ambition to rule their decisions. Is that evil? Not really, but it's definately wrong.

djtestudo

A corporation can only be as "evil" as the people running it.

Just because it is a seperate legal entity, doesn't give it any sort of artificial intellegence that allows it to act on its own.

I think it is "evil" in the sense that it is putting your personal interests so far above the interests of anyone else, even within the same organization, to the point of bringing negative effects upon the others involved.

Ken Lay was evil. "Enron" was not.

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Willravel

Well "evil" to me always has the religous undertones because the term is so often used by religous people. I believe that this boils down to a moral issue, seperate from religon. If you're using the word evil in a purely secular context, I suppose that one could call the immoral members of large corporations evil.

So far we have 3 for individual, and 0 for entity, if you're keeping score.

ratbastid

I think "corporations" in the phrase "evil corporations" is shorthand for "capitalist fat-cats who run corporations". There's obviously nothing inherantly evil about a legally recognized business enterprise.

Now: there's such a thing as "corporate behavior". A company takes certain actions that are the result of committee thinking and impersonal decisions. While I don't think I'd use the word "evil" to describe it, companies (by which I mean the groups of people running companies) are motivated by financial concerns most of the time, and their interest in people is generally a secondary concern at best.

The_Jazz

Add me to the list of folks drawing a line between corporations and the folks that run them. Case in point - my own company, which is owned by a very large bank. There is apparently a large website devoted to how much the bank sucks because of some foreclosures they've made in the past. One of my coworkers found a reference to the guy that runs our division with some insulting things. In my opinion, the guy is one of the nicest human beings on the face of the planet and has little or nothing to do with foreclosures that may or may not be justified. However, he's being tarred with the same brush as the bankers.

Another example - AIG is the largest insurance company in the world, and they are notorious for not paying claims as quickly as some people would like. It's a double-edge sword, though. If your house burns down, you curse AIG for taking a week or two to get you the check. If you're sued for setting someone else's house on fire, and AIG won't pay the claimant, you think they're great since you didn't set the fire in the first place (except you, MrSelfDestruct - I've seen your video). It can be a matter of perspective.

As a stockholder in several large companies, I'm sometimes distressed by what companies will do in my name. One of my holdings just layed off a couple hundred people to move a manufacturing operation. Personally, I'm not very pleased about that, but I would be pissed if I didn't get my dividend statement at the end of the quarter. There are fine lines here.

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feelgood

Ain't no such thing as evil or good in corporate world. Corporations can be either labeled as those with high standards of ethics and morals or those with low/ or none ethics and morals.

Like what willravel said, the term evil is more related to relgious purpose.

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hiredgun

I mostly agree with ratbastid that when people speak of 'evil corporations', they are in fact talking about 'evil' actions being performed by people who run or own certain corporations.

The thing that sometimes makes corporations particularly prone to reckless and thoughtless behavior as a body is the lack of individual responsibility. A corporation is nothing more than a collective of men and women working towards a particular goal. The most important goal is, of course, profit (and I don't mean that statement as a value judgment), and the entire machinery of the corporation hurtles towards this singular goal; it is no one's job to stop and consider why they are pursuing this goal, or what impact it might have on people, other than in ways that affect the bottom line.

To be fair, many corporations also commit themselves to specific corporate and civic values, and they do take many of these values seriously as part of their business. Corporations have the potential (more often realized than many will admit) to do great good as well as harm.

Really, though, what bearing does the question of whether one prefers to personify corporations have on issues of business policy and one's political outlook?

Ustwo

The corporation is perhaps the most important "invention" in modern society. It allows for cooperative self interest while working with human nature rather than against like you see in socialism.

Like any invention it can't be good or evil, only used that way, there are no evil inventions.

Casual liberals will attack corporations while they live in a house, produced by a corporation, wear shoes and clothes, produced by a corporation, drink coffee imported and sold by a corporation, while staring at you through contact lenses developed and produced by corporations.

In the 30's and 40's people complained that 'chain stores' were destroying American business, now its 'corporations' with Wal-Mart being the bugaboo dejour (most likely because of the non-union thing, its not worse than any of them) but what the anti-corporation people fail to grasp is that the prosperity and relative wealth we ALL live in, in the west is due specifically to corporations. Its myopic to blame corporations by sighting a few bad examples, when almost all commerce and trade falls under a corporation.

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Willravel

Yikes, agree to disagree there. I won't threadjack though as this thread is amazingly civil.

roachboy

a corporation can do unacceptable things.
corporations do unacceptable things all the time.
sometimes they even concede that they do.
nike for example, in its 2005 corporate social responsibility report, said that it had hired a "team of experts" from mit (where experts come from you see) to work out the otherwise imponderable relationship between its pricing policies and the exploitation/abuse of workers in firms that participate in nike's supply chain. gee, folks, whaddya think? do you think there is a relationship between what a firm might pay for production and the policies that contractors have to put into place to meet those requirements? heavens to betsy, maybe there IS such a relationship. who'd have thought it? well, thank god there is an mit team of experts on the case. i feel better. dont you?

you can read nike's csr report at the global reporting institute's website.


since the early 1970s, mncs and later tncs have been trying to figure out how to appropriate the discourse of ethics.

they like the discourse of ethics because--well--it isnt a political discourse. the main reasons for this are: 1) the rise within business schools of this strange phenomenon known as "business ethics" (that i spent my summer writing a book about, to my ongoing horror) and (2) the dread of possible transnational institutions that might develop, of transnational law that might develop that might impose meaningful regulation on the profit generating activities of corporations (longer run) and (3) one effect of the net has been the prliferation of information sources not wholly owned by major corporations that investigate, compile and publish online information about the actions of tncs around the world. often this information is factual, and worse, it often surfaces within the smooth carefully manicured garden of corporate p.r. and can even imperil brand identity and brand allegiance. for many commodities, brand identity and brand allegiance is all there is. the importance of these features is in inverse proportion to the significance of the commodity. so nike, which would have you believe that by purchasing thier shoes, you also purchase heroic athletic potential. it is not good if this illusion gets tangled up by information about the exploitation of workers, now is it? (shorter run)


the language of ethics is useful in redressing such damage--it at once provides a way to talking about good versus bad and does so in a language that abstracts these questions from politics.

so one major reason why you get this strange ethical discourse floating about with reference to corporations is that many many corporations have adopted that language themselves.
and more and more of them are doing this, because it really is no longer possible to control information about business practices and their consequences.

so to some extent, the major corporations have brought this on themselves.

but there is another problem.
what exactly does it mean to say something or someone "is" evil?
here i almost agree superficially with ace, but the way the argument goes is not anything like what i would imagine he would agree with...but who knows? we shall see (does anyone actually read this far into these posts?)

strange thing about business ethics is that despite the fact that the field is really pretty vacant intellectually and toothless politically, despite the dire poverty of its philosophical underpinnings, despite the horrifyingly low quality of the textbooks that teach future execs about it, and despite the fact that for many year ethics audits have been confined by american corporations to human resoures departments (which has rendered them a complete joke util the last 3-4 years)--it is better that this stuff is out there than it would be if it wasnt. it is better that corporations have used this language and try to figure out how to use it to generate meaningful images of their own practices for themselves as one stakeholder community amongst many than not. it is better that corporate types fight with the real problems they have in trying to analyze their own performance using sustainability criteria than it would be if there was no pressure to do so.

can a corporation be evil?
well, is a corporation a sentient being?
does a corporation have consciousness?

another way: what does it really mean to "be" evil? is anyone essentially evil? were the people who administered the holocaust essentially evil? it would be reassuring if you could say so, wouldn't it? because that way you'd make genocide an exceptional state of affairs and the administrative conditions of possibility for it an exceptional state of affairs--when the fact is that these administrative preconditions are not exceptional and that the conditions that could enable genocide continue to exist. what if the capacity to carry out atrocities, say, is situational and not a matter of essence? what if the preconditions of what you would call evil are the compartmentalization of tasks, conformity to a bureaucratic/professional role, a bureacratic culture geared around conformity, the neutralization of ethical questions that arise about the object being administered.....these preconditions are part and parcel of bureaucratic organization in general (and contrary to the recieved wisdom of the planet limbaugh etc, there is NO distinction in this regardbetween public and private bureaucracies) and become bad or not bad depending solely on the nature of what they administer and the consequences of that administration.
if that is the case, then the notion of evil as a matter of essence is worthless, even on its own terms--and the separation of ethical from political questions is untenable as well.


i say all this because it is wrong to imagine that a corporation is simply the sum of the individuals who make it up at any given time. a corporation as a legal fiction exists across generations until it doesnt. the internal organization of a corporation persists across generations of individuals who occupy those positions. the corporate culture that establishes the rules that shape action within that bureaucracy can persist across generations of professional lives of those who make it up.

can a corporation be evil? it is not an entity endowed with consciousness--it is not in itself an ethical agent--so no. is a corporation simply the sum of its parts at any given time? no. are the individuals who occupy these positions at any point in time autonomous, free individuals who would make the same choices in their work environment as they would in their personal lives concerning ethical questions? no. does the discourse of ethics really apply to what corporations do? yes and no.

these questions are less simple than they appear.

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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aceventura3

On the otherhand I can remember some discussions I had with a Libertarian, and how he went on and on about "corrupt government". I think he would say that the power given to those who govern or to bureaucrats corrupts them or that the only people interested in that power are corrupt to begin with. But now that I am thinking about it my liberal friend and the Libertarian where doing the exact same thing and one could easily interchange "evil corporation" and "corrupt government".

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

roachboy

i hope you do not imagine that i was talking about adjectives as if modifying a noun was a problem.
the only coherent direction i can see you going in is that you dont like people modifying any noun that refers to the existing order with an adjective that is in any way critical.

you may think them snippy.
it would follow that you see yourself as not snippy.
so these adjectives harsh your mellow.
the positive statement of that would have to begin: "dude, dont...."

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Ustwo

If you want to take it up in another thread, and I'd recomend the philosophy board, be my guest.

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ASU2003

I think there is a difference between a large corporation and a small corporation. And all corporations want to become as big as they can.

I like the idea of franchising, but limiting the number of stores one person can own.

Car dealerships are for the most part regionally owned, towing companies, and bike shops are usually locally owned too (I just had to use both services). Plumbers, carpenters and electricians are usually part small companies (mostly union, though it doesn't matter to me, it just prevents them from undercutting the price until 1/2 of them can't get by on the wages they make, and the other half have to cut so many corners that the work suffers)

Would they become evil if Wal-Mart (or Home Depot/Lowe's) hired every plumber in America so you had to go to them? Or would we complain about the 20% of the bill that we pay to the Walton family when we have to hire them. They might not be evil or even had the intention of Wal-Mart taking off like it has. But I'd bet that life would be better without Wal-Mart (or K-Mart, JC Penny or Sears before them).

Large corporations are more efficient, but they also make every part of America the same, with the same big box stores and the same types of jobs. Why would you go to school for 13-14 years to learn how to stock shelves and run a cash register? It also makes an elite upper class made up of the people who run the corporations and everybody else down below (with 1/400th the salary). It's either work for a corporation, get less money and work for a non-profit, or not work at all. Most people will take the job at the corporation over unemployment. Then they will dream of one day becoming a CEO of a oil company.

Ustwo

Anti-Trust laws take care of the first statement, and nothing is stopping you from shopping where you want to. Large corporate stores exsist because people CHOOSE to go there, they vote in favor of them every time they shop.
I've lived in one of the biggest cities in the world, Chicago, and some small BFE towns in southern Illinois. If Wal-Marts and the like went 'poof' in Chicago, life would be about the same. You might have to make another trip or two. If Wal-Mart disappeared from small town areas, life wouldn't be quite as good. Whats ironic is that while people complain that the Wal-Marts are destroying small towns, what they are really doing is offering people a superior choice, with MUCH more variety then they could have hoped to ever get prior. When I lived in a rural town I did all my shopping at the Wal-Mart, it saved me a lot of time and I was able to get what I wanted. Now that I'm back in Chicago, I won't go near one since I have better alternatives

Small stores have people stocking shelves too, did they go to school for 13-14 years? As for the elite-upperclass,who run the stores, this is different then before how? Are people poorer now then before? Do we live in smaller homes? Do we have less health care? I don't think you really know what you are talking about, the standard of living has improved and the gap between the rich and poor in terms of what is available to them is less than it was back in some mythic golden age you seem to be implying existed prior. People have a tendency to glorify the way things were without understanding the way they were at all.


Well this sounds like angst here. My guess is you are not established in life yet, and are now looking for something to blame. Most of America is 'corporate' but not giant like Wal-Mart, but small business. I work for a corporation, we have 15 employees, myself included. You are getting into liberal babble when you say 'work for a corporation' without understanding what a corporation is. What you mean to say is 'work for a giant corporation' and thats just not true. While giant corporations may be good at moving goods, and selling them, there is far more to do in life than work retail.

http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oecon/chap4.htm

Its a few years old, but its the first hit on google, and its early so I'm not going to be digging more.

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Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

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rofgilead

We humanize entities all the time. People often saw that the government of so and so is evil, because of its actions.

If a government can be deemed evil than so can a corporation. Both are groups or associations of people. The individual actions of a person in a group may not be evil or done with malice, but the combined actions of the group can create an evil or malice doing entity.

For instance, the Iraq war. The people who make up America are by and large good people. However, the war which has resulted in deaths of over 30000 civilians, and thousands of troops could be looked as being evil. And, since America purposefully started the war, it could reflect on "America's character", making the country a little more evil in the eyes of many potential terrorists.

The same happens when a Wallmart store kinda forces its way into a town (just a business aspect, but when you humanize the Wallmart entity this action takes on belligerence or rudeness). Then, by price cutting with non-american goods and tough labor practices (no health care and minimum wage), causes a local store to go out of business (seems like a maliceful attack on the small town entity).

Sun Tzu

Subsidies, government-granted monopolies, and other forms of corporate welfare today exist as privileges granted by government to those with political access. I think anything like these realtionships which erodes the playing field in what could be a completely free-market is greedy and corrupt. Another way of looking at it is could the drive to incur more money regardless the cost to others; be considered evil?

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Charlatan

Corporations do evil things all the time. This is not to say that all corporations do evil.

It should be noted, however, that the very nature of a corporation removes responsibiliy from the owners (the investors) and places it squarely on the plate of the Corporation. The Corporation, as aceventura points out, is considered a person by law. A corporation's goal is to amass profit for its investors... period (it may have other "goals" but profit is its only true motive, if it were otherwise, why would anyone invest? Just give to a charity). Corporations allow investers to put their money into a collective pot without getting their hands dirty with the actual running of a business. The thing is, these investors expect, no... demand, a return on their investment. The pressure to pay lower wages, to "corner the market", to grow to the detirment of the environment, etc. is great.

When you are chasing profit as your only motivation, evil becomes something you do to keep the machine going. To keep growth happening. To keep the cogs of business in the black.

Are corporations evil. Not inherently so. Are they conducive to evil? Yes.

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Ustwo

I wish I had a link, but I read it in the magazine a few years back and don't recall which computer magazine it was.

They did a test of the honesty of computer repair. They went to several big chains with a very minor issue (cable unplugged or the like) and of course had solutions from new motherboard to plugging back in the cable.

They got a lot of letters complaining they didn't check out the small 'ma and pa' computer stores. The gist was they would be more honest.

Well they did the test again, only this time they included a bunch of private stores. The results were they ripped off MORE by the small, single owner stores, than by the chain stores.

Where am I going with this? Well people do evil, and a corporation does not make you more evil nor does it make you immune from doing evil. Ask Skilling and Ken Lay how that all worked out for them.

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Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

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Charlatan

You are right. People do evil.

The thing is... what responsibility to the investors have as owners? The answer... none.

Sure the management can go down. But the money stays clean.

When a small business goes down due to bad practice... the owner is fried as well.

This is this difference.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

roachboy

the american economy is dominated by transnationals.
the claim above from ustwo that small business is central is ideological, not fact.

transnationals can be defined around their supply chain.
a supply chain is a purchasing system that is made up of a system of subcontractors/suppliers who produce specific objects in specific quantities and specific times--these outputs are co-ordinated by the purchser/tnc.
supply chains are not transparent.
the relationship between a tnc/purchaser and its suppliers has been one of the most contentious issues in the politics that surround corporate activity in the globalizing captialist context.
for a while, supply chains were used to simply externalize the most oppressive aspects of contemporary production...but over the past 3-4 years, political pressure has become so intense that most tncs are moving to treating suppliers as extensions of themselves, rather than as independent entitites...

take walmart.
the center of walmart is a VERY highly rationalized supply chain.
the logic of the chain extends all the way to the stocking of shelves, to the functions of registers (which track inventory, which shapes product movement, etc.)..tasks are bundled in a manner that is completely dependent of very extensive use of computer technology to rationalize commodity flows and eliminate human skills and human beings when possible.

working for walmart then is fundamentally different from working for a traditional store.
theirs is probably the most extensive and expensive development of the logic of supply chain organization and technology in the whole of retail.
this supply chain is the center of all their competitive advantages, in the bland speech of such profit uber alles operations.
walmart is the absolute embodiment of all the "race to the bottom" tendencies within globalizing capitalism.

to think otherwise is to be chumped by the appearance of the stores.


walmarts buying practices are notorious: the effects of these pricing practices is routine worker abuse throughout its supply chain.

walmart tries to deal with this by refusing to release information.

you can find information about walmart's business practices, but it is not easy. the corporation places little value in transparency.

tncs are not transparent to themselves. in walmart's case, there is an apparent willingness to allow organizational structure and corporate culture to completely sever cause/effect relations when it comes to linking pricing structures to worker abuse within its supply chain. in this, walmart falls into a variant of the "banality of evil" problem--ethical questions that its own practices generate are bracketed because the corporation refuses to look at its chains and to accept responsibility for what happens within that chain.
this kind of problem is what the long post above was trying to get to.
i dont think that the individuals who run the show at walmart arenecessarily bad people--but they work within an environment that encourages a total compartmentalization of thinking: their pricing practices directly result in oppressive work conditions---within walmart, those conditions are simply the supplier's problems--no linkage is made between how walmart conducts its business and these abusive practices--so normal people can go about their normal jobs in a normal way and one set of results is systematic abuse of workers throughout its supply chain--and within walmart there is no problem about this. why? because of the characteristics of its organization and the effects of this organization on how management see itself and its tasks.

is this evil?
say a massive p.r. problem were to surface concerning walmart's business practices that they could not simply stonewall away.
if everything were to remain the same as it is now in that context, you would expect to see versions of the nuremburg defense: i was just following orders, man.
no-one need take responsibility for anything.
yay capitalism.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ratbastid

Heh. That's very, very true.

Liberals don't have the market cornered on hypocracy, of course. But in this, I've seen some liberals be very, very hypocritical.

roachboy

could someone explain to me why this remark has any weight to it?
i dont get it.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

stevo

Its just a remark. an observation some would say.

__________________
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Seaver

Show me where Walmart has "forced" itself on a community. It goes in, finds a seller, and buys land. It doesn't take over the local grocery store with guns drawn as is implied. And said labor practices? Show me a grocery store or retail store that gives insurance or pays more than a few bucks over minimum wage and you'd have an argument. When it comes down to is the people CHOOSE Walmart. It's not as if they have a secret blacklist of anyone who doesn't shop there loses their jobs.

Personally our small town was glad when we finally got a Walmart. We were sick of driving an hour to the nearest small-city to buy cloths, and we really didn't like paying the huge prices that the locally owned stored gouged us with. It was a mom and pop store, but it was owned by the richest family in the county... and their children would brag about their 400% markup and how much profit they made. Naturally it was that family who went to the news agencies and cried that they were being forced out of business by the big and evil Walmart. The rest of the town was more than happy to do our business there.

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"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

Ustwo

I really don't follow you on this.

If I invest $500 in Enron stock, and the company goes down, so does my money. I am assuming that by your logic the stock holders should be just as guilty as the CEO? In that case Enron woulda been a hoot, because the people that lost their life savings in stock could then be held libel like the men who destroyed the company!

'Honey remember that enron stock I bought?'
'Yes dear.'
'Well the company went belly up due to deceptive accounting.'
'Oh dear!'
'Yes we lost it all....oh and we are going to jail'

The owner of a small store IS the CEO, so yes if the store goes down for something illegal the owner goes down too. He did the evil deed.

I assume your implication is that it is the shareholders which somehow force a company to do something 'evil' and then they take none of the burden? They do take the financial burden, if the company loses good people, or breaks the law the stock price will suffer and they will be out their investment. Its insane to hold anyone more accountable than that if they are not directly involved in running the company. Its not like they put an 'evil' plan up for a vote. Enron or Global Crossings share holders didn't get the 'evil' option or a good option.

IF there was some sort of legal burden on shareholders all it would do is remove ALL investment opportunity from the general public because no one would be able to take such a risk.

Basically you would destroy Western Civilization as we know it, and ensure that only the very wealthy get to profit from continued prosperity.

__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

roachboy

walmart's location strategies are a matter of public record, seaver.
they basically pick an area and draw a grid.
then they locate up to four stores within that grid.
the idea behind the grid is to force competition out of business.
they do this because of their supply chain, which gives them economies of scale that older types of retail outlets simply can't compete with.
their location pratices are predatory.
they are kinda slimy even, but within what is understood as acceptable, i guess.


as for their employment practices, walmart's are also matters of public record.
they will hire more people than they've any intention of keeping at the outset: within the first 6 months, they whittle down the initial hires to a pool of folk they think profile the walmart way.
walmart prefers to keep their wages at the legal minimum and to schedule employees just under what would qualify them as fulltime.
they treat the welfare system as a cost externalization mechanism.

look for yourself--these two aspects of walmart's activities are easy to get information about.
what is harder is anything to do with their supply chain--they consider almost all of it to be proprietary information.
the general schema behind their supply chain is fairly well-known: it is even a kind of model for one type of chain--extremely capital intensive to put together, thoroughly automated--and they are pioneers in giving the lie to any claim that the automation of a production-type process does not result in the radical reduction of employment.

finally, your town may have been glad when walmart arrived, but many many towns are not. some places rather like local ownership of business. some places think that a diversified retail sector is a good thing. some towns think that trying to maintain a pedestrian-oriented town center is desirable. not everyone buys the walmart logic that all that matters to a population is cheap shit and lots of it.

i know alot of conservative folk like walmart, but insofar as it runs counter to everything about small business, why has always been a mystery to me. maybe they think walmart is a small business. it really really isnt one.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

aceventura3

In the locations I am familiar with, when a Walmart opens other stores, restaurants and businesses follow. I have never seen a Walmart not surrounded by thriving competitors.
[quote}they do this because of their supply chain, which gives them economies of scale that older types of retail outlets simply can't compete with.[/quote]

Perhaps Walmart can't compete with better service from small retailers. Perhaps Walmart can't compete with a smaller retailers ability to meet changing market conditions with new inventory. Perhaps shoppers don't always want the cheapest product or the most common product and Walmart can't compete with that.
You call good clean competition "slimy". Walmart wants our business and is willing to work for it - You think thats bad?


On the first night of the NFL season, every football team does what you describe also. They bring in people, give them an opportunity, and cut those who are not good enough or those that don't fit into the culture of the team. What wrong with that.
If people don't want to work at Walmart, they can work at Target...Sears...Penny's...Costco...Nordstrom's...etc, etc. Walmart is not the only retailer.

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

roachboy

um...if you really think walmart is a swell company, ace, it is because you only look as far as the shiny surface of the floor of individual stores.

when i have more time, i'll start compiling links to help you see the limitations of your view.

well, this at least starts to explain why conservatives tend to defend walmart, despite the strange relationship it has to much of their economic ideology:

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/bu...rtner=homepage

conservatives are the best friends money can buy.


here is a link to one report about walmart labor practices in the empirical world, not the one purchased by the walton family trust:

http://edworkforce.house.gov/democra.../rel21604.html

read the full report.

or you can watch a dvd:

http://www.walmartmovie.com/

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

aceventura3

Thanks but I have already read material, both pro and con, on Walmart, usually written by people with an agenda.

What I would be interested in is your personal view and the views of others. Real people.

I am interested in understanding why people shop at Walmart if it is so bad? Why do people work there? Why would the people in a small community stop going to the stores of their friends and neighbors to shop at Walmart causing the small local stores to go out of business? Why do local governments allow Walmarts to be built? These questions to me are far more interesting to me than some, mind numbing dissertation on how Walmart is ruining small communities. My gut tells me that people actually like Walmart and that Walmart has made their life better in some way.

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."