Target Beats Walmart in the Price Wars

Target Beats Wal-Mart for Prices

Craig Johnson, president of retail consulting firm Customer Growth Partners, compared 35 brand-name items sold at Wal-Mart and Target stores in New York, Indiana and North Carolina. They consisted of 22 common grocery goods such as milk, cereal and rice; 10 general merchandise products such as clothing and home furnishings; and three health and beauty items.

Target's shopping cart rang in at $269.13 (pre-tax), a hair lower than the $271.07 charged at Wal-Mart.

You're right, that's not a huge difference but there is a huge difference in the shopping experience between the two stores. Target stores are clean, well-lit and well-staffed whereas most every Wal-Mart I've been in is disheveled, dingy, dark in places and its nearly impossible to find someone to help you.

There's actually a psychological reason for this, people shopping in a store that looks like crap are tricked into thinking they are getting a better deal because the store is shabby.

Me? I prefer to shop at Target (though admittedly less so since the CEO of Target is a homophobic asshat) because the company does not have a track record of exploitation at every turn, Target does not gouge employees and force them to work off the clock, Target does not lie, cheat and steal at every turn. Wal-Mart has and Wal-Mart does.

Shipping Money to China Even Faster

This post is a forward from my mom. The final paragraph is the most key to me. If you read nothing else in this post, please read the last paragraph before my thoughts.

The Emma Maersk, part of a Danish shipping line, is shown in the photos below.

What a ship....no wonder 'Made in China ' is displacing North American made goods big time. This monster transports goods across the Pacific in just 5 days!! This is one of three ships presently in service, with another two ships commissioned, to be completed in 2012.

These ships were commissioned by Wal-Mart to get all their goods and stuff from China. They hold an incredible 15,000 containers and have a 207 foot deck beam!! The full crew is just 13 people on a ship longer than a US Aircraft Carrier (which has a crew of 5,000). With it's 207' beam it is too big to fit through the Panama or Suez Canals.

        

The goods arrive 4 days before the typical container ship (18-20 knots) on a China-to-California run. Ninety-one percent (91%!) of Walmart products are made in China. So this behemoth is hugely competitive even when carrying perishable goods. The ship was built in five sections.  The sections floated together and then welded. The command bridge is higher than a 10-story building and has 11 cargo crane rigs that can operate simultaneously unloading the entire ship in less than two hours.

Additional info:

Country of origin - Denmark

Length - 1,302 ft

Width - 207 ft

Net cargo - 123,200 tons

Engine - 14 cylinders in-line diesel engine (110,000 BHP)

Cruise Speed - 31 knots

Cargo capacity - 15,000 TEU (1 TEU = 20 cubic feet)

Crew - 13 people!

First Trip - Sept. 08, 2006

Construction cost - US $145,000,000+

Silicone painting applied to the ship bottom reduces water resistance and saves 317,000 gallons of diesel per year.

Editorial Comment!
A recent documentary in late March, 2010 on the History Channel noted that all of these containers are shipped back to China, EMPTY. Yep, that's right. The United States send nothing back on these ships. What does that tell you about the current financial state of this country? Just keep buying those imported goods (mostly gadgets) until you run out of money.

End Forward (after much cleaning of bad formatting).

To me things that are Made in China are poisonous to the American way of life. Not only the lead tainted toys they send over and Wal-Mart puts on shelves for you to buy. The one-way money train is bleeding this nation dry. And for what? Cheaply made plastic crap that'll probably end up out in the Pacific plastic nightmare island gyre. I refuse things from Wal-Mart because I cannot stand to support a corporation that is so hell bent on the destruction of America for their profits. I urge all Americans to buy American and to Just Say No to Made in China!

Wal-Mart Spreads Like a Virus

Holy cats, this is both fascinating and frightening. This is a flash-based map showing how Wal-Marts have spread across the nation.

If you don't think the mega-retailer is a virus on the land then this just might change your mind.

Another Drop in the Bucket Loss for Wal-Mart Wage Exploitation

Wal-Mart to pay up to $54 million to settle wage suit

At what point does the Justice Department look at these many and repeated lawsuits of Wal-Mart's wage exploitation and finally step in and say these are not isolated incidents. Wal-Mart has a corporate philosophy of squeezing its least powerful employees for extra work. Nobody likes being squeezed and, eventually, the squeezees will fight back and win yet another judgment.

Spend your money at Wal-Mart? Then you are supporting an exploitative company that crosses the line so often that it knows the border guards by name and how well their kids did in school this last semester.

Wal-Mart cares not the least about the law, they care about their bottomline regardless. And that is despicable.

Truth in Advertising

Shanghaiist: Hey Fatso: Buy your boxers at Wal-Mart in Shanghai

They are easy to find, the box says Fatso on it. Nice. I wonder if they have a line of paper bags called Ugly? A line of hats called Baldy?

All Hail Costco

The Motley Fool has an interesting article, All Hail CostCo that details some of the sharp differences between Wal-Mart and CostCo.

# CEO Jim Sinegal earns a mere $350,000 per year, with a bonus of as much as $200,000 (and possibly some stock). He aims to earn no more than three or four times what his highest-paid store managers earn. "Having an individual who is making 100 or 200 or 300 times more than the average person working on the floor is wrong," Sinegal has said.
# Costco pays its employees relatively lavishly. Workers reportedly start at $10 or more per hour, considerably more than elsewhere, where minimum wage is the usual starting point. According to a 2008 SmartMoney article, average pay topped $18 an hour, fully 68% more than employees earned at Wal-Mart's (NYSE: WMT) Sam's Club, and more than BJ's Wholesale (NYSE: BJ) employees earn, too. Roughly 85% of Costco's employees had health insurance last year (at fairly cheap rates), versus only about half at Wal-Mart and Target (NYSE: TGT). All this leads to low turnover, saving the company money on recruiting and training new employees, and helping Sinegal argue that it's simply a rational business practice.

How much did the Wal-Mart CEO take home last year? How many hundreds of times was that above the floor level grunt?

I shop at CostCo because the prices are good, the stores are well cared for, the employees are well cared for and it is a company I can feel good about supporting. How many of you shopping at Wallyworld can say the same thing?

Yet Another Reason Why Wal-Mart Sucks Goat Nuts

Wal*Mart shutting down DRM server, nuking your music collection if you "bought" it from Wal-Mart.

Which is to say, you didn't buy anything, you rented that music and are about to lose it because Wal-mart decided to.

What does this do to people who wanted to legitimately buy their music? Screws them over. What does this do to people that downloaded music illegally? Not a thing.

Nice work, Wally. Next are you going to demand a quarter from shoppers to keep the lights turned on while they're in your store?

I expect lawsuits over this shutting down of the servers and I expect Wal-Mart to lose, again.

Wal-Mart Depresses Wages, Study Finds

The Hometown Advantage - Wal-Mart Depresses Wages, Study FindsThe study "focuses on stores that opened between 1992 and 2000 and concludes, "Opening a single Wal-Mart store lowers the average retail wage in the surrounding county between 0.5 and 0.9 percent."

Currently, more than of Wal-Mart's employees earn less than $10 an hour.

Think about that for a moment. This is the world's largest company and the majority of its employees earn less than $10 an hour. They made $11.2 billion in profit last year, they can afford to pay a (more) livable wage. They choose not to because it would cut into their profits, which makes them greedheaded jerks.

That is both pitiful and infuriating.

The rest of the article has quite alot of interesing and useful information (among the juicy bits is the breakdown of raising their wages and the effect it would have on consumers, which is to say not much).

I'm not anti-Wal-Mart per se, I'm anti-exploitation and Wal-Mart is the world leader in worker, supplier, locality and consumer exploitation. And they do it on purpose to make every last penny they can for their stockholders.

New York City Successfully Fends Off Anti-Worker Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart gives up on plans for New York City

In an interview with the New York Times, [Wal-Mart CEO Lee] Scott denounced the city for its obstacles to his firm's plans for stores and super-centers in several boroughs, including Queens and Staten Island. "It's not worth the effort," Scott said. He added "the glue is the unions" of the coalition that blocked Wal-Mart.

Thanks unions! Thanks for standing up to the ugly, money sucking hole that is Wal-Mart. And thanks to Lee Scott for basically giving a roadmap for repelling Wal-Mart's encroachment.

The article also very rightly points out that Wal-Mart is just the tip of the iceberg and the most visible. Other big-box retailers need to clean up their shit too. It is just that Wal-Mart is the biggest, the most visible and has the most openly egregious record of exploitative business practices.

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The Machine Behind the Smiley Face of Wal-Mart

The New Yorker: Selling Wal-Mart does a really thorough job of breaking down where Wal-Mart has come from and what it is doing now. Mostly its image concerns and how much effort is put into trying to spin bad news (really just exposes of long held business practices usually).

There is this nice bit about Edelman, the public relations Wal-Mart with its own image problems, who work hard for their ten mil per year contract.

Edelman specializes in helping industries with image problems; another important client is the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington lobbying group that seeks to convince Americans that oil companies care about the environment and that their profits are reasonable.

Edelman is pure evil too. They would take on the devil himself if he could pay the retainer. And they have not the first problem about what the article accurately refers to as malleable ethics.

Sure, they make a ton of money but they do so at the expense of their own souls.

God, the thing reads like a bizarre horror story. Tightly scripted execu-bots with political backgrounds, contacts that are unable to be contacted, they hire tobacco lobbyists, soulless rationalists who have figured out a way to trick themselves into peddling poison and defending retail super-bullies.

Did you know that Lee Scott, Wal-Mart's CEO made about 2000 times what the average Wal-Mart employee made last year?

Did you know that Wal-Mart says it pays full-time employees an average wage of $10.51 an hour? Do you know what that the same average wage for a full-time employee at CostCo is? $17.46 an hour. And CostCo is profitable and a better place to shop.

The choice is yours. Shop at Wal-Mart and you are supporting a retail behemoth that spends its money trying to spin bad news publicly while bullying suppliers and exploiting workings behind closed doors. It wouldn't even be too far to go to say that shopping at Wal-Mart is un-American. The money you spend there goes into two places, China and the Walton family bank accounts, neither of which gives a damn about you.

Oh yeah, as a public relations professional, it made me sick to my stomach to read about what some of the "top" people in my field are like and get up to. If selling out every shred of humanity and personal dignity and respect is a requirement of getting to the top of the heap then I think I'll be quite content to stay right where I am. So quit calling, Richard. I'm not going to work for you, ever. Found via the Grist Mill.

More Anti-Wal-Mart Food for Thought

Wal Mart... A Violator of Human Rights?:

According to www.pbs.org, the average take-home pay of an American Wal-Mart employee is under $250 a week; the minimum wage pay scale places employees with families below the poverty line. The company is staunchly anti-union, and Wal-Mart employees make 25% less than their unionized counterparts after two years on the job. 85% of the stores' merchandise is made overseas, often in Third World sweatshops. Wal-Mart is the country's largest importer of Chinese goods in any industry.

At $250 a week in take home pay, that works out to a whopping $12,000 a year. Add in some kids and you've got a recipe for indentured servitude, the employees are too in debt to make waves or go find a job somewhere else.

Why do I hate Wal-Mart? Because Wal-Mart hates me and you and everyone else but they love, love, love your money. They can't wait to get it so they can send it China where it will never come back into circulation in the US, ever.

If you shop at Wal-Mart you are enabling this exploitation, you are directly working to undermine the strength of the USA. Wal-Mart is not about low prices, Wal-Mart is about shaving costs at whatever price and hiding expenses that they can shift to localities, counties and states.

Wal-Mart is a despicable company that could be using its power to make the world a better place but that doesn't please shareholders as much as an extra penny on their dividends.

Wal-Mart Cheats the Law to Get Into India

Protests Greet Wal-Mart In India

"Wal-Mart is the biggest monopoly retailer in the world which is infamous for its pathetic record of violating labour laws, union-busting, displacing small retailers and exploiting small producers of manufactured and agricultural commodities. Its entry into India, which would invariably be followed by the other multinational retailers like TESCO and Carrefour, would monopolise the retail market in India in their hands causing harmful effects to all sections of the people. It would cause large scale displacement of small retailers and squeezing of domestic manufacturers and farmers. Expansion of the Wal-Mart chains has caused massive closure of small stores and pauperisation of poor communities even in the United States."

Yep, even in the USA, Wal-Mart has caused massive harm to small stores and does a really superb bang-up job of pooring down communities. And that quote does a really good job of summing up what it is that Wal-Mart inflicts on localities and states that allow them to land there.

Also, you'll read about FDI in the article and its not explained, FDI stands for Foreign Direct Investment. And Wal-Mart's backdoor entry into India is an end-around of policy regulations intended to keep multinationals from preying on the soft Indian economy.

Oh yeah, before anyone gets all flustered that the link is to the Communist Party of India, the link goes to the People's Democracy site which is the news outlet for the Communist Party in India. Get over it. Communism isn't evil.

Tags: Wal-Mart, WalMart, India, protest, union

The Wal-Mart Effect

Fishman presents ‘Wal-Mart Effect’ and, rather than harp on the giant for its shortcomings, he illustrates just how deep and wide its reach really goes and presents options for those who do want to spend their money at a more ethical business. He uses the example of the bankrupting of Vlasic Pickles by the supply chain bullying of Wal-Mart. What it comes down to is Vlasic had to sell their pickles at a loss or Wal-Mart would drop them and they'd go out of business anyway. Rock and a hard place indeed, or maybe its more appropriate to call it a deal with the devil, just delaying the harvest. But Charles Fishman presents some ideas that you can or cannot think about implementing. He recognizes that people might not have the means to shop elsewhere, that cold hard economics may require patronizing Wal-Mart. But if you can, why not try other stores. Why not go to Target or KMart or some of the others, or the local toy store, if you can afford it.

And who can these days?

I understand that its hard to make the decision to not buy things as cheaply as possible, we're trained to do it. That way we can have more stuff. And stuff is good. I crave stuff just like the rest of the world.

But what if the stuff you crave and buy from Wal-Mart helps Wal-Mart avoid taxes or suck up some additional healthcare and you end up paying more for it in the long run.

Shop locally, spend your money on businesses that will keep the money as local as possible. Shopping at Wal-Mart is like making a deposit at the Bank of China ATM. Only thing is that we will not be making any withdrawals, maybe ever.

Shopping at your local hardware store, grocery store, whatever, is a good thing to do.

By the way, did you know Wal-Mart is the world's biggest grocery store as well as retail schlock? I didn't until this article in the University of Wisconsin student paper.

Tags: Wal-Mart, WalMart, Charles Fishman, Vlasic, bankruptcy, options

Square Business Models and Round Internet Tubes

Wal-Mart online service misfires, as iTunes readies video for Europe

Bad grammar and misspellings aside, this is a good examination of what's wrong with Wal-Mart's plans to sell movies online.

They only want PC's and Microsoft browsers and its US only. Which I can sort of understand, appealling to the majority and all and avoiding the copyright implications and expense of selling into foreign markets with the thorny DRM.

Bad pricing, bad implementation, clearly just a decision driven by greed and not smart marketing. But this is what we have come to expect for Wal-Mart. Bad copycat business done in a half-assed kind of lame way, its just enough to get by. Maybe that's what annoys me most about Wal-Mart, that its the lowest common denominator, its crap that is just good enough, its a store for unachievement.

Yet Another Way Wal-Mart is Screwing All of Us

The Raw Story reports that Wal-Mart pays itself rent, gets large tax breaks

Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer and the world's biggest retailer, is regularly paying itself rent and using the transaction to decrease the taxes it pays to state governments, according to a report in this morning's Wall Street Journal.

In one four-year period, Wal-Mart avoided $350 million in taxes using this strategy, which was developed by the accounting firm Ernst & Young LLP.

That's $350 million dollars that they didn't pay, so the rest of us had to. Nice, eh?

The Always Low Prices line they use doesn't take into account all the costs they pass along to the localities and states that they suck on. Make no mistake, Wal-Mart has nobody's but their own interests at heart. Its not like Wal-Mart can't afford to pay their fair share of taxes, they just do whatever they can to dodge as much as they can for as long as they can. If they could get away with using slave labor, they would (oops, they do, but its overseas and well out of our sight). Shop at Wal-Mart and you are directly contributing to and condoning their business model and practices. Is saving thirty cents on a bottle of soda worth aiding the erosion of our country? I don't think so.

Tags: Wal-Mart, WalMart, rent scheme, $350 million, deceit