I wonder how many people here have actually been to a Walmart...I only ask because until last week I had never been.

Last week I would have quietly agreed with this thread. I thought it was an evil place where tacky people bought tacky goods for too much money.

I'm not Walmarts target demographic. I live in manhattan. I'm college educated and a professional filmmaker.

But last week I drove by one and felt I just had to go in, if I was going to continue to disparage it.

Boy was I wrong about what walmart is...

A) it's huge. Gigantic. Four times the size of the next largest store I've ever been to.

B) most things were reasonably priced, but some things were unbelievably good bargains. I bought a grab bag of tiffen filters for $2-10 each, including a low contrast 3 filter. I bought Carl zeiss lens wipes, $2 for 50. Allergy medication for $0.88 a package. A Belkin 802.11n router for $20. 5 lowepro camera bags for $5 a piece.

C) the service was terrible (not as bad as in the Berlin, @andrewreid, where I used to spend a good deal of time. And it wasn't located anywhere convenient.

People shop there because they have everything and it is much much cheaper than competing stores, be it small ma and pa stores, or large retailers like Target, at least here in the NYC area. For the people who I think do shop there on a regular basis, the savings can be substantial. The difference between buying off-brand Claritin at Walmart versus a Duane Reade (which is where I normally buy it) is about 75 cents per pill. That's a lot.

One thing we can do is raise the minimum wage.

Won't work. I'll explain later how you can solve some monetary problems.

One thing we can do is raise the minimum wage.

For basic needs, Walmart is the way to go. For clothes and electronics, Walmart is not the way to go. I have found Safeway sales prices on alot of food items cheaper and better quality then Walmart. Walmart is not the only place to me.

Wow.com, good thing I stopping at wally-mart years and years ago. @brianluce, you're exactly right. Their prices are higher when you factor other things, plus quality is shitty. It's gonna take a miracle IMO to change this cuz they have the core of the American spender under their control; the poor and middle class.

I agree here 100%.

I don't agree that you agree 100%.

In seriousness, not only are Wallmart prices often higher than local grocers, if people would factor in lost time, fuel costs (most people don't live across the street) and also the (common) annual membership fees, the deal looks even worse.

Wallmart has people trained like Pavlovian Dogs: Need Food, Go Wallmart. Eat. Shit. Sleep. Do not turn on brain. Go church. Pray. Repeat.

Wallmarts, Costcos, even the big retail grocers like Safeway, frequently do NOT have the lowest prices

As I do not have religion behind me, I agree here 100%. Big guys are sometimes also bad in prices. especially it is true for many small items and otems that have producers tightly controlling prices.
Their margin for some small shit can be as high as 200-300%.

Interesting - and the flipside is just a small thing, done by millions of customers, would make a huge difference. Agree with all you say about lawyers / workforce...and they make their money as a retailer by having long payment terms to their suppliers, while of course they demand instant payment from customers. If they can predict demand they can refine the amount of stock they buy and make huge profits on products they haven't yet paid for. Someone I know who worked at Tesco (big UK chain) said that their profitability was closely tied to their ability to predict demand accurately - in other words, purchase just-in-time, just enough, on long payment terms, and sell quickly. If customers did something unpredictable - like not going there on one day, sort of a "reverse flashmob" where you don't appear all at once, then they'd be in trouble.

Yep - totally agree. The comments in the article you linked to also mention about this - that Walmart doesn't stock specialist stuff and neither will anyone else local, 'cos they've all gone out of business, so it's off to the Internet to buy anything remotely unusual.

For day-to-day stuff, those things big stores know that they are doing really well off every customer and I think they tread a very careful line because they can't afford to lose people. There's a customer service truism that an unhappy customer may walk out of your store forever, and you don't just lose the amount of that item, you might lose a lifetime's loyalty, which is worth potentially 10's / 100's of thousands of dollars / GBP / Euro or whatever. And f suddenly their customers turn on them en masse they can be in deep sh*t very quickly.

If you pay by card and can download your bank statements into a spreadsheet, try doing that for the last 12 months, then sort by name, and add up how much you spend at the big shops. It may really surprise you and make you realise how seductive and aggressive these big companies are at taking your valuable cash.

Mind you, surely it's OK to be successful (as they are)? But it's the effect / ethics of that that can be pretty evil: greedy buying, greedy selling, destroying local business etc...