Why do ultra liberal types hate walmart but not amazon?

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Nov 8, 2012
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Not sure what you're talking about - liberals love Walmart. Who do you think shops there? Who do you think makes their record sales numbers?

News Flash: It isn't Mitt Romney voters. Maybe the occasional gun tot'n crazy rednecks. Aside from that, you're living in a world of fantasy.
 

dank69

Lifer
Oct 6, 2009
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Not sure what you're talking about - liberals love Walmart. Who do you think shops there? Who do you think makes their record sales numbers?

News Flash: It isn't Mitt Romney voters. Maybe the occasional gun tot'n crazy rednecks. Aside from that, you're living in a world of fantasy.
You're decribing the unwashed liberal masses. He's talking about tree-hugging hippy types.
 

Juddog

Diamond Member
Dec 11, 2006
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Not sure what you're talking about - liberals love Walmart. Who do you think shops there? Who do you think makes their record sales numbers?

News Flash: It isn't Mitt Romney voters. Maybe the occasional gun tot'n crazy rednecks. Aside from that, you're living in a world of fantasy.

Both liberals and conservatives shop at walmart, because it's a store with cheap goods. I've known some extremely conservative people that love to shop there (the types that are constantly posting fun of Obama / insulting liberals on facebook literally every single day).

I personally don't like Walmart because every time I've been there I've seen either kids running around out of control (twice I've seen kids getting slapped by their parents), goods on the floor with no store personnel bothering to pick them up, and otherwise annoying people flooding the store.
 

Eug

Lifer
Mar 11, 2000
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I sometimes shop at Wal-Mart because for some things it's cheaper, but otherwise I generally hate it.

1. I'll avoid the "It's killing all the local small businesses!" arguments since that's going to be rehashed over and over again by others anyway.

2. It's usually really grungy in there. Not only are the stores grungy and the shelves messy, some of the clientele seems grungy as well. The website www.peopleofwalmart.com exists for a reason.

3. The store workers are amongst the least helpful for big retail stores. I've been to a lot of different stores with terrible sales people, but Wal-Mart is usually the worst.

4. In my city's Wal-Marts, the lineups are huge. Lineups for returns are even more huge.

5. Their website is useless. Even for big ticket items, you can't actually use their website to check anything reliably.

6. The grocery selection in the Supercenters sucks. If I'm going grocery shopping, I'd much rather go somewhere else.

Basically, I go to Wal-Mart for very specific items like baby formula and diapers, and once a year for Halloween candy, and then I go somewhere else for the rest of my shopping.
 
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Phokus

Lifer
Nov 20, 1999
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Not sure what you're talking about - liberals love Walmart. Who do you think shops there? Who do you think makes their record sales numbers?

News Flash: It isn't Mitt Romney voters. Maybe the occasional gun tot'n crazy rednecks. Aside from that, you're living in a world of fantasy.

You're retarded:

Zogby finds that while 85 percent of frequent Wal-Mart shoppers voted for President Bush's reelection in 2004 (and 88 percent of people who never shop there voted for Sen. John Kerry),

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/06/revenge_of_the_walmart_voters.html

Liberals are costco shoppers
 
Nov 8, 2012
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but what galls me even more and probably kills them is. why are you hating on walmart in particular? most of these are the douchey iphone starbucks types (same idiots on their iphones who were camping out at occupy wallstreet while i was working a real job) i mean every retail place has basically the same benefits / pay. and the worst part is why do they love amazon? thats the part i dont get the most! amazon basically eliminates retail jobs entirely and their distribution centers are just as bad as working at walmart, just with even less manpower.


Also - to answer your question. Liberals live in an "Out of sight, out of mind" world. Thats why they butt-sniff eachother over the whole electric car shit. "Am I using fuel/gas when I plug it into the electrical outlet that creates its energy using common forms of CO2? I don't know LOL!!!"
 
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hans007

Lifer
Feb 1, 2000
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Both liberals and conservatives shop at walmart, because it's a store with cheap goods. I've known some extremely conservative people that love to shop there (the types that are constantly posting fun of Obama / insulting liberals on facebook literally every single day).

I personally don't like Walmart because every time I've been there I've seen either kids running around out of control (twice I've seen kids getting slapped by their parents), goods on the floor with no store personnel bothering to pick them up, and otherwise annoying people flooding the store.


i think that is mostly the reason why i dont shop at walmart , that and they tend to be kind of far away from where i've lived (i live in nicer parts of California what can i say). the few times i've been inside though they seem kind of random and cluttered, target seems a lot better kept / organized and the prices seem to be about the same especially if you have the target card.

i suppose for me, i have no problems with how they pay their employees, you don't have to work there. my father told me walmart really tries to screw you over if you are working with them as a supplier (the vlasik pickle situation is a good example that is a well known story), so they have fairly poor business to business ethics so i guess thats another reason ( dell actually is another brand i dont buy because of this).
 

Eug

Lifer
Mar 11, 2000
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With regards to Dell, my colleagues in our department stopped dealing with them completely because they kept getting our orders wrong. I'd attribute that to a crappy ordering system, but curiously, the errors were always in their favour.

P.S. I hated Dell's ordering website. 10 pages of junk to scroll through to order a simple laptop. It almost reminded me of the crapware installed on Acer computers, but in retail web form.
 

Juddog

Diamond Member
Dec 11, 2006
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i think that is mostly the reason why i dont shop at walmart , that and they tend to be kind of far away from where i've lived (i live in nicer parts of California what can i say). the few times i've been inside though they seem kind of random and cluttered, target seems a lot better kept / organized and the prices seem to be about the same especially if you have the target card.

i suppose for me, i have no problems with how they pay their employees, you don't have to work there. my father told me walmart really tries to screw you over if you are working with them as a supplier (the vlasik pickle situation is a good example that is a well known story), so they have fairly poor business to business ethics so i guess thats another reason ( dell actually is another brand i dont buy because of this).

Yeah the messiness / clutter factor just annoys me; the Target stores nearby where I leave seem to have a much cleaner / well kept appearance, so if I want something cheap, I go there instead.

What's the story about Vlasik pickles? I hadn't heard of that.
 

Juddog

Diamond Member
Dec 11, 2006
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With regards to Dell, my colleagues in our department stopped dealing with them completely because they kept getting our orders wrong. I'd attribute that to a crappy ordering system, but curiously, the errors were always in their favour.

My company stopped buying Dell laptops because their quality went downhill; the D600-series seemed to be great (other than the D620's which had heating issues), but the E6400's / E6500's, etc. seemed to go to crap and we had constant quality issues with them, so went with Lenovo instead, which while they occasionally have problems, seem to be more tanky in terms of surviving damage from the consultants that use them on the road.

We still use Dell servers though; the servers didn't seem to take the quality hit that the laptops did, and our entire datacenter is almost completely filled with Dell servers.
 
Nov 8, 2012
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Both liberals and conservatives shop at walmart, because it's a store with cheap goods. I've known some extremely conservative people that love to shop there (the types that are constantly posting fun of Obama / insulting liberals on facebook literally every single day).

I personally don't like Walmart because every time I've been there I've seen either kids running around out of control (twice I've seen kids getting slapped by their parents), goods on the floor with no store personnel bothering to pick them up, and otherwise annoying people flooding the store.

I'm conservative and do the same.

1) I find their prices impeccably stupid. If you buy constant fattie things that everyone else buys (eg: Bud Light, Lays Potato Chips, Coke), yes - they might be $3.88 instead of $3.99 - other than that? They are NOT cheaper than my local HEB or Kroger grocery store. Not by a longshot.

2) I can't stand seeing shit parents with shit kids. I would applaud a parent that actually slaps their kid in public. Instead they don't give a shit. They run up and down the aisle banging into shit and knocking things over. Take responsibility for your kids actions? Hellllll no. :rolleyes:

3) Food all over the place, yup.

4) Shit employee's, yup.

5) 2 Check-outs open with 25 customers with full shopping carts. Wow, you obviously give a shit about your customers over your bottom line... I consider things like that being spat on.

Hence, I love Target. Much like fast food, I haven't step foot in a Walmart in over a year.
 

Eug

Lifer
Mar 11, 2000
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Wal-Mart priced pickles from Vlasic at $2.97 for a GALLON of them. That meant Vlasic was making something like 2 cents per jar.

It was also kind of Vlasic's stupidity for agreeing to this, but what happened is people started buying ONLY these gallon jars and not buying Vlasic's stuff from other stores, and worse, they'd buy a jar and throw most of it away, cuz who needs a gallon of pickles?

Basically killed their profits. When Vlasic asked Wal-Mart to increase the price, Wal-Mart just said no for the longest time. Finally they relented to an extent, but Vlasic ended up filing for bankruptcy (for various reasons).
 

Juddog

Diamond Member
Dec 11, 2006
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Wal-Mart priced pickles from Vlasic at $2.97 for a GALLON of them. That meant Vlasic was making something like 2 cents per jar.

It was also kind of Vlasic's stupidity for agreeing to this, but what happened is people started buying ONLY these gallon jars and not buying Vlasic's stuff from other stores, and worse, they'd buy a jar and throw most of it away, cuz who needs a gallon of pickles?

Basically killed their profits. When Vlasic asked Wal-Mart to increase the price, Wal-Mart just said no for the longest time. Finally they relented to an extent, but Vlasic ended up filing for bankruptcy (for various reasons).

That sounds more like Vlasic being utterly stupid and not having any business sense, versus a problem of Walmart being shady.
 

Gunslinger08

Lifer
Nov 18, 2001
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That sounds more like Vlasic being utterly stupid and not having any business sense, versus a problem of Walmart being shady.

Seriously. If you aren't making enough profit with a certain retailer, raise the wholesale price. They will either pass it along or stop carrying your product. If they stop carrying your product and it's something that consumers really want (rather than just a "convenience brand"), they will find it at other stores.
 
Nov 8, 2012
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"Emotional", apparently facts are for liberals.

I'm sure that site is COMPLETELY factual. None of those were made up, and the stats were gathered in an orderly, fair fashion.



...Or anyone here can take a look in their local Walmart and easily deduce who the hell votes liberal vs. conservative ;)
 

blankslate

Diamond Member
Jun 16, 2008
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When a company pays low enough wages for some workers that they have to go on Federal assistance it means that taxpayers (like you and me) are in effect subsidizing Walmart profits.

Some one else brought up Costco they generally pay better for most of the employees and are still turning a nice profit.


Maybe it's partly because the CEO for Costco isn't being given as big of a total compensation package as the CEO for Walmart and one can surmise that other officers like the CFO and COO also receive less (although still nothing to sneeze at) compensation than their counterparts at other retailers.



http://www.businessweek.com/article...the-cheapest-happiest-company-in-the-world#p2
Jelinek earned $650,000 in 2012, plus a $200,000 bonus and stock options worth about $4 million, based on the company’s performance. That’s more than Sinegal, who made $325,000 a year.

By contrast, Walmart CEO Mike Duke’s 2012 base salary was $1.3 million; he was also awarded a $4.4 million cash bonus and $13.6 million in stock grants.


Also as pointed out before in the thread how do you even not get past making the post political in the very title of the thread without thinking "Hmmmm... maybe this should go into P&N."?


*edited for spelling*
 

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
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A lot of it has to do with them strangling the necks of farmers and various other vendors for wholesale pricing.

Just look at what they did with pickles.

It's easy to justify your disdain for people that don't like something you like by instantly labeling them as "commie liberals," but if you actually spent an hour or so investigating the history of their labor practices and their relationships with vendors, you might realize that this has very little to do with some blanket "liberals love unions and I hate them!" type of belief.
 

Eug

Lifer
Mar 11, 2000
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That sounds more like Vlasic being utterly stupid and not having any business sense, versus a problem of Walmart being shady.
Well, it's both. Not "shady" really, but just being asses, combined with Vlasic being stupid.

And even you don't mind Wal-Mart's approach to business, their stores really do suck in general for the reasons I mentioned before - dirty and messy, crowded, clueless sales people, etc.
 

_Rick_

Diamond Member
Apr 20, 2012
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Socialists hate Amazon.

That's why in Paris the little bookshops get subsidies, so they can continue to pay the rent.
And it's also why the price of a book is fixed.
Amazon's free shipping is seen as an attempt to force smaller businesses into bankruptcy, by accepting a loss.

Liberals are just too right wing, to see the evil of the locust plague of capitalism.
 

nehalem256

Lifer
Apr 13, 2012
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When a company pays low enough wages for some workers that they have to go on Federal assistance it means that taxpayers (like you and me) are in effect subsidizing Walmart profits.

And if you force Walmart to pay above market wages and raise their prices how does this change this for you?

You either pay either taxes, or prices.

And you are not in effect subsiding Walmart's profits. You are subsidizing their employees who have 4 bastard children. Walmart pays enough to support a single person.

Some one else brought up Costco they generally pay better for most of the employees and are still turning a nice profit.

Maybe it's partly because the CEO for Costco isn't being given as big of a total compensation package as the CEO for Walmart and one can surmise that other officers like the CFO and COO also receive less (although still nothing to sneeze at) compensation than their counterparts at other retailers.

Someone before posted a breakdown in the differences between Costco and Walmart.

(1) Costco has significantly fewer employees for amount of retail space

(2) Costco in fact makes absolutely zero profit off the operation of its stores. Its profits are solely due to the membership fees. As Walmart has to membership fees it should be obvious why this is problematic.