wal-mart is killing usa
While Dante and I were eating our Irish pasties, he told me something that really stuck with me. “I came to this country because I wanted to, because it had so much promise. And when I see what has happened to it, ahh, it’s…”
He couldn’t finish. For a guy to come to the U.S. in the fifties, when America was on the rise, when there was a feeling of goodwill for this country, and for him to see in his own lifetime that sense of goodwill disappear and turn to hatred, it must be powerful. As he said, he chose to come to this country, he didn’t just sprout up here. He made a choice, whereas I didn’t. He bought into the American Dream at a much higher cost than I paid. He lost a country in the effort to reach this one.
So I listened to him as he told about his protest against Wal-Mart. It was sincere. People would ask him how many days he planned on hanging around there, so he started putting the number of days his protest had left. 125 in this case.
If you read the comment on my last post about Dante, you can hear it in his voice. He loves America. He wants it to do the best job it can, and that means we have to pay attention and watch where our money goes.
i don’t think that any of us whose parents were born in the 40′s or 50′ have been doing our best. then again, maybe we have been doing our best to have a good time.
because of all of the shit that our families had gone suffered and survived has made it easy for us to have a cushy life.
cushy life = no polio, no malaria, umm… labor laws,weekends,free education (but with that you get what you pay for), less threat of being lynched, less threat of a financial depression(think the 20′s), less need for hoarding food, hell, we don’t even have to ration gasoline(think the 80′s). we have the opportunity to get work, have abortions, get HerpaSyphalAIDS and live forever with medication; fuck, suck and chuck or marry anyone of the opposite sex who will consent and complain about every fuckng minute of it the whole damn time.
that said, what do we make a point to contribute to the rest of the country? we drive imported cars,eat out of season foods that are imported from other countries(think about Farm Aid and all the farmers here who were SHUT the fuck DOWN), we are overly concerned about funding and repairing other countries and not concerned enough with employing and rebuilding the country in which we live.
what’s the legacy we will leave?
though, i will say that we do seem to be the best at ignoring the obvious, eating junkfood and buying and using to mask the pain.
Comment by the girl with the glass eye — December 7, 2007 @ 9:57 pm
that’s a lot to think about.
Comment by Rolston — December 8, 2007 @ 5:41 pm
Jon, I want to clear something. I don’t hate this country, disenchanted, yes, hate it, never. I am pissed off with with our political heads, that election after election have driven our country down the proverbial chesspool. what motivated them? God only knows. It’s an historical fact tha empire crumbles and I accept that, But I don’t remember a country populated by people so eager to accelerate its disintegrating process. In 1597 the mighty Spanish Armada sailed up North on its way to conquer England. Up there they encountered a mightier storm that destroyed most of the ships and that was the end of the Spanish dream. It was an acto of God and as King Philip said “I sent my Armada to fight England not to fight God”. The beginning (in my opinion) of the decline of our country started with a home grown God. The year was 1956. And that was the year Wal-Mart opened its first store. In 1962, the USA established an American Military Council in Vietnam. In 1972, Nixon went to China…and the rest is history. None of these events can be considered an act of God.
Comment by Dante — December 8, 2007 @ 11:32 pm
I just like how the sign makes you ask: Shit! What’s gonna happen in 125 days? I’d better go into Wal-Mart and buy some…duct tape!
Comment by Nick — December 9, 2007 @ 4:14 pm
p.s.–there was/is a protester-on-a-Segway in the Outer Banks (barrier islands, N.C.) who hates the Nat’l. Park Service’s closing stretches of beach there for sea turtles and rare birds during nesting season; fools can drive on the beach there (no ATVs or Jet Skis) any other time. It’s redneck nirvana paired w/ pricey beach cottages.
Comment by Nick — December 9, 2007 @ 4:24 pm
I want to hear more about how Wal-Mart is killing the USA.
Comment by Lyle_s — December 10, 2007 @ 6:21 pm
Thank you Lyle. I will.
Comment by Dante — December 11, 2007 @ 7:46 am
Watch out Dante, Lyle’s a tough one to convince of your liberal views!!
Comment by Rolston — December 11, 2007 @ 7:41 pm
LIBERAL? Maybe. Realist? O yes! Tell Lyle that I will send all informations I have after I finished to memorize a bunch of Christams songs I have to present by next Wednesday.
Dante.
Comment by Dante — December 13, 2007 @ 8:43 pm
First to Nick. Yesterday was my birthday. 77. The reason I was picketing Wal-Mart is that I have five grandchildren age, 4 months, the twins, 6 year-old, a girl, 7 year-old, a boy and 15-year-old, a girl. If I didn’t have them I would go with the flow and screw everything else. But, I was thinking about what they will do when they will graduate from school and I didn’t see too much about a job in the manufacturing business. In the service, yes, we are serving now. We have become a nation of servant. Well almost. Because they could always found a job manufacturing guns because in that we are the first, followed by England and Russia. In the USA we totally manufacture one car. Corvette. All the rest are made;
In Mexico: BUICK Rendezvous, CADILLAC Escalade ESV & EXT, CHEVROLET Avalanche, HHR, Silverado, Suburban, CRYSLER PT Cruiser, DODGE Ram, FORD F-Series, Fusion, GMC Yukon, LINCOLN MKZ, MERCURY Milan.
In Canada: BUICK LaCrosse, CHEVROLET Impala, Monte Carlo, Silverado, CHRYSLER 300, minivans, DODGE Charger, FORD Crown Victoria, GMC Sierra, PONTIAC Grand Prix.
The rest of what we need, Shoes, Pants, Shirt, and 90 percent of EVERYTHING else we need in our daily life is made in some foreign country. Nick, I hope you don’t have children.
Second, Lyle. Here you have a lst of some American manufacturing company who had business with Wal-Mart and conseguently went bankrupt. VLASIC, RUBBERMAID, HUFFY, LOVABLE COMPANY and LEVY STRAUSS. There are more. Go into the internet and type WAL-MART. You will find a list from 1 thru whatever. Read #5, and see what it says. Read #6 and see what it says.
You can also read an article by Peter Navarro published February 26, 2007 in The Christian Science Monitor , it says WATCH YOUR FLANK, AMERICA. Nick, Lyle, thank you for your time and later on, more will follow.
Comment by Dante — December 14, 2007 @ 1:19 am
Well, I’m certainly no Wal-Mart apologist but I also can’t blame them for the demise of some of their suppliers. Levi-Strauss was on the decline a full decade before they partnered up with Wal-Mart and created a line in a market they knew nothing about to get on board. By the time Levi partnered with Walmart they had already closed 90% of their US based MFG plants.
The Vlasic story is more troubling to me because it shows how stupid consumers can be. The idea that any company would sell 1 gallon jars of pickles to consumers is straight up ridiculous. Who can eat that many pickles before they go bad? Yet consumers gobbled them up to the tune of 240,000 gallons a week! What a waste of resources. Shame on everyone involved, there.
Still, Vlasic made the same mistake that Levi Strauss made: they changed their whole business philosophy to get into bed with Wal-Mart. The 240,000 gallons of pickles sold was bringing in only $2,400-$4,800 a week. That’s just a stupid business decision.
There’s an article from Fast Company in 2003 that seems to be the source for a lot of what’s on the internet about how Wal-Mart deals with it’s suppliers. When I Googled ‘Walmart Vlasic’, it was the first result. It’s a great read on the subject and presents a very objective story. I think the best point they made is that Wal-Mart believes that they speak for the consumer when dealing with suppliers. Unfotunately, they’re probably right; I think we have to accept the fact that 99% of the US is ignorant to how the world works and think everything they buy grows on trees. Shame on us. If we don’t agree with how Wal-Mart does their thing, we need to do exactly what Dante is doing: tell them about it. Stop shopping there, raise a stink. Rent the Wal-Mart documentary and get all fired up over it. Just because it’s really hard to organize and educate so many people doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Good for you, Dante!
I don’t shop at Wal-Mart, generally, because I don’t care for the shopping experience I have there and the supposed savings don’t outweigh the negative aspects. I suspect most of Wal-Mart’s customers don’t reap any real savings because they end up buying more than what they really need. That’s what really depresses me. We’ve become such gluttons (myself included, to an extent). The Navarro article points out that we basically don’t know how to tighten the belt when we need to; we’re softies. China scares the crap out of me because they don’t play by any sort of rules. They steal intellectual property all the time and turn it into cheaper goods to push back into the US. We send them enormous amounts of raw materials and it comes back as TV’s and other appliances, at a hefty markup. The fact that they are becoming our chief financier means their evil ways probably won’t change any time soon.
Anyhow, that’s about all the energy I have. Dante, thanks for getting me thinking. I’ve added the Wal-Mart movie to my queue!
Comment by Lyle_s — December 15, 2007 @ 5:55 pm
Today I had a revelation. It has nothing to do with God. Revelation, to me, is something that happen a person is exposed to somehting so good that that moment will be remember for a long, long time. The first time it happened in Chicago when I heard Leontyne Price sing Liú in Turandot. The next one was in Las Vegas. We went to the Frontier Hotel for dinner. We had a steak and a potato. That steak was the best beef, my wife and I had in our life Twenty years later we still remember. This morning I had another revelation. The Russians are here. At one local movie house there were broadcasting from the Metropolitan Opera House, Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette. At 9;15 we were standing in line, the show was scheduled to start at 10 am. I counted eleven people ahead of us and they all knew I was counting them. Twenty minutes later there were seventeen and growing. I faced the growing group and we had a conversation about the proper way to stand in line. A women from the group listened and told me that they were Russian and in Russia people didn’t waste time with “unimportant things.” I told here that in America it was just a of good manners, not necessarely always onserved, but we did the best we could. But that is not what we do in Russai. My voice went upward a little. Lady, I said, we are in America, not in Russia. She looked at me like “What the fuck is he talking about? Finally it downed on her that I was serious and she asked me if I wanted to go ahead of her group, still growing, and I said yes. When the door opened all the Russians surged in masse and that was the end of of the proper way to stand in line for anything. That was the revelation of the Russian way of life.
Comment by Dante — December 15, 2007 @ 10:53 pm
gotta get that bread and cheese.
Comment by sea n — December 17, 2007 @ 9:38 am
Sesn, if you bring that bread and cheese, I’ll bring pasta and sauce.
Comment by Dante — December 17, 2007 @ 12:55 pm
dante, are you trying to get an italian dinner out with me, too?
Comment by sea n — December 18, 2007 @ 2:16 pm
No, because what I got from Jon was not really “Italian”, but, hey, I am always game for a good Italian meal.
Comment by Dante — December 19, 2007 @ 3:24 pm
[...] What is Dante going to think? I worked for Wal*Mart yesterday, moving furniture and set pieces (fake walls and windows) to a photo studio for an advertising shoot. I worked for two hours and they paid me for four. Handsomely. What was the problem with Wal*Mart again? [...]
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