Walmart didn’t kill the small town, it is the small town • Hacker News Board

Re: Walmart didn’t kill the small town, it is the small town

#101

Post by dmoy » Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 3:37 PM UTC

gtowey wrote: post #77

This article is pure corporate propaganda. Walmart isn't good for small towns no matter how you look at it because they turn entire small town economies into a line item on a gigantic global multi national's ledger. And once done, there is no going back. They build a new store and then sell at a loss to bankrupt the competition. They can do this because they have billions of dollars in reserve and are subsidized by o…

> sell at a loss

They don't even necessarily need to sell at a loss. They can also just get economies of scale that don't work for tiny local businesses.

Still has the same effect in the end.

Re: Walmart didn’t kill the small town, it is the small town

#102

Post by gainda » Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #81

r00fus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply amazing. And I thought I was wasteful. What happens to the old mowers? Does your friend sell or give away his old mower? I almost feel like our way of life (artificially cheap) is going to hit a brick wall once gas stops being cheap (peak oil).

also what is the guy doing with his mowers that they only last a year? my dad neglects his mowers pretty badly and it still runs fine 10+ years later. only issue is the dull blade.

My father and now me are in the "badly neglects lawn equipment but somehow they carry on" camp. I'm not sure what it is, but our stuff just works. I have a shed for my equipment but I leave the gas in over the winter, I crank them right up once I need them the next year, I use gas from last year that's been sitting in the can ...

and these are cheap sub $200 machines

Re: Walmart didn’t kill the small town, it is the small town

#103

Post by gottorf » Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

moolcool wrote: post #37

light_hue_1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. The 8 stores are far better. There's competition. There's variety. Employees can move around. I can get to know the shop owners. I can take a wonderful stroll. Instead. You get to enjoy one corporation, that does anything it wants, pays horribly, employees have no choice, you have no choice in what garbage you buy. And your downtown now consists of 8 banks. Yup. You're living the dream!

Not to mention that the product you get from dedicated merchants will invariably be better. The worst bakery in my city is leagues better than the best bread available at Wal Mart

> The worst bakery in my city is leagues better than the best bread available at Wal Mart

You're lucky to have a dedicated bakery that actually makes bread, or maybe you just live in a big city? There's probably twenty bakeries in my midsize city, but they all bake cakes, muffins, confectioneries, and whatnot. None of them actually bake bread.

Walmart bread is truly awful, with the only thing going for it being that it's cheap and consistent. My preferred choice in my area is the sourdough bread from Aldi, which at least only has the ingredients that bread should have, with no sugar or soybean oil or other junk.

Re: Walmart didn’t kill the small town, it is the small town

#104

Post by coreyp_1 » Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

no_wizard wrote: post #14

lotsofpulp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be surprised if most people under 60 or even 50 know what strolling down “Main Street” means. In my 30+ years, I have never once strolled down a Main Street. I have always gone to big stores and malls (and now online shopping).

I consider it the fact that Walmart for a long time had a mostly rural and suburban strategy that skews demographics to people 40+. It’s a Sam Walton hold over that I think is being slowly replaced. What WalMart hates the most is that they can’t get people of affluence who want to save money to shop at one though. When I worked there the complaint out of HQ I heard the most is that Michelle Obama and Oprah would shop…

I H-A-T-E going to WalMart. I have to go every once in a while, because that's the only place that I can find one particular item that I use frequently, and that's only if I forget to buy it online where it costs a bit more.

I do my normal shopping at a grocery store where everything is probably 10-15% more expensive. Why? 5 reasons.

1. Paper bags. I hate plastic ones.

2. I'm not forced through the self checkout. Walmart has almost no cashiers any more, and the two that they do have (for all 30 registers) are hidden, except for the fact that there's a huge line of people there, all with overflowing carts.

3. I'm tired of having to wait 20 minutes just to stand in a checkout line. It happened so often at Walmart (even with self-checkouts) that I was fed up with it. The longest I have ever had to wait at the grocery store is 5 minutes, and often there's no wait at all.

4. Carry-out. It's nice for some young kid to have an after-school job helping me load water into my car. It's nice not having to find the carousel to return the shopping cart to. It's nice having a quick conversation with someone. It's standard at my 24-hour grocery store. It's an act of congress and a long wait at WalMart.

5. Walmart treats you as if you're trying to steal everything everywhere. They put cameras up everywhere that ding at you as you pass by. They take pictures of you as you use the self-checkout. They check your receipt when you try to leave. I'm sick of being treated as if I'm a criminal when I haven't done anything wrong. So I refuse to go there.

I can choose to spend $100 at Walmart, or $115 at a grocery store without having to put up with 1-5. I will choose that any day of the week.

Re: Walmart didn’t kill the small town, it is the small town

#105

Post by m_0x » Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 3:40 PM UTC

ilyt wrote: post #4

Author is delusional. A bunch of small stores close is nowhere near similar. I just want to go to one shop, get the stuff, and leave, not to go to 8 shops, pay 8 times, pack groceries 8 times and overall walk more edit: that is not to say opening big supermarkets is great, just that once they are there that's why people skip local stores and go to the big supermarket

> overall walk more

Walking more is better for your health. Or are you saying you walk too much already?

Re: Walmart didn’t kill the small town, it is the small town

#106

Post by troyvit » Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 3:41 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #32

chromaton wrote: post #15

Sam Walton points out in his autobiography that big cities are changing all the time, yet somehow people expect that small towns will not.

Small towns should be able to change and adapt, but Walmart being the corporate small town core is another version of enshitification (Walmart being your IRL ecomm platform), with your town's core dictated and governed by Bentonville, Arkansas. Build strong, local communities and economies instead: https://ilsr.org/ | https://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/how-small-towns-and-cities-c... (it will not be extremely economical…

Exactly. Just because a guy who's gigantic paycheck depends on hollowing out small towns says small towns should change, doesn't mean that they need to change the way wants them to. After reading (most of) the article it's a little mind blowing. Walmart took the map of a town, made it car-free, and people flocked to it. Towns can take that same model, apply it to down town, and people will love it.

I also love your point that what we're talking about here trades economic efficiency for resilience and local governance. Always pushing for growth is eventually going to hit a wall when either there's no more room to grow and no more good land to grow food on.

Re: Walmart didn’t kill the small town, it is the small town

#107

Post by gottorf » Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 3:41 PM UTC

no_wizard wrote: post #69

gottorf wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What WalMart hates the most is that they can’t get people of affluence who want to save money to shop at one though. Inflation is doing the trick[0]. For several quarters, they've reported marked increases in the share of higher-income shoppers, especially for groceries. [0]: https://www.axios.com/2023/05/18/inflation-walmart-prices-ea...

This happened in 2008 too with the housing downturn. Part of the store boom I participated in was fueled by that growth. The problem is they can’t manage to keep most of them once the economy bounces back, and growth slows significantly (their top line growth was only 2-4% per year for most of the 2010s and they still aren’t profitable on e-commerce) Maybe since inflation is a different beast it will capture more con…

We shall see, indeed. I believe that this round of inflation is going to stick around for a while for to geopolitical reasons: decreasing globalization, China no longer exporting deflation to the rest of the world. As someone who has only ever seen sovereign bond yields go down over time, it'll be interesting.

Re: Walmart didn’t kill the small town, it is the small town

#108

Post by ilyt » Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 3:42 PM UTC

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #10

ilyt wrote: post #4

Author is delusional. A bunch of small stores close is nowhere near similar. I just want to go to one shop, get the stuff, and leave, not to go to 8 shops, pay 8 times, pack groceries 8 times and overall walk more edit: that is not to say opening big supermarkets is great, just that once they are there that's why people skip local stores and go to the big supermarket

I think the issue is more about the systematic destroying of the small town. They open multiple Walmart's, the small town stores go out of business, then they can close some percentage of the Walmart's to consolidate into a few stores in central locations, now all of the small town people have to drive farther to get anything at all. And the small town dies.

Right but the issue is that people want to go there, if nobody went there it would not be a problem. There is th emoney aspect of course, but supermarket (of any type really) is convenience vs having to go to a bunch of smaller stores.

Re: Walmart didn’t kill the small town, it is the small town

#109

Post by no_wizard » Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 3:43 PM UTC

gtowey wrote: post #77

This article is pure corporate propaganda. Walmart isn't good for small towns no matter how you look at it because they turn entire small town economies into a line item on a gigantic global multi national's ledger. And once done, there is no going back. They build a new store and then sell at a loss to bankrupt the competition. They can do this because they have billions of dollars in reserve and are subsidized by o…

Walmart won't run an unprofitable store, as you mentioned. From my time working there[0] their strategy was mostly to put stores as far out as possible from a warehouse hub and work backward. To be honest, Walmart isn't known for closing alot of stores, they tend be very good at figuring this stuff out, at least.

Which is to say, I know they don't take a loss on stores, even news ones. They may have loss leaders, but they make a small (and I mean small) profit on most things sold in the store. Its all about volume.

Their labor practices are quite abhorrent. Not to mention they employ enough people to make a small city (2 Million+ last I checked). I don't know if they been good on balance or not, I do know they are the epitome of Corporate Exploitative Practices[1]

They also have an entire division that exists just to extract tax favor-ability for building in places. They've gotten really good at pitting towns against each other for their business.

That said, all of this is true for Target too. All of it. It just doesn't have the same poor brand reputation and it being the smaller of the two it gets less media attention for its poor practices.

[0]: I really resent them after working there though. I haven't stepped foot in an WalMart since that time period. It worked for that time in my life and I had one of the "better" jobs for sure, but it was rough to see what they did to associates and being part of that machine.

[1]: Its well studied that they have an enormous amount of their workforce on government subsidies / benefits. To the point that they have handouts to help people get on assistance that work there, rather than pay them a living wage. Its nuts when you really think about it.

Re: Walmart didn’t kill the small town, it is the small town

#110

Post by FrustratedMonky » Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 3:44 PM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #94

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is more about the systematic destroying of the small town. They open multiple Walmart's, the small town stores go out of business, then they can close some percentage of the Walmart's to consolidate into a few stores in central locations, now all of the small town people have to drive farther to get anything at all. And the small town dies.

people often give this "just so" explanation, but it doesn't quite add up to me. if it's really so inconvenient to go to the consolidated Walmart location a few towns over, why don't you see shops start to reopen on main street? I suspect the root cause has more to do with cars than a particular megastore.

The needed capital to re-start. They have lost the critical mass. For many small towns, these stores were started many decades ago.

I guess technically, if a store can't be re-started today is kind of like also saying, if the small town can't re-start itself, then that points to question, why would a small town need to exist at all today.

Think the end of this line of reasoning is that small towns have no reason to exist, so let them go?