Random thoughts 1: Just Sayin'

[Timsup2nothin]

That you're making me feel old, and being the same age as your children does not help.

And yet I'm pretty young, and my kids are a whole generation younger.

 

[civvver]

Literally (not figuratively) too many to count and list. That goes for just about any food in the US. It's cheap, plentiful and of endless variety.

Packaged food for the most part. For fresh stuff like produce it still kind of depends, and for meat forget about variety without going to a specialty shop. Most americans eat hamburger, generic steak cuts like sirloin and ny strip, and chicken breast. Try finding skirt steak at a local walmart or kroger. Rarely have it. Flank steak is usually available. But skirt steak is very common for fajitas and stuff so it seems like it should be carried. I was also trying to find beef short ribs. One store didn't have them, another store had them but they weren't packaged there, they were like pre packaged in vacuumed plastic from some outside place, and another place had them but no boneless variety so I had to cut them off myself.

Then I wanted some ground chicken. Couldn't find it it. Or how about ground pork? Forget about it. Even finding a pork butt roast is difficult. Most grocery stores only have tenderloin or stuff cut into chops already. And if you go outside the three major meats, pork, chicken and beef, there's hardly anything. You can get turkey ground or breast and tons of turkey deli meat. Other meats are very rare. Maybe they have lamb chops, maybe you can find a duck breast. Though outside of those and goats I can't think of any meat regularly eaten except for maybe wild game in some cultures.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Packaged food for the most part. For fresh stuff like produce it still kind of depends, and for meat forget about variety without going to a specialty shop. Most americans eat hamburger, generic steak cuts like sirloin and ny strip, and chicken breast. Try finding skirt steak at a local walmart or kroger. Rarely have it. Flank steak is usually available. But skirt steak is very common for fajitas and stuff so it seems like it should be carried. I was also trying to find beef short ribs. One store didn't have them, another store had them but they weren't packaged there, they were like pre packaged in vacuumed plastic from some outside place, and another place had them but no boneless variety so I had to cut them off myself.

Then I wanted some ground chicken. Couldn't find it it. Or how about ground pork? Forget about it. Even finding a pork butt roast is difficult. Most grocery stores only have tenderloin or stuff cut into chops already. And if you go outside the three major meats, pork, chicken and beef, there's hardly anything. You can get turkey ground or breast and tons of turkey deli meat. Other meats are very rare. Maybe they have lamb chops, maybe you can find a duck breast. Though outside of those and goats I can't think of any meat regularly eaten except for maybe wild game in some cultures.

Dude, where are you? I dunno about the WalMart, because it would never occur to me to shop there for food, but the meat department in both of the grocery stores that are closer to me than the WalMart would provide clear counter-examples to almost everything you said there...other than the ground chicken. Stores generally don't "cross contaminate" their grinders. They have one or more grinders for beef (hamburger) and one or more for pork (sausage) and generally have a supplier for ground turkey, but no one grinds chicken that I know of so you have to do that yourself.

 

[Takhisis]

How bad is Wal-Mart in the U.S. of A.? Because here they don't sell the bad stuff as they appear to do over there. They wouldn't find customers if they did.

 

[Hrothbern]

How bad is Wal-Mart in the U.S. of A.? Because here they don't sell the bad stuff as they appear to do over there. They wouldn't find customers if they did.

exactly right !!!
Wal-Mart will have excellent retail software
and that delivers a treasure chest database for game theory based manipulation of customers to optimise their business. In every sea other fishes to catch.

 

[Cutlass]

How bad is Wal-Mart in the U.S. of A.? Because here they don't sell the bad stuff as they appear to do over there. They wouldn't find customers if they did.

Walmart typically carries merchandise not really different from what can be found elsewhere. Although they pioneered outsourcing to China back 30 years ago while claiming to be buying American. Some of their goods are somewhat cheaper in quality. Largely they cut prices by having a very efficient supply chain. That, and the fact that they mistreat their labor pretty severely, and drive many people out of self sufficient self employment into minimum wage mcjobs.

 

[Farm Boy]

Walmart typically carries merchandise not really different from what can be found elsewhere. Although they pioneered outsourcing to China back 30 years ago while claiming to be buying American. Some of their goods are somewhat cheaper in quality. Largely they cut prices by having a very efficient supply chain. That, and the fact that they mistreat their labor pretty severely, and drive many people out of self sufficient self employment into minimum wage mcjobs.

And for all those reasons I would give my money as an out of pocket charitable donation straight to the Waldens before I buy on Amazon.

Well, ok, not literally true. But I'm pretty sure I would honestly consider it, which feels weird. Mostly though, Walmart is less crummy than Amazon, and that is a bit gobsmacking.

 

[Samson]

And for all those reasons I would give my money as an out of pocket charitable donation straight to the Waldens before I buy on Amazon.

Well, ok, not literally true. But I'm pretty sure I would honestly consider it, which feels weird. Mostly though, Walmart is less crummy than Amazon, and that is a bit gobsmacking.

+1
I live in a shared residence, and often sign for others amazon deliveries. You can see the desperation in the delivery driver's eyes, and the life has been documented by the bbc. It is changing the world, and not in a good way.

 

[Takhisis]

exactly right !!!
Wal-Mart will have excellent retail software
and that delivers a treasure chest database for game theory based manipulation of customers to optimise their business. In every sea other fishes to catch.

Some articles mention how they can become effectively the only store in town in teh US…

Walmart typically carries merchandise not really different from what can be found elsewhere. Although they pioneered outsourcing to China back 30 years ago while claiming to be buying American. Some of their goods are somewhat cheaper in quality. Largely they cut prices by having a very efficient supply chain. That, and the fact that they mistreat their labor pretty severely, and drive many people out of self sufficient self employment into minimum wage mcjobs.

I don't know, perhaps the fact that I live in a city with 14 million inhabitants and several established supermarket chains means that they can't go that low.

I live in a shared residence, and often sign for others amazon deliveries. You can see the desperation in the delivery driver's eyes, and the life has been documented by the bbc. It is changing the world, and not in a good way.

It's the same as Uber's doing with the taxi market in many places: ‘Hey, we're competing with established transport services who, by law, have to pay taxes and insurance and training that we don't. We're US folks, you can't impose your rules on us while we operate in your country’.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

To be fair, that's exactly what Uber is doing within the US as well. I'm all for competition but it's not a level playing field. Taxi operators are heavily regulated, taxed and fined in all the big cities in the US. Uber neatly circumvents those rules and I can't for the life of me figure out how they are able to do it legally. Many of those regulations are for public safety or other valid public concerns (like pollution and congestion fighting regulations) but an awful lot of them are I believe the product of the Taxi companies themselves lobbying for restrictive legislation and regulation in order to artificially restrict the supply of their services.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Packaged food for the most part. For fresh stuff like produce it still kind of depends, and for meat forget about variety without going to a specialty shop. Most americans eat hamburger, generic steak cuts like sirloin and ny strip, and chicken breast. Try finding skirt steak at a local walmart or kroger. Rarely have it. Flank steak is usually available. But skirt steak is very common for fajitas and stuff so it seems like it should be carried. I was also trying to find beef short ribs. One store didn't have them, another store had them but they weren't packaged there, they were like pre packaged in vacuumed plastic from some outside place, and another place had them but no boneless variety so I had to cut them off myself.

Then I wanted some ground chicken. Couldn't find it it. Or how about ground pork? Forget about it. Even finding a pork butt roast is difficult. Most grocery stores only have tenderloin or stuff cut into chops already. And if you go outside the three major meats, pork, chicken and beef, there's hardly anything. You can get turkey ground or breast and tons of turkey deli meat. Other meats are very rare. Maybe they have lamb chops, maybe you can find a duck breast. Though outside of those and goats I can't think of any meat regularly eaten except for maybe wild game in some cultures.

I've gotten skirt steak at wal mart in three different states and one of those wal marts was in a rural town. In fact I regularly buy lamb chops and whole duck (never seen just a breast though I haven't looked) at the grocery store. Nothing you've listed there is rare - hell I even find pork steaks in our grocer here in CA and that's something I'd only expect to see stocked in the St. Louis area. I agree you are not going to find the all the same cuts at a grocer as you would at a butcher, or all the vegetables you'd find at a farmer's market but you can still find an awful lot. And the grocer has the huge advantage of having a wide selection of all kinds of foods and household goods that you won't find at the butcher or farmer's market. We have a glut of cheap food here.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

How bad is Wal-Mart in the U.S. of A.? Because here they don't sell the bad stuff as they appear to do over there. They wouldn't find customers if they did.

They sell a lot of things made of cheap chinesium but overall the quality is ok. They sell mid to low range items (skewed to lower) at a low price. If you want something cheap go to wal mart, if you want something nice, go to a proper shop for the item. However, I've only had a few instances of QC being so poor that items just didn't work or fell apart. Thankfully they have a generous returns policy.

 

[Cutlass]

Some articles mention how they can become effectively the only store in town in teh US…

I don't know, perhaps the fact that I live in a city with 14 million inhabitants and several established supermarket chains means that they can't go that low.

I live in a large town close by a small city. There is Walmarts here, but not the supersized ones with supermarkets built in. I don't often go into them, because they tend to be too crowded and not enough workers there to speed things along. But recently I was traveling out in the rural West, and stopped at a Walmart a couple of times, and it was.... It just was. Those places are huge! And by huge, around here we used to have several different companies which had stores similar to Walmart, and most have now gone out of business. Any one of those places had enough floor space to lay out 4-5 full soccer fields. The 2 Walmarts I went in out West were at least double that size, if not more.

Now these were in what I would call modest sized towns for this area. But for those areas, those towns were the central city for the region. And those towns, and the businesses in them, may serve people from 100 miles away, because in many of those places you could travel way more than 100 miles and not find another town as large. So the Walmarts did a job on the local businesses. But at the same time brought in a variety of things to shop 'local' for is increased by quite a bit. The supermarket areas of them looked as complete as the standalone supermarkets here (and recall that when Russian president Boris Yeltsin saw an American supermarket, he gave up on communism).

The bad side of Walmart is that it uses its market power deliberately to destroy other businesses, and then pays and treats its employees poorly. So fewer jobs at lower pay. It really isn't better than Amazon in that respect. But the upside is that those rural people who happen to live near one have never had better selection of goods to shop for in their area. But the other downside is that people who live in nearby towns also lose their local shopping, but then have to drive to the central town to buy many things that they used to get closer to home. And, as I say, that could well be 100 miles.

 

[civvver]

Dude, where are you? I dunno about the WalMart, because it would never occur to me to shop there for food, but the meat department in both of the grocery stores that are closer to me than the WalMart would provide clear counter-examples to almost everything you said there...other than the ground chicken. Stores generally don't "cross contaminate" their grinders. They have one or more grinders for beef (hamburger) and one or more for pork (sausage) and generally have a supplier for ground turkey, but no one grinds chicken that I know of so you have to do that yourself.

It's not just walmart, I haven't seen ground pork at local kroger, meijer or bush's either. And bush's is kind of more unique/high end. They have more specialty cuts. I found shortribs prepackage offsite at meijer, from the butcher case at bush's and kroger and walmart didn't have them. This is in michigan though, maybe it's regional.

How bad is Wal-Mart in the U.S. of A.? Because here they don't sell the bad stuff as they appear to do over there. They wouldn't find customers if they did.

It's fine for the most part, it very much depends on which one you go to just like any other supermarket. Like there are different krogers and some are dirty with awful produce, and some are really upscale and clean. Of course it usually has more to do with the surrounding neighborhood than the store sadly. The walmarts in rich suburbs are perfectly fine.

They in general don't have as much variety. Produce is pretty limited to apples, bananas, lettuce. Like I couldn't find asian pears at one. I doubt they have stuff like bokchoy if I were going to make bokchoy. I wanted a single bunch of garlic and they didn't have any bulk garlic, just bags of the stuff (which was still only like $3 so I just got a whole bag). The thing is though they are extremely cheap. It depends on the stuff, beer, pop, snacks are not cheaper, I think that's where they make their money or the companies set the prices for name brand stuff. But soup is super cheap. Campbell's chunky is like $1.99 and at other stores regular price is $3-4. Dressing is cheap, kraft bottles are like $2 compared to 3-4 other places. And their store brand called like america's choice or something corny is really, REALLY cheap. Like gravy packets, mccormick ones were over a buck, walmart brand was 50 cents. So if you want a bunch of canned food or flour or salad dressing stuff like that walmart is where it's at.

I don't usually shop there but it's a mile from my house and the place I prefer, meijer, is 5 miles. Usually we order online and hit meijer on the way home from work, but for a quick stop it's walmart.

 

[Takhisis]

To be fair, that's exactly what Uber is doing within the US as well. I'm all for competition but it's not a level playing field. Taxi operators are heavily regulated, taxed and fined in all the big cities in the US. Uber neatly circumvents those rules and I can't for the life of me figure out how they are able to do it legally. Many of those regulations are for public safety or other valid public concerns (like pollution and congestion fighting regulations) but an awful lot of them are I believe the product of the Taxi companies themselves lobbying for restrictive legislation and regulation in order to artificially restrict the supply of their services.

The corrupt trade unions here play their own detrimental role, but Uber allows anyone with a driver's licence to compete unfairly. Also, since licences usually last you ten years, you can have a psycho at the wheel without any mandatory controls. !

They sell a lot of things made of cheap chinesium but overall the quality is ok. They sell mid to low range items (skewed to lower) at a low price. If you want something cheap go to wal mart, if you want something nice, go to a proper shop for the item.

This seems to apply here as well.

But their stores here are far smaller than those monstrosities Cutlass describes.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

And for all those reasons I would give my money as an out of pocket charitable donation straight to the Waldens before I buy on Amazon.

Amazon has helped keep me sane over the years, after most of the bookstores here in town closed down (various reasons; the independent bookstore I used to shop at went out of business after most of their walk-in business evaporated due to the other destination stores in the neighborhood moving out to the mall at the south end of town). As for the bookstores that are still here... one is physically inaccessible to me now, two others are too far out of my way, and the other hardly stocks anything I want - due to the fact that it's owned by Chapters Indigo, which has its own online store. Since most people shop online now, they don't bother having much of a selection in the store. It's been ages since I bought anything in the physical store, and I don't often buy anything from that chain online, either (my last purchase was a book and a couple of bookmarks).

+1
I live in a shared residence, and often sign for others amazon deliveries. You can see the desperation in the delivery driver's eyes, and the life has been documented by the bbc. It is changing the world, and not in a good way.

My Amazon deliveries come via Canada Post.

Some articles mention how they can become effectively the only store in town in teh US…

Just consistently undercut the established businesses at a level they can't possibly meet, and a lot of people will switch. I had to do that for some items, for budgetary reasons. When they sell cat litter and cat milk for half of what I'd have to pay at my grocery co-op, it just makes sense to get more for less. I've remained loyal to the co-op for most things, but I've also been frank with them about the things I can't afford at their prices. There's no ill-will, since I know they can't drop the prices to match Wal-mart or London Drugs (another place I shop online with for cat litter) and they know I'm not accusing them of being greedy - just realistic.

As far as food purchases at Walmart... I can't get any beverages delivered by mail, except for Maddy's cat milk (and in fact I'm about to order some more), so those have to be ordered from the co-op. I do bulk orders/case lots whenever possible, since I get a discount for those (at least enough to pay the GST).

It's the same as Uber's doing with the taxi market in many places: ‘Hey, we're competing with established transport services who, by law, have to pay taxes and insurance and training that we don't. We're US folks, you can't impose your rules on us while we operate in your country’.

Edmonton and Calgary are doing their best to try to regulate Uber... it's messy.

I live in a large town close by a small city. There is Walmarts here, but not the supersized ones with supermarkets built in. I don't often go into them, because they tend to be too crowded and not enough workers there to speed things along. But recently I was traveling out in the rural West, and stopped at a Walmart a couple of times, and it was.... It just was. Those places are huge! And by huge, around here we used to have several different companies which had stores similar to Walmart, and most have now gone out of business. Any one of those places had enough floor space to lay out 4-5 full soccer fields. The 2 Walmarts I went in out West were at least double that size, if not more.

The nearest Walmart to me is in a mall, and is located in Woolco's old space. They expanded it some, and there's a small McDonalds attached (only a fraction of the menu of standalone McDs is offered). I remember how frustrating it was when they added the grocery section. They taped up a small map at the front of the store, but who remembers all that when you're trying to find everything on a list? I asked them why they didn't just print some maps off for people, and got a shrug and "we have a map at the front door"... as if that's useful. I got lost several times (the store was like a labyrinth, with dead-end aisles and nothing close to where it used to be), and at one point a clerk came up with one of those "can I help you find anything" speeches. I was absolutely out of patience by that point, so I snapped at her, "The way out. I want out of this store NOW."

Now these were in what I would call modest sized towns for this area. But for those areas, those towns were the central city for the region. And those towns, and the businesses in them, may serve people from 100 miles away, because in many of those places you could travel way more than 100 miles and not find another town as large. So the Walmarts did a job on the local businesses. But at the same time brought in a variety of things to shop 'local' for is increased by quite a bit. The supermarket areas of them looked as complete as the standalone supermarkets here (and recall that when Russian president Boris Yeltsin saw an American supermarket, he gave up on communism).

Red Deer has two Walmarts, one at either end of town. I've been to the south end one a few times; it's standalone, in a shopping area full of "big box" stores. This city serves Central Alberta, which does take up a large geographic area - lots of towns around, where we're closer than Edmonton or Calgary.

We've got a variety of other grocery stores too, though we lost a Safeway awhile back. The closest grocery store to me is an upscale one that I can't afford to shop at, so I've stuck with the ones that are farther away but offer either online shopping or phone/delivery service.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I was absolutely out of patience by that point, so I snapped at her

NO!!!! Not YOU!?! I wouldn't believe this for a second!!!

Sooooo....let's get back to the observation that no one working in retail is paid enough to deal with the steady stream of jerks they encounter in their jobs. Does anyone really want to argue the point?

 

[Farm Boy]

Amazon has helped keep me sane over the years, after most of the bookstores here in town closed down (various reasons; the independent bookstore I used to shop at went out of business after most of their walk-in business evaporated due to the other destination stores in the neighborhood moving out to the mall at the south end of town). As for the bookstores that are still here... one is physically inaccessible to me now, two others are too far out of my way, and the other hardly stocks anything I want - due to the fact that it's owned by Chapters Indigo, which has its own online store. Since most people shop online now, they don't bother having much of a selection in the store. It's been ages since I bought anything in the physical store, and I don't often buy anything from that chain online, either (my last purchase was a book and a couple of bookmarks).

While Amazon is garbage, I'm not going to rag on the people who shop it anymore than I rag on people who shop Walmart. Especially since the times have changed and Amazon will gradually continue killing the competitors you can get things from that aren't Amazon.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

While Amazon is garbage, I'm not going to rag on the people who shop it anymore than I rag on people who shop Walmart. Especially since the times have changed and Amazon will gradually continue killing the competitors you can get things from that aren't Amazon.

I'm just pointing out that some of us have valid reasons for using Amazon and Walmart. Books have been a constant in my life for over 50 years. If I could still do the rounds of the local stores (if they were still here), I would. It's not my fault that this or that owner decided to close for whatever reason; these things happened years before I even knew Amazon existed.

There's a second-hand bookstore downtown that I patronized for over 30 years. But I can't physically get to it anymore, due to my mobility issues and the fact that the store is not accessible to people with mobility issues (high steps and two narrow doorways). So that place is out.

That leaves me with the bookstore at the mall that doesn't stock what I want, when I want it... and online. And when I needed a computer book a few months ago and had a choice of paying over $40 at the local bookstore and half that online, which do you think I chose?

As for Walmart and groceries, the only stuff I get at Walmart is what I can't get at my usual place, or can't get it at an affordable price. That's not actually that much. I'm someone who is content to find a few favorites and stick with them. I don't need something new every week.

 

[shadowplay]

My dog has fleas (again, for the third time in her life.) Can this be fixed without taking her to the vet again?