Wal-Mart Is Right

[Kat Kanning]

  Wal-Mart Is Right

by Charley Reese
 

Wal-Mart is the only corporation in the world that I know of or have ever heard of that is hated because it is successful. What do these critics want Wal-Mart to do? Fail? Start selling $300 shirts like Saks Fifth Avenue?

Of course, some of the hatred is coming from unions, which have tried but, so far as I know, failed to unionize Wal-Mart's work force. That one thing tells you that it must be a much better deal to work for Wal-Mart than its critics let on. Some of the disdain comes from leftist snobs who think they should run the lives of the peasants who work and shop there.

I am a small-town guy who has hated to see so many locally owned small businesses go under, but that's not Wal-Mart's fault. That trend started years ago with suburban sprawl (a major contributor to the energy crisis, by the way), suburban shopping malls, strip malls and all the other discounters that preceded Wal-Mart in prominence. It was caused by the American public's preference to buy based on price, rather than on service or quality. It was caused by local politicians converting the National Defense Highway System (the interstates) into suburban and urban commuter systems by routing them through instead of around the cities.

Wal-Mart is one of the best-run corporations in the world. The individual consumer has no clout with suppliers and manufacturers. Wal-Mart uses its enormous buying clout to get consumers the best price at the best quality possible. Being a supplier to Wal-Mart is no picnic, as the company is quite demanding.

It's not Wal-Mart's fault that much of its merchandise is manufactured in China. The late Sam Walton went to extraordinary lengths to help American manufacturers, but Wal-Mart doesn't control any corporation except itself. The move to China is not coming from Wal-Mart, but from greedy manufacturing corporations that love cheap and controlled labor. If your competitor is selling an American brand-name product made in China cheaper than you can buy one here, and if the customer says, "I don't care where it's made as long as I can afford it," what are you going to do?

More recently, Wal-Mart has been slammed for not providing what its critics think it should in the way of medical insurance. Well, why is General Motors flirting with bankruptcy? Why is Ford Motor Co. in financial trouble? Why, for that matter, is the federal government in financial trouble? The stinking hag in this room that everyone is ignoring is the high cost of medical service.

You can't provide low-cost health care or low-cost medical insurance for a system run by millionaire doctors and six-figure hospital administrators, and that has 1,200 percent profit margins for drugs and medical devices. The health-industry attitude is, we'll profiteer like crazy, and you people find a way to pay us. If Congress were not a bought-and-paid-for whore, America could join the rest of the industrialized world with a reasonable health-care system.

Health-care costs are one of the key factors in making American manufacturers uncompetitive. Now that the state of Maryland has presumed to dictate what kind of benefits Wal-Mart provides, if I ran the company, I'd close every store in the state and put the property up for sale. This is just one more ploy in the anti-Wal-Mart crusade.

We have reached a sick and perverted point in our culture when honesty and success bring attacks, mainly from people who either don't know what they are talking about or have a hidden agenda.

Millions of Americans who earn low wages from other employers rely on Wal-Mart to help them stretch their family budget. Wal-Mart has kept faith with those people. I've never found a dirty store, a rude employee or a defective product in a Wal-Mart store.

If you prefer to pay more than something's worth in exchange for some phony ambience or fancy label, go right ahead. In the meantime, get off Wal-Mart's back. It's one of the few entities in this country that is doing the right thing the right way for the right reasons.

May 8, 2006

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

[aries]

While Wal-Mart has not really exploited it's customers, or as someone told me yesterday "hindered the free market" (How can a private company do that?), they have sought a legal means to achieve their ends. They've used processes such as eminent domain to set up stores, offshored help so that they could provide substandard working conditions, etc.

That said, they provide decent products at low prices, and get a lot of business from me.

Seeing as I live equal distance from Lancaster and Littleton, sometimes I'll go to Lancaster to do some shopping instead, and there's no Wal-Mart there.

[Pat McCotter]

You can't provide low-cost health care or low-cost medical insurance for a system run by millionaire doctors and six-figure hospital administrators, and that has 1,200 percent profit margins for drugs and medical devices. The health-industry attitude is, we'll profiteer like crazy, and you people find a way to pay us. If Congress were not a bought-and-paid-for whore, America could join the rest of the industrialized world with a reasonable health-care system.

So, Wal-Mart is successful because they have worked in the free market but we have to get the government in there to bring health-care prices down? Or is the government causing the high health-care prices?

[aries]

Maybe eliminating patents on medicine and allowing generics in the US market as soon as other companies could figure out how to mass produce them, and dismissing 99% of malpractice lawsuits, most of which are frivilous, would lower health care costs a lot more.

I wonder if any of those liberal goons ever thought of that.

[Pat McCotter]

Maybe eliminating patents on medicine and allowing generics in the US market as soon as other companies could figure out how to mass produce them, and dismissing 99% of malpractice lawsuits, most of which are frivilous, would lower health care costs a lot more.

I wonder if any of those liberal goons ever thought of that.

Eliminate just patents on medicines?

Frivolous malpractice suits - who determines if they are frivolous?

[Dreepa]

Maybe eliminating patents on medicine

So I should spend years and millions of dollars making a drug and then have someone copy the drug and then I don't get to recoup my investment?  What incentive do I have to make more drugs?

[president]

What incentive do I have to make more drugs?

Your kid/wife/mother is going to die if you don't ???

But if you can't turn a profit on the drug....fuck 'em 

[Pat McCotter]

What incentive do I have to make more drugs?

Your kid/wife/mother is going to die if you don't ???

But if you can't turn a profit on the drug....fuck 'em 

d-pres - do you play situational ethics?

[Dreepa]

What incentive do I have to make more drugs?

Your kid/wife/mother is going to die if you don't ???

If saving the life of someone was my motive then I could just make enough to save their lives and stop.  I wouldn't go through the FDA etc.

Do you really think that the big drug companies give a rat's ass for people's lives?
It is about money.

[DC]

What incentive do I have to make more drugs?

Your kid/wife/mother is going to die if you don't ???

But if you can't turn a profit on the drug....fuck 'em 

If you don't have a potential to make a profit then you want get the money to do the research to begin with. If magically you did you wouldn't have the money to clear all the government hurdles. If magically you did it would go bankrupt under all the frivolous lawsuits on the drug company that discovered the drug.

[tracysaboe]

Actually. Elliminate all patents. They are coersive government granted monopolies. Patents aren't just, and the violate real property rights.

Eliminate class action lawsuits perhaps, but really we need to eliminate all the laws that encourage class action lawsuits.

Elliminate all the medicare/medicaid socialism. Elilminate cumpulsory offering of medicle insurence by employers, and elliminate the licenser and other regulations artificially limiting supply on medicine.

Tracy

[DC]

Actually. Elliminate all patents. They are coersive government granted monopolies. Patents aren't just, and the violate real property rights

You still have this problem.

So I should spend years and millions of dollars making a drug and then have someone copy the drug and then I don't get to recoup my investment?  What incentive do I have to make more drugs?

Your kid/wife/mother is going to die if you don't

They will most likely be dead before it's finished anyway.

Elliminate all the medicare/medicaid socialism. Elilminate cumpulsory offering of medicle insurence by employers, and elliminate the licenser and other regulations artificially limiting supply on medicine.

I can go along with this.

[Zork]

Maybe eliminating patents on medicine

So I should spend years and millions of dollars making a drug and then have someone copy the drug and then I don't get to recoup my investment?  What incentive do I have to make more drugs?

You're welcome to try.  After all, noone is going to force you to release the "recipe" for the drug so you can continue to manufacture and sell the product without any competition until someone figures out how to make a generic version of it.  And then you can still sell your product and try to prove to the consumer why your version is superior to the generic.

Society got by for thousands of years with millions of innovations without patents.  But dammit, they OBVIOUSLY couldn't have known what they were doing!

[aries]

I only mentioned medical patents but I don't really agree with the existence of patents at all. I do think that there is vast precedent supporting the existence of trademarks and possibly suing for blatant brand-hijacking, but a similar product or design should never be disallowed by a government.

And the judges decide if the lawsuits are frivilous. People bring way too many lawsuits against doctors and hospitals for minor things. You can't sue a record company for a nicked CD, you can't take Ford to court if your car comes with a minor scratch...

You always have to expect a few flaws with service, even medical service. That DOES NOT constitute malpractice. A doctor forgetting his knife in your abdomen is malpractice, a doctor prescribing LSD to treat a cold (hello US Army) is malpractice.

[aries]

After all, noone is going to force you to release the "recipe" for the drug so you can continue to manufacture and sell the product without any competition until someone figures out how to make a generic version of it.

Exactly, when they file for a patent they reveal the "recipe" in order to prevent its copying. Ever heard of a trade secret? The government's been keeping secrets for years, successfully.