Evil Bastards

Background: Friend of mine has a friend who hates Wal-Mart. Whenever I see something positive about Wal-Mart, I pass it to my friend who passes it WMB (Wal-Mart Basher). A couple days ago I passed along a PR release announcing WM's expansion of their $4 prescription program. In return, WMB sent a story from NPR. My email response:

Here's the part about Wal-Mart from the written portion of the article. I didn't listen to the audio:

"Almost everybody closed because of too much competition," he says. "What happened? Wal-Mart came along and closed them down. The consumer made a choice to choose Wal-Mart. The prices were lower, the stores were bigger...."

Too much competition? I wonder what the right amount is. Anyone have a clue? Maybe we could vote on it. I've got an idea! Everyone gets to vote on how much competition there should be. Hmmm....that might be a logistical nightmare trying to conduct that election. Wait, I got it. We'll distribute ballots to everyone. We'll make them green and print numbers on them (like 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100). Voters can take them to the store they want to vote for and give them to the store. Then at the end of the election, the stores can tally up their votes and see who gets to stay in business.

"Wal-Mart came along and closed them down", yet "the consumer made a choice to choose WalMart". Okay so did Wal-Mart come along and ordered the competition to close or did Wal-Mart open a store and consumers took their business to Wal-Mart instead of the other place? Because if WalMart walked up to it's competition and pulled a gun or something and threatened them to shutdown, something needs to be done! On the other hand, if consumers CHOSE Wal-Mart, then maybe the Wal-Mart haters ought to be yelling at the consumers.

Oh and can you believe Wal-Mart's stores were bigger and the prices lower? What a bunch of greedy corporate bastards offering lower prices and a bigger selection. Enticing us mindless sheep (aka consumers). Leading us to slaughter. Someone needs to do something!

:o) <-- not a Wal-Mart smiley face

[Online Rant. Posted 05/07/2008.]