you have to tell me this ...HOW is it unions are to blame for so much in this country when less that 10% of the country is unionized ..I'm at a loss to understand this ..and while on the subject Walmart is one of the major problem employers as there people need the government programs ( food stamps ...heap ) and any other things necessary to exist ..of course there employees say Walmart is a good employer their afraid to say anything else they don't know who you are ..my wife worked there for years ....they suck
Unions aren't responsible for a lot of things in this country, but they are responsible for some pretty big things. Unions are at a low point as far as their representation goes, and that's not where they want to be. Unions are just like any business... they need revenue. They need revenue to pay salaries, benefits, office space, electric bills, and buy influence, and to increase those revenues they have to increase membership, and recent history has shown they'll go to great lengths to make that happen. To give you some perspective, Walmart offers the unions about 1.2 million potential members, who would pay dues on average of $478 a year, which would mean over $573,600,000.00 being pumped into union coffers each year! You think unions aren't desperate enough to get that cash that they aren't willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get it?
I'm probably not the only one who remembers the ABC Primetime Live report on Food Lion grocery stores back in 1992 that ended up landing ABC in court. ABC News had a couple of producers go undercover at a Food Lion store to expose all kinds of bad practices like selling food past it's expiration date, selling slimy lunch meats, selling rat-knawed food, etc. It made it look like Food Lion was the worst food store in the country. What ABC didn't bother to mention was that all of the employees in the piece were activists and supporters of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which had just failed to unionize Food Lion workers, or that the practices they "exposed" weren't Food Lion practices at all but crap the union activists cooked up. They also didn't mention that the idea for the story came from Neel Lattimore, an activist and spokesman for the union (and BTW, he was later Hillary Clinton's press secretary... go figure).
When I watched the episode of Primetime Live, what shocked me wasn't the allegations being made. It was the allegations were almost word-for-word identical to allegations that had been made against a small grocery chain in Maryland called Value Food that we shopped at when we lived there. We had to make our way through union activists every time we went in the store, and they would try to get you to go somewhere else because the food wasn't safe because of the exact same practices the Primetime Live segment covered! Once Value Food caved in and allowed the union in, poof! All those allegations of bad business practices disappeared over night and as if by magic, and now Value Food was the finest food store in America! That's why I was thrilled that Food Lion didn't cave and ended up suing the whole pack of liars.
Now we have the same games being pulled by the USW and the UFCW against Walmart. There's a small minority of workers who want to be unionized, but not enough to form a majority, so the workers who do either create situations that look bad for Walmart, or out right lie about conditions, to try to trick consumers into thinking Walmart is screwing it's people and not wanting to shop there in the hopes the downturn in business will force Walmart to push for unionization. I guarantee you that if Walmart pushed unionization, overnight you would see a complete 180 on their business practices. All of a sudden they would go from corporate greed specialists to benevolent defenders of the poor and from sinner to saint.
As for Walmart being a "
major problem employers as there people need the government programs ( food stamps ...heap ) and any other things necessary to exist", let's give that some perspective too. About 1.4 million Americans work at Walmart. Non-seasonal, part-time, workers make up about 32% of Walmart's workforce, or about 448,000 workers. Now factor in the number of Americans who receive some type of public assistance is 153.8 million. Even if every single employee at Walmart, from the CEO to the greeters, was on some sort of public assistance, Walmart would account for less than 1% of the folks on public assistance. If a more realistic scenario like every part-time worker was on public assistance, that would account for about .01 percent of the folks on assistance. I'm no statistician, but I don't see how accounting for an unrealistically high (since we're assuming every part-time Walmart employee is on assistance, which they aren't) .01% of anything can be considered being a major part of a problem... unless of course I'm some union activist who wants to get people like you roiled up against a company by misrepresenting the facts.
As for your wife, I know people who worked at Walmart and thought it sucked, hated it, cursed it, whatever. I also know people who love it. I sold a new Mustang to a young lady who had worked herself up from a cashier to manager of the cosmetics section in two years, which was when she bought the car, and now eight years later she's a general manager of a store and driving a much better car than the Mustang I sold her.
I look at working at Walmart like working at any other business. Some people make the most of the opportunity and some don't.
- - - Updated - - -
Bru's explanation of the pricing theory applies to selling used car parts as well.
If you want to sell it...price it accordingly.
If you want to sell it fast...price it just slightly under the going rate.
If you want top dollar...be prepared to wait...sometimes longer than an average human lifespan.
What I found so interesting about Walmart's strategy is that consumers will assume all of a store's prices are lower just because one is lower. At first I thought Ray was making that up, but then I remembered looking at TVs years ago in a Walmart and doing exactly what he described. I shopped around for the lowest price on a 32" set and found it at Walmart. But then I also saw the 36" sets and the 40" sets, and since I had already decided to spend the money on the 32", I started thinking why not go ahead and buy one of the bigger sets for a little bit more and just assumed they were priced lower than what anyone else would sell them at. I had done exactly what they wanted and expected me to do, and that was very enlightening to me.
But while this sounds sinister, this sort of stuff has been going on for as long as retail existed. I remember my Dad shopping for a sabre saw at Sears one day back in the 70s, and he told the salesman he saw the exact same saw for less at Kmart. The salesman told him the saws may look identical, but check the model model numbers. Black & Decker would make a better tool for sale at some retailers, then make a cheaper lower-quality one for sale at discount retailers. My Dad followed up on that and found the number on the Sears saw was like a model 100, and the saw at Kmart looked identical to the Sears saw but had a model number of model 100 with a hyphenated number like 100-N. The saws looked the same externally, but they were different inside.
- - - Updated - - -
You guys drink some strong Kool Aid (Fox Flavored I bet) My wife & I have a $2500 deductable & get dental with our insurance for $497 a month I pay 5% on meds
That beats the $1230 a month for just my wife with a preexisting before ObamaCare Our income is over $80K a year so you can't call me a Govt mooch
Non compliant usually means not enough insurance to be legal in the law
I have two questions. One, are you in an ACA plan? And two, is your plan subsidized?
