We’ve seen “Walmart is a virus” videos before, but this interactive map showing the proliferation of Walmart from the early 1960s until 2007 is especially cool. Zoom in and out as the Walmart infection grows…
Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America [Flowing Data](Thanks, synergy!)
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yeah yeah walmart kills people blah blah.
How about showing this for any other company? Starbucks?
Eh, the cheaper they are, the more I’ll shop there.
disgusting.
@blong81: The more jobs are shipped over-seas, the lower our economy sinks, etc, etc…
Too many people today either have no foresight, or could care-less about the future. Hopefully, these people will be around to reap what they sow…
@blong81: Cheaper or less expensive? There’s a fairly large difference between the two. I prefer to have high quality goods at inexpensive prices. Walmart can only deliver on one of those points, thusly I don’t patron their warehouses.
When I saw the Buy N Large company in the movie “Wall E”, I thought of Wal-Mart.
Yeah, how dare they move into poor areas and reduce prices. Don’t you know that poor people deserve to be ripped off by smaller, less efficient, retail operations with huge overhead?
Americans vote with their dollars and, by a huge margin, they vote for Wal-Mart. If we hated them as much as some people claim, they would have been out of business decades ago.
@Howie: I applaud your freely-made choice about which products to buy. I assume you respect everyone else’s choices as well?
what’s with all the wal-mart hate on consumerist lately? Wal-mart helps a lot of communities and it helps poor people who live pay-check to pay-check. For all the wrongs wal-mart has done, nothing compares to how much they have done to provide more options for poor people.
site down at 3:15 EST
@petrarch1610: WalMart has helped the poor become a throw-away society like the rich- yeah for WalMart.
Poor communities did fine before WalMart. They’d do fine without them now. Actually they probably do better, since the poor communities are becoming more prevalent BECAUSE of WalMart and their tactics.
@petrarch1610: It’s more complicated than that.
When the local stores go away, there’s no place to work but Walmart (an exaggeration, but work with me here). Walmart pays a lower wage and gives the employees less power than a small business would. Also, WalMart sends most of his profit out of state and out of country, where it does the local community no good. As a result, you end up with a community of lower paid people, forced to shop at WalMart, while the money, that used to flow around the community, is hemorrhaged far, far away.
The only people WalMart helps are the CEO’s and the investors. They’ve provided less options and cheaper products to people.
If you want to take it even further, it’s companies like WalMart that took advantage of trade agreement loopholes to lower their manufacturing costs by using small children in third world countries to sew their clothes. This resulted in the closing of local manufacturing in the United States, since competitors could not stay open using goods produced in this country. No, those good paying manufacturing jobs also disappeared.
Believe me, they have done *nothing* to help the poor, other than make them poorer and force them to shop there due to a lack of other options.
@rellog, the fact is that poor people vote with their dollars and Wal-Mart is the undisputed winner.
@rellog: “poor communities are becoming more prevalent BECAUSE of WalMart and their tactics”
Prove it.
You and I have very different meanings of the word ‘forced’.
[www.globalinsight.com]
people who say wal-mart hasn’t helped the poor obviously don’t know what its like to live pay-check to pay-check.
i suggest everyone watch Penn&Teller’s Bullsh*t episode on Wal-Mart hate. Here’s a teaser:
I wish that video could’ve used that smiley face brand icon to show the spread. That would’ve been way creepier!
ps – Wal Mart goes away if you stop shopping at it. If you like it, shop there. If you don’t like it, don’t shop there. Easy!
@petrarch1610:
I love that show. They do a great job putting a new perspective on an issue. Although I can’t call them objective, which is why I have to take a lot of their facts with a grain of salt.
@purplesun: I know the prevailing view is that Wal-Mart destroys small businesses, but at least in my home town, that is not the case. We had an increase in small businesses opening after our Walmart turned into a Supercenter, and they all clustered around Wal-Mart! It may be an exception, but it shows the prevailing view is not always correct.
When you shop at Wal-Mart because that is what you can afford, the only thing you will be able to afford is Wal-Mart.
It is a downward spiral. Wal-Mart drives manufacturing jobs to China, and puts mom and pop stores out of business. Their goods are often inferior to those made by the same company sold at other retailers.
When you buy something at Wal-Mart it may be cheaper at the register because of the other costs that don’t get passed on to you at the register. Cheaper made in China goods often come at the cost of destruction of the environment, and an exploitation of third world workers.
And then when the product breaks (as it is much more likely to happen when buy a cheap piece of crap made at Wal-Mart) the cost on the local environment occurs. Pollution and landfill space.
@nonzenze: Usually for me, for something to constitute force it must involve “do X or physical harm Y shall occur to you.” I’m pretty sure Wal Mart hasn’t engaged in this sort of behavior. Now the communities who won’t allow the company to build a store on land they own and would turn the police on Wally World should Wal Mart attempt to purchase and develop land in said community; that fits my definition.
I’ve never gotten the way people have such a fetish for “mom and pop businesses”.
Somehow, these small businesses manage to pay their employees huge wages, full benefits, and make this world a perfect place.
The fact of the matter is that these “mom and pop” stores tend to pay low wages, no benefits, and fail and go out of business all the time (at a rate over 90%) without WalMart doing anything.
most people (myself included) don’t take into account the ethical or environmental costs of a product. they only look at one thing: the price. there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just a way to spend less money.
if buying a more expensive, “natural”, “ethical”, or locally made product warms your heart because it wasn’t made in a sweatshop or is covered in chemicals, go ahead.
the fact is, the cheaper, more popular products are the ones produced with more efficient and artificial processes where labor is cheap. people vote with their wallets, and wal-mart wins by a landslide.
Agent Smith was right when he told Morpheus that Man was a virus…
I avoid walmart at all costs unless somehow every store around me is out of something I need (rare, but its happened). The whole “poor because of walmart” thing makes a lot of sense. Walmart is not necessarily a store anymore, its more of a lifestyle for some people. Walmart teaches that “cheap is good, longevity means old, and old is bad, so buy cheap and new!”. It thus creates a whole swath of people know nothing more than buy/throwaway/buy/throwaway. Walmart also dictates what media companies can and cannot sell because hey, if your largest retail outlet refuses to sell a CD or game because of content, wouldn’t you as the developer/artist/label react to adapt to this controlled market? As for their employees… well lets just say I’ve seen happier people pumping gas. In the end, its just as much about the money as it is about selling a culture that ties the money to a particular brand or store, thus creating a self perpetuating line of consumers.
@petrarch1610:
I just watched that episode a few days ago. A few things jumped out at me as bullshit on Penn&Teller’s part. One was that they called bullshit on people who say Walmart offers low wages and benefits by citing Walmart’s average hourly wage as $10 something. Except that the $10.– average hourly wage only includes full time employees. Totally apples and oranges. Even more ridiculous was that they say the average [full time] employee makes more than $10.hour, the only one they choose to profile makes well below that. Another bullshitty fact was their statistic that families save over $2000 because of Wal-Mart. That’s true, but as consumerist readers know, you don’t have to ever shop there to have saved that money [consumerist.com] .
If I think of more I’ll report back. I love that show, but it was definitely a poorly researched episode and entirely unconvincing.
@blong81: Ever watched Big Box Mart? [www.jibjab.com]
If that’s what these people want (as indicated by their free choice to shop there), then that’s what they want. There’s no sense lamenting the particular choices that make other people happy, no matter how much we cannot understand them.
If you think you have a better way, then you are free (and welcome!) to try to convince people. If your way of life does make people happier then you should have no trouble getting everybody on board.
I love wal-mart! They have the cheapest prescription drugs around. My dad may not be alive today if it was not for wal-mart. He was one of those buy groceries or drugs people until wal-mart slashed it’s prices on rx’s.
I’m happy that there’s no actual Wal Mart in my fair city of… And I’m fine with Target not expanding.
For a truly objective view of Walmart’s impact, watch the PBS Frontline “Is Walmart good for america?” [www.pbs.org]
The crux of what I got from watching that when it came on originally a couple of years ago, that while some believe that Walmart provides a net positive impact on the economy, others are emphatic in their belief that it is a negative influence. In my view, the truth lies somewhere in between, and is dependent on a whole host of factors.
Don’t like them? Don’t shop there. That is the beauty of a free society.
As for sweatshop labor, remember that not so long ago that America was built on the backs of that labor, which allowed our economy to eventually flourish. In countries where these practices are common, over time there will be improvements, just as there was in the US. Also note that if not for those jobs, distateful as they may appear, many workers would have exactly zero job opportunities.
It goes without saying that Walmart should encourage fair and reasonable labor practices of suppliers, but to overlook the true economic picture of those countries (e.g. China) tends to negate many other salient points that could be made.
Reminds me of the path killer bees took when invading the U.S.
@wiIdcatlh: I was thinking the same thing. I want to see these mythical mom-and-pop shops that pay above minimum wage, give health insurance, and instead of smoke spew rainbows and ponies. I used to work for a mom-and-pop cell phone place. We never got a raise, paychecks were late, our “health-insurance” was a dental discount card and when the place went out of business, for whatever reason they fought against us when we applied for unemployment. Yeah, mom-and-pop shops, they are greatest.
@WisconsinDadof2: What gets me is that people act as if Walmart is the only one that uses sweatshops. Target, JCPenny, Macy’s, K-Mart, Sears, they all use sweatshops. But it’s understandable, Walmart is the biggest so they have the biggest target painted on them.
Waiting for projects.flowingdata.com…
(five minutes pass)
What is this, on Geocities hosting?
@wiIdcatlh: Exactly what I was thinking! It just isn’t logical. You have small store, with a relatively small inventory paying employees $15 an hour with benefits and still are able to keep rock bottom prices. Nope. It is a nice idea but it isn’t realistic.
@WisconsinDadof2: Age of Walmart is on CNBC this weekend. I found it very informative. But like anything, watch with an objective eye.
My favorite is how Walmart ‘forced’ some companies to do stupid things like Vlasic pickles. The companies went along with walmart because they were so deathly afraid of losing market share even if it meant selling items at a loss.
There’s something very eerie about this…
Considering that there are no Wal-marts in L.A., the smear of green over us is fascinating.
Personally, I think Wal-mart is a POS store. I don’t know if it was the coming of Wal-mart or something else, but the demise of New England chains Caldor’s, Bradlees, and Ames… ok, no Ames sucked worse than Wal-mart, but the loss of those saddened me back when I lived there.
@ohyeahright: Bullshit! was a much better show when it was actually about skepticism and devil’s advocacy, and before it became nothing but a platform for P&T’s brand of Cato Institute douchebag libertarian propaganda.
Now the title is much more about the show itself rather than the people featured on it.
@BlackBirdTA:
I think that was the point. I thought the same thing. So, does that mean that in x years if we fill the earth up with trash, does that mean that Wal-Mart will save us all and reduce us to blobs of fat and atrophied bone floating around on chairs staring at screens for our whole lives?
Cheers!
As an informed consumer I always include walmart in my shopping arsenal. If they have the product I want for less than the competition, I shop there. Period.
It amazes me the hypocrisy consumerist editors and the vast majority of commenters show when it comes to walmart. Corporations exploit their employees and attempt to smudge out the competition. It’s their nature. Why single one (or a select few) out as the root of all evil?
Cool animation btw. Next up: Starbucks!
@LostAngeles: o rly?
The smiley face beckons. Go to it and partake in its low, low prices.
@nonzenze: “Yeah, how dare they move into poor areas and reduce prices.”
Most of my relatives live in Portsmouth, Ohio. You’ve probably never been there, but it is a poor city. The standard of living has been quite low there ever since steel manufacturing left the area in the 1970s. When Wal-Mart move d into Portsmouth in the mid 1990s, one by one most of the mom and pop grocery shops and somewhat larger regional grocery stores (Big Bear, Festival Foods, etc) closed their doors. Once most of the competition was driven out of town, prices stopped falling at Wal-Mart. I live in Toledo, where the standard of living is much higher than Portsmouth, yet the prices at the Portsmouth Wal-Mart are higher than those here in Toledo. The next closest town whose main grocery store is not Wal-Mart is over 50 miles away.
Why don’t people shit all over Target like they shit all over Wal-Mart? Is it because they are a smaller operation, or because their business practices are somehow better? I’m a big fan of Target because I find their merchandise and aesthetic to be superior to Wal-Mart, but they are pretty similar, so I wonder why Target largely escapes derision. Anyone?
@AtomicPlayboy: Because the soccer moms driving Lexus SUVS and college students finishing their slurpees and throwing the cups out their car windows need a place to buy their Head and Shoulders and Pledge after the anti-Walmart protest. And besides Target is “kewl”.
kelrod, the singular of data is not anecdote. I’ve provided solid evidence from a number of sources that Wal-Mart’s prices are, in fact, lower than the competitors.
@nonzenze: Watch the PBS show cited above. As I recall, they have a Wal-Mart manager chortling how they use the price-leaders to draw in the rubes, then get them to switch to the higher-margin models which – surprise! – are more expensive than competing stores. And the Wal-Mart staff during meetings cheering their dep’t managers who do this the most effectively.
They use smoke and mirrors to seem like they’re cheaper, but they’re not. They’re just cheap.
@cmdrsass: Gee…. uh, their practices of forcing companies to continue cutting the bottom line until they are forced to shipped jobs over seas…. Check Rubber Maid, and Jockey for examples…
And if people chose to vote with their dollars, they deserve what they get. Just like to morons that voted “W” into office. That retard has trashed our country… only problem is, is that he’s also fucked it up for the rest of us- just like WalMart.
@friedgold: There’s nothing wrong with buying without a conscience??? Then I guess you wouldn’t mind your family being kidnapped to work in sweatshops so others can buy cheap t-shirts…
I really wish karma was real, so people that behaved in this manner would get what they have coming…