We buy most of our food
locally, but we buy most products for the home from Walmart.
I recently purchased a pair
of bifocal glasses at the Walmart store: the frames were $17.00 and the total,
including Transition lens, came to $125.00 – less than half of what it would
have cost at the local eye doctor – and they came with a one year warranty.
Our microwave, George Foreman
grill, some of our dishes, some of my tools etc. came from Walmart. I get the toner for my printer, most of our
paper products and cleaning supplies and even the windshield washer fluid for
our car from Walmart. Many of these
products I would have to go out of town to purchase.
The bad rap for Walmart is
the wages they pay - and the way they treat their workers; but, have you ever
asked a worker at the Dollar Store, or Save-a-Lot what pay and benefits they
receive?
When my wife and I first came
to town thirty years ago the unemployment rate was 15%: one out of six people
were unemployed. The paper mills were
the desired place to work; next came the shoe factories; then there were the
wood turning mills ( seventeenth century sweat shops that never went more than
three days without an work related accident);
and finally the tanning mill ( you could always tell the tanning workers
because they had fingers missing.)
Walmart employs a few hundred
people in our small community. For the
most part the people working at Walmart are untrained and would be unemployed
if the company left town. Are there
better places to work? You bet – but
those jobs don’t exist here.
Before we get all high and
mighty about the Chinese junk sold at Walmart check out where your cell phone
was made; what third world country your clothes were made in; all the products,
including fresh foods you purchase on a regular basis not produced in the United States.
We liberals complain about
global warming, yet we drive pickup trucks, heat our homes with fuel oil, burn
wood stoves, buy our electricity from coal fired plants, and have a house full
of plastic. We should be conscious of
our hypocrisies.
Walmart, such as it is,
forces local stores to compete – and for someone on a small fixed income
cheaper products are important.
We buy local when ever we
can, but we shop at Walmart on a regular basis – and we say hello to a number
of our friends that work and shop there.
I will stand in a protest
line with the Walmart workers for higher pay; but I don’t wish the Walmart
store to go away. Their business plan
is like every other big business in the country: designed to pay big bucks at
the top while paying workers as little as possible. This isn't new. It is the way it has always been. It is
the American free market way.
the Ol’Buzzard
