<p>I went into Walmart tonight after work for the first time in years. I needed to get a kettle bell and Walmart is the place for that, according to the gurus over on the Exercise thread!</p>
<p>Y’all ruined my whole shopping experience! I went in open minded and immediately saw a mother slapping away at her toddler! There were no employees to help me. I did find my kettle bell and lugged it the 1/2 through the store to one of the 3 open registers. The nice woman ahead of me in line asked me to go ahead of her since I only had the one (very heavy) item. I thought that was very nice and I thanked her profusely. A screaming child was drowning out everything in the store. Nordstrom it wasn’t, but I have a new 15 pound kettle bell!</p>
<p>I wish I could take some of you with me to Bangladesh, or south India, or Pakistan, or… and just have you visit the factories where the Walmart subcontractors are making your clothes, or your cheap soccer balls, or…</p>
<p>I wouldn’t even begin to claim that the others are much better in this regard. But I do know what I’ve seen. You wouldn’t want your children working in these places, and the only reason they aren’t is a pure accident of birth.</p>
<p>I don’t have an answer, except to say that Value Village is my retailer of choice.</p>
<p>Me too! And I talk about my 2nd hand/thrift shop/garage sale/consignment store/craigslist deals all the time at work. My students invariably, are STUNNED to learn that I shop at those places, and that not only am I not embarrassed by it, but that I am happy about it. It causes some of them (all low income) to rethink their idea of a deal, and makes others of them less embarrassed about doing the same (as evidenced by the “I’ve-never-told-anyone-I-get-my-kids-clothes-there” comments) </p>
<p>That’s why the elitist comments are presumptuous, and laughable. </p>
<p>And no, I’m not a hippy, or bleeding heart liberal…just cheap.</p>
<p>And those folks in India work there because–it beats begging or picking rags from a dump. I don’t judge other countries by our own standards. i just fell lucky to have been born a US citizen. They gave their own governments and laws.</p>
<p>“How do you know that we haven’t been there?”</p>
<p>I said, “some of you”. If you’ve been there, more power to you.</p>
<p>They work there because they’ve been kicked off the land they worked for centuries, because GMO cotton has destroyed their communities, because multinational prawn farming destroyed their land, because global climate change has made some of the land untenable. I don’t for a minute think the foreign governments are, on the whole, any better than ours (though usually less corrupt.)</p>
<p>And I don’t know what to do about it. But I do know that I don’t want to shop at Walmart, or buy a soccer ball sewn by a six-year-old chained to a wall.</p>
<p>Based on what I saw of India, the folks working in what we might call sweatshops would most likely consider themselves lucky. Every floor in the backpacker hotels had a “watcher” who didn’t get paid but got a bowl of rice and a chance to sleep on the floor in the halls, rather than out on the street.</p>
<p>Even out on the street, there is a hierarchy of homeless people. When the shops along a street close down for the night, their sidewalk fills with the homeless, each of whom have “their” spot and who will fight if someone tries to take it – these spots in front of the stores are prized, because there is a raised curb and an overhang which protects them from downpours. The other homeless get rained on.</p>
<p>Many families intentionally cripple one of their children, especially if they live near a tourist destination – they do so because Westerners as a group give such children, parked in strategic begging locations, enough money to pay for the living expenses of a large extended family, far more than the head of the household could ever earn on his own.</p>
<p>When you take away their sweatshops, you doom those employees to lives that would be much worse.</p>
<p>Perhaps. But you need to remember that most of the people who came to the sweatshops had their livelihoods taken away from them. (and most of them are not beggars in the big cities either). Or (as in the case of the soccer ball makers), many of them were kidnapped and “sold”.</p>
<p>Walmart notified its suppliers in January of its tightened ‘zero tolerance’ standard for unauthorized subcontracting related to worker safety in Bangladesh and surrounding region factories. </p>
<p>While I generally avoid Walmart and haven’t set foot on a local McDonalds since my youngest grew past the “Happy Meal and a couple of hours at the indoor McD’s playland when the weather is terrible can be a wonderful thing” stage, there are times when I appreciate them, and all national chains.</p>
<p>I like the consistency of product, even if the product is relatively crappy. On vacations, I appreciate the fact that when the weather hands us something completely unexpected, or when we forget to pack sunscreen, or one of us leaves out his underpants, or the airline loses the luggage, we can make a quick dash to the closest Walmart (prefer Target, but there seems to ALWAYS be a Walmart) and find what we need, cheaply. At that point I’m not looking for a really well made raincoat, because I have one at home. I’m just looking for something to get me through the unexpected monsoon. I like the fact that when we are on the road, we can be pretty sure that wherever we pull off for gas there will probably be a McDonalds, and their french fries and shakes will be good, and we won’t come down with food poisoning before we get to our destination.</p>
<p>My daughter got pinkeye at one of those McD playland places and we kept our kids out of those places afterwards. McD’s supposedly has healthier products and that’s where they are making tons of profits these days. I’m working on getting down to marriage weight and don’t eat out at all because I want to control diet and nutrition closely. That means home prepared meals.</p>
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<p>You only said that you’d like to take some of you. Not that the some of you didn’t refer to whether or not you’ve been there.</p>
<p>I went to Walmart yesterday for the first time in months. We are having a mini monsoon season and my daughter needed rain boots for a field trip today. I went to four stores before making the trek. I luckily found some inexpensive Hunter knockoffs on sale for $15.</p>
<p>The store was well lit and neat but I felt like I walked into a dystopian novel. It was crowded but eerily quiet. The lines for customer service and Western Union were extremely long. Many of the customers were obviously poor. The whole experience was depressing.</p>
<p>Volvo station wagon driving soccer moms stopping at Walmart to buy almond milk on the way home from the country club will surely get depressed being in a Walmart.</p>
<p>The day before Thanksgiving, I went to Whole Foods with my SIL. We were expecting a total of 15 people in our house for three days. She and my other SIL are into all healthy food. That’s great, but I think they go overboard. We spent $926 in that store, and I’d already spent a couple of hundred at the “regular” grocery store. And of course we didn’t use all the food. SIL warned me that the roast beef wouldn’t last long since it had no preservatives. I about died when I looked at the price we’d paid (my nephew had picked it out, so I hadn’t looked at it before then) - $16/pound! Good grief.</p>
<p>We (DH and I) have been banned from shopping at Walmart by DS and DD ever since the bad publicity about how they treat their workers. We don’t shop there but once in a while DH will go there to get something he can’t find anywhere else. He comes back and hides the bags from my DD.</p>
<p>Ever so often I stumble on this thread and just makes me laugh. The people who shop at Walmart :</p>
:</p>