Thought Experiment: Rise of the Anti-Walmart

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Falstaff: Apr 27, 2008; I have a kind of alacrity in sinking.

Liquid Communism posted:

No privately held business 'sits on' their profits.

Yeah, this isn't true at all, at least not in Canada where HBNRW is posting from.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 14:31

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# ? May 9, 2024 01:52

Arglebargle III: Feb 21, 2006

HBNRW posted:

Sorry for the wall of text. I'm going to try to clarify things.

That's the problem. Because wages are not increasing with inflation, wages that we have now are insufficient to live off of in poor cities. We let every company increase the cost of food, but we do nothing to offset this cost. People lose more and more buying power as inflation increases. Something must be done to force wage increases or people will continue to vacate poor areas for those where their money will go farther. If companies won't do it voluntarily, and governments won't force it because it makes them look "bad for business", then we need a market approach that forces wage increases. One way is to make a company that automatically increases its own wages by its own mandate. If it sells all things equally to its competitors for less, then being a better run business will make yours more attractive than one that treats its employees lovely and sells the same poo poo. It sets a bar that makes all private industry look bad. Since the value of food is completely subjective (considering how much is wasted in developed countries, the cost of having that food wasted each day doesn't help), the easier and cheaper you can make food purchases (and a pricing cap would help), the more money the poor will have to spend on other services. Instead of going "Do I pay rent, or do I eat?"

Could you explain the difference between price, cost, and value? Because if you can't you need to educate yourself before you go inventing a five-sided wheel.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 14:47

Stretch Marx: Apr 29, 2008; I'm ok with this.

My Imaginary GF posted:

How you gonna protect your anti-walmart when wallyworld bribes the local township to eminent domain your outlet and sell it to wallyworld at a firesale price?

The world does have an anti-Walmart. Its called CostCo.

"Hey Shareholders! The GOVERNMENT is trying to confiscate YOUR COMPANY and sell it to Walmart for next to NOTHING! Are YOU going to let BIG GOVERNMENT take YOUR BUSINESS?! What is NEXT; your HOME?! STOP BIG GOVERNMENT AND WALMART FROM TAKING YOUR MONEY AND PROPERTY! CALL YOUR REP/MP/SENATOR/MAYOR/THE PRESIDENT/PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE/THE POPE AND TELL THEM YOU WON'T LET THEM TAKE YOUR BUSINESS!". I now have every redneck/blue collar nut job foaming at the mouth at both government overreach and painted Walmart as a big bad government welfare queen. What does Walmart do next?

Also, while I do like Costco and generally shop there myself, it is still flawed in how slow it raises wages. While it does it better, it is still too slow to help a lot of people in poor areas get ahead. The extra buck an hour they make over the people who are at Walmart still generally means that have to take a second job if they have a family. If they're single, it's not so bad. But most young and single people have left the city for greener pastures. Which is partially what the Anti-Walmart is designed to help stop, which Costco cannot.

Liquid Communism posted:

You can't be blind enough to have not realized that the reason there is no real difference between retail pricing these days is specifically because Walmart has extorted distributors for the lowest prices possible, to the point that any other retailer purchasing lesser quantities would take a loss due to lack of economies of scale, and ruthlessly undercuts prices until their competition goes out of business based on that leverage.

Seriously, man? Yes, I've very aware of this. This is why I want the Anti-Walmart to take the same mentality. I have already, multiple times now, explained this. This is the reason why Walmart is considered the most efficient means of getting basic goods to poor people. It undercuts all competition with cheaper and less expensive versions of everyday things that people are most likely go through and not be concerned that it didn't last two years. It undercuts distributors so that only those that feed Walmart survive. It will go anywhere in the world to get its goods to sell, which promotes industrial expansions in where ever it is most cheap to produce things. This kills industry in developed nations who refuse to stoop to working in sweat shops.

The only thing that could possibly compete against a model like that, is itself. However, the problem is that, as other retailers have demonstrated, you cannot copy Walmart exactly and survive. People will go to what they are familiar with and if Walmart even once gives them a better deal, they'll generally return to Walmart. Why? Why not? So companies react too slow, try to match Walmart, fail to regain lost customers, Walmart does it again, they lose more, death spiral ensues.

So how do you stop this spiral from starting? The copy of the Walmart must have something that encourages people to choose it over Walmart. Costco tries to do this by selling everything in bulk for slightly cheaper than the average going price. However, as evidenced by the fact they have membership fees, either this causes too many people to come to the store (thus causing shortages which can't be managed) or it doesn't make as much money (so it's being made up in the form of membership fees) or Costco just likes nickle and diming too (which wouldn't surprise me). But, as made evident that lots of people still buy food at Walmart when a Costco is up the street, that is either not enough incentive, or we have a lot of people who aren't willing to/can't pay a membership fee.

Thus an option that doesn't restrict customer base must be chosen. However, Walmart already holds that niche. So how do we take that niche away? You have to create an incentive that, given everything else being equal, will make people want to go to the Anti-Walmart over Walmart without:

A - Making it obviously transparently Socialist. People will snap and reject it out of spite. Deniability to any government intervention is important. The only way to make a company not actually public is to sell off its shares to a private entity. If you want to make sure that private entity isn't going to turn around and sell out to Walmart (or Walmart doesn't just buy it), then you need to find one that would give an incentive not to do that. One possible solution is a union. People won't sell their own jobs off to a competitor that they know will immediate sell them out. That's stupid and yes there are examples of that happening and obviously people sell their business to competitors all the time. But those people are usually doing so to retire or are incredibly bad businessmen. Most cases of public companies becoming private is because the government sold them to a private individual. The union would hopefully prevent that by owning more of it than the government. The government doesn't really matter in this equation as it can replaced with shareholders, because that's basically what it is at that point. The government exists in this equation to either distribute dividends and/or act as a liaison between the Shareholders and the company. Otherwise, the government does not assist in anyway outside what it could do for Walmart.

and

B - Making it too opaque. People need to be able to see a benefit or they will go to what they know. If the Anti-Walmart is exactly the same as the Walmart, people will go to the Walmart if that's what they always go to. If you don't make immediate benefits obvious, people won't care. If you do, however, then you will set off Walmart's defense reactions. Again, you need to keep the government out of this situation. If the government can't help the Anti-Walmart because that would be socialism, it can't help Walmart because that would be socialism. That's how you have to word it. Walmart can't accuse the Anti-Walmart of being a government stooge and then take money/give bribes. Especially if the Anti-Walmart is YOUR (the shareholders aka the public's) company. The Anti-Walmart needs just as good a propaganda machine as Walmart to remind everyone WHO OWNS ANTI-WALMART. Again, if you were a government who had these options, choosing between the Anti-Walmart or the Walmart, most good people would go with Anti-Walmart. If you're a corrupt dicklord, you would probably go with the Walmart, but given you're a corrupt dicklord, you probably wouldn't have let the Anti-Walmart exist in the first place. :shrugs:

quote:

No privately held business 'sits on' their profits. They invest them in company infrastructure, lobbying relevant governmental and regulatory bodies, advertising, and buying off stockholders to artificially increase their share price and thus get better deals from their financial institutions based on perceived value.

Are you loving kidding me? http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/wmt/financials

Walmart last year made almost 16 BILLION dollars in net profit. That means after expenses. That means above and beyond what was needed to run their business. Are you seriously trying to tell me that Walmart used every last bit of that to build new stores, pay off shareholders, buy off governments, gently caress with poverty rates, poo poo new sweat shops, etc? There is no loving way the Waltons reinvested all that loving money. Especially when it basically made the same amount the year before, and the year before that, etc, etc. There is no loving way it spent over 16 Billion in bribes. No, I would wager that an awfully large chunk of it is doing absolutely nothing but sitting in either the corporate bank account or a whole bunch of small private ones. If you don't think most retail companies are doing the same thing, I welcome you to the great poo poo show of Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. Where the minimum wage is the guideline, not an option. If that's how you want to live, there's a reason why most 80s future movies were dystopian.

Now imagine what Walmart could be doing to help poor communities across a single country with 16 Billion in a year? How much of that 16 Billion would it lose to raise its employee's wages even a dollar to match Costco? To bring in new services? To hire more staff? It won't, because why would it? It can make 16 Billion with its current scheme.

This is why the Anti-Walmart needs its mandate. Because by forcing it to spend that sort of profit rather than maybe, sort of, sometimes I'll use it for this bribe or maybe I'll buy a boat for my boat, you create a corporate atmosphere where banked profit is considered dead weight on the company's long term future and the economy. Because it's union based, a larger chunk of that profit will, most likely, get turned into wage increases. More people with more money equals more sales. Since it has price caps, it can keep people afloat price wise until a raise in wages makes it irrelevant. At that point, you could decide if the caps are still needed. Since it wants to always use its profits for something, it could pay out dividends as incentives to continue coming to it. There are things 16 Billion could go towards that aren't bribes. Even if the Anti-Walmart doesn't make half that in profit because it's forced to buy local, it still has 8 Billion loving Dollars.

Stretch Marx fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Mar 30, 2015

# ? Mar 30, 2015 15:41

Series DD Funding: Nov 25, 2014; by exmarx

HBNRW posted:

Are you loving kidding me? http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/wmt/financials

Walmart last year made almost 16 BILLION dollars in net profit. That means after expenses. That means above and beyond what was needed to run their business. Are you seriously trying to tell me that Walmart used every last bit of that to build new stores, pay off shareholders, buy off governments, gently caress with poverty rates, poo poo new sweat shops, etc? There is no loving way the Waltons reinvested all that loving money. Especially when it basically made the same amount the year before, and the year before that, etc, etc. There is no loving way it spent over 16 Billion in bribes. No, I would wager that an awfully large chunk of it is doing absolutely nothing but sitting in either the corporate bank account or a whole bunch of small private ones. If you don't think most retail companies are doing the same thing, I welcome you to the great poo poo show of Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. Where the minimum wage is the guideline, not an option. If that's how you want to live, there's a reason why most 80s future movies were dystopian.

Luckily, Walmart is publicly owned and we can look at their financials: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/104169/000010416914000019/wmt13114ars.htm

Walmart made 16 billion in profit in fiscal year 2014. They also invested 13 billion of that in new property. 9 billion of that canceled out depreciation of their prior assets, so 4 billion net. The rest went into paying debts, and a large portion went to paying dividends and stock buybacks. That money went back to their investors. They actually ended up with less cash on hand (7.3 billion from 7.8 billion).

Series DD Funding fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Mar 30, 2015

# ? Mar 30, 2015 15:55

tsa: Feb 3, 2014

HBNRW posted:

"Hey Shareholders! The GOVERNMENT is trying to confiscate YOUR COMPANY and sell it to Walmart for next to NOTHING! Are YOU going to let BIG GOVERNMENT take YOUR BUSINESS?! What is NEXT; your HOME?! STOP BIG GOVERNMENT AND WALMART FROM TAKING YOUR MONEY AND PROPERTY! CALL YOUR REP/MP/SENATOR/MAYOR/THE PRESIDENT/PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE/THE POPE AND TELL THEM YOU WON'T LET THEM TAKE YOUR BUSINESS!". I now have every redneck/blue collar nut job foaming at the mouth at both government overreach and painted Walmart as a big bad government welfare queen. What does Walmart do next?

Also, while I do like Costco and generally shop there myself, it is still flawed in how slow it raises wages. While it does it better, it is still too slow to help a lot of people in poor areas get ahead. The extra buck an hour they make over the people who are at Walmart still generally means that have to take a second job if they have a family. If they're single, it's not so bad. But most young and single people have left the city for greener pastures. Which is partially what the Anti-Walmart is designed to help stop, which Costco cannot.

You have been in a lefty echo chamber a little too long if you think your first bit would get any traction whatsoever. It really sounds like you are just asking for a GMI. The reason people at costco still don't make all that much money is because it is mostly unskilled labor. Unskilled labor has never been well compensated, but now there's just a lot more jobs that fall under this category. This is due to jobs being designed more efficiently (in that they have designed jobs to require less thinking to increase efficiency) along with efficiency gains in general from technology and computing.

This is also why unions have suffered, the jobs of today are so much harder to unionize than a factory job of the 50's. It's a lot loving easier to find a new shelf-stocker than to find someone who can safely and quickly operate large machinery. I would also guess that we have seen an increase in the diversity of workers skills, in other words there's a lot bigger gap between a companies high performers and low performers when compared to many decades ago. This is most obvious in finance. Something like that would also lead to a decrease in union participation, which works best when everyone is of fairly equal skill levels.

quote:

Remember, it has been shown mathematically, fiscally, and ethically better to house the homeless. This action has saved every city that has tried it a lot of money. Yet it is still hard to explain to people why it saves money because they have been convinced that socialism is bad. It has to be something that gives them immediate benefit because they can't think long term.

This is laughably false, though I'm sure some leftist blog somewhere made up some numbers that made you believe this. In the real world even 'liberal' cities have just started paying for busing tickets because they can't handle the costs at all.

Baudolino posted:

Your plan is promising in some ways but it depends on the uber-wealthy being too stupid to realize your intentions and the danger anti-walmart would pose to neo-liberalism. Never make that assumption if you want to change the world. Legally or illegally they would find a way to crush anti-walmart.

No, it really doesn't because the op's crackpot theories are unworkable nonsense from the getgo.

tsa fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Mar 30, 2015

# ? Mar 30, 2015 16:10

computer parts: Nov 18, 2010; PLEASE CLAP

tsa posted:

This is also why unions have suffered, the jobs of today are so much harder to unionize than a factory job of the 50's. It's a lot loving easier to find a new shelf-stocker than to find someone who can safely and quickly operate large machinery. I would also guess that we have seen an increase in the diversity of workers skills, in other words there's a lot bigger gap between a companies high performers and low performers when compared to many decades ago. This is most obvious in finance. Something like that would also lead to a decrease in union participation, which works best when everyone is of fairly equal skill levels.

Unskilled labor definitely had unions a hundred years ago. The issue today is more that jobs are becoming increasingly white collar and for whatever reason unions haven't caught on there.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 16:16

Typo: Aug 19, 2009; Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

HBNRW posted:

Gunna have to explain why you think those two things are related enough to contradict themselves. If you only think in terms of profit margins, then no you can't have cheap goods and high wages because you'll stop yourself to maximize your profits. This has been the thinking for centuries and is part of the reason we are in the lovely situation we are in. We need to stop thinking in "how can I get the most out of my customers" and more "how do I steal customers from my competition". One way is improving your employee standards and lowering your prices. Things companies do not do, especially effective monopolies.

Because you want your company to make a profit which in turn means that Revenue - Wages - other costs >0. So the implication is that since your revenue comes from sales if you decrease prices you have less money to pay your workers. If you increase wages, prices has to go up. Even if you run at perfect no net profit at all and with complete benevolence, you are still stuck with the contradiction where you can increase prices to benefit workers or decrease prices to benefit consumers.

Typo fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Mar 30, 2015

# ? Mar 30, 2015 16:21

Arglebargle III: Feb 21, 2006

So... if economies of scale are a problem, wouldn't it be more efficient to simply nationalize Wal-Mart than try to create a competitor?

Your solution makes no sense on a number of levels.

(Did you give up on price controls yet? I haven't read your walls of text.)

# ? Mar 30, 2015 16:40

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

HBNRW posted:

Sorry for the wall of text. I'm going to try to clarify things.

That's the problem. Because wages are not increasing with inflation, wages that we have now are insufficient to live off of in poor cities. We let every company increase the cost of food, but we do nothing to offset this cost. People lose more and more buying power as inflation increases. Something must be done to force wage increases or people will continue to vacate poor areas for those where their money will go farther. If companies won't do it voluntarily, and governments won't force it because it makes them look "bad for business", then we need a market approach that forces wage increases. One way is to make a company that automatically increases its own wages by its own mandate. If it sells all things equally to its competitors for less, then being a better run business will make yours more attractive than one that treats its employees lovely and sells the same poo poo. It sets a bar that makes all private industry look bad. Since the value of food is completely subjective (considering how much is wasted in developed countries, the cost of having that food wasted each day doesn't help), the easier and cheaper you can make food purchases (and a pricing cap would help), the more money the poor will have to spend on other services. Instead of going "Do I pay rent, or do I eat?"

How do you stop rich people from just starting this whole mess again if we try simply another government answer? It happened before the Great Depression; it happened before the Great Recession. It'll happen in the future if we do the same drat thing. I would love a strong government to just come in and slap a company or two around and go "Knock it off." but it won't happen as long as the average Joe is convinced that taxes = bad and private = job creator. The answer has to be something that works within the system but has enough checks and balances that it doesn't go off the rails and just become another Walmart. Because the second it becomes exactly like Walmart, it will fail since Walmart already fills that niche.

You petition your conservative government this and I'll wait for the response.

You again, mistakenly, surmise that this isn't trying to make a profit. It is trying to outsell its competitors just like Walmart does. The difference, and I'll say it again, is that profit made is forced to be used internally to the company in one shape or form instead of being funneled to shareholder's bank accounts (of which there are not very many compared to the population of an average city) where it sits and does nothing or being sat on by the company where it does nothing. It does not get invested back into the economy. It just sits and accrues interest. This has been demonstrated to be a very bad thing throughout history. That money needs to start moving again. As long as companies can cut costs without raising wages, they will do so. As long as they can keep personnel down, they will do so. They will add fees to everything and do everything in their power to neither lower the costs of things, increase the wages of their employees, nor purchase anything that isn't being ship in by container across an ocean.

The theory and supposed benefit of Capitalism is that if a good is in sufficient demand, someone will try to exploit it. The less suppliers, the more valuable it is. Likewise the opposite is true. If more people attempt to sell this product, they compete with people who are also selling it. Theoretically, in order to increase customer share, you need to do something different than your competitors. One thing is you can offer higher quality for the same price. If everyone else follows suit because people would rather pay the same for higher quality, then that's a net benefit. You could lower the price of the same quality good. This will draw more people to your store. This is how Dollarstores work. Again, if it forces all competitors to lower their prices to match then we have another net benefit.

However, because of profit margins, companies always stop this process. There gets to a point where the price of something will never decrease because the store wants to make a return on the product generally equal to a multiplier (I'm selling this good with a mark up that triples the initial wholesale value). Since all stores know there is a point where they can hover around that people will neither choose to go somewhere else or pay more, they all hover at this point. Because why wouldn't you? The price will never go lower than this point until the costs of manufacture and distribution go down, since the retailer will always have a markup.

So the question becomes, if the mark up is always going to be there in private retailers, and that markup is the main obstacle for people to purchase things, and the markup will increase along with inflation, and wages are not increasing in poor areas to compensate for said inflation, and shipping is loving expensive sometimes to avoid local retailers, what do you do?

1 - You could petition the government to mandate wage increases. Conservatives harp that this is going to drive away business. Old men and women start to weep. Most of the young people have left the area, so you have to convince mostly boomers and the elderly. Good luck.

or

2 - Choose to shop at places that lower their prices. Except no one has a reason too. You could go to a bulk place (if you're lucky to have one), but they're probably not really much cheaper, it's just that you get more control over portion. Target here in Canada just flopped because it promised to be more than just another Zellers, which flopped because it was just another Walmart, then surprised no one by being exactly like Zellers. The prices were exactly the same. If no one has a reason to not go to Walmart, they will probably go there since it has the largest variety in most cases. Because they are literally generally the biggest store.

So even retailers now are falling one by one here in Canada because they keep copying each other's ideas but never offer anything different or better. Grocery stores here are hurting because Walmart and other larger chains can now support their own grocery sections. So Grocery stores have to offer newer things, which then get copied by Walmart. Another discount retailer called Giant Tiger (don't ask) is doing the exact same thing, but is able to survive because it picked places that Walmart isn't physically. If Walmart did move to those areas, Giant Tiger would die off too.

So how do you overcome this cycle? Specialty stores all fail because no one has enough disposable income to buy more expensive stuff. So they purchase at Walmart because it's almost as good and is something they can afford. So local stores wither and die.

The purpose of the Anti-Walmart is that it wants to do literally all these things as well. It will set its prices such that it can. It will do everything that Walmart does. However, it will not be allowed to sit on its profits. Unlike retailers who do nothing to invest into the local economies where they set up shop and make billions yet do nothing to lower prices or increase wages, this company is forced too.

First it needs something to initiate being more attractive to purchase at for the poor than Walmart. What are two ways you can attract more poor people to shop here rather than there? One is you give them rebates. If they know they'll make money back from purchasing at place A than place B, given all things else being equal, they would go shop at A. It makes financial sense since free money is free money. But only if it's obvious. This is why mail in rebates, while great for money, generally annoy the poo poo out of people. You could make sure your price is always lower than your competitor by enough to be noticeable. Since the prices at retailers are always mark ups, this just means you make a bit less immediate profit (since you're selling your product for less) for a longer term gain (more people will buy your exact same product if its cheaper). These are both net benefits.

If the people who work at this company are owners of the company, they will be more inclined to see it succeed. This is not a new concept. If the people who also own the company are people who may likely shop at the company (because of the above mentioned better prices), then they would naturally want the prices to be as low as they can be, since they would rather save money too.

Since the company is publicly owned, the general population would like to see a return on their investment. If your company is selling goods at better prices and more frequency than competitors such that more people are choosing to go to you rather than them, then this is reflected in the perceptive value of the company. This is done all over the place in business. I'm not sure why this is surprising. More people buying = more profit = more speculative value in the company.

So let's have an honest look at the probability of someone choosing the Anti-Walmart over Walmart. Again, it has literally everything Walmart has at equal or less expensive for the same quality. As shareholders, the better the company does, the better your dividend is. If all things are equal and you had access to both, which would you prefer? If someone was selling your corn flakes for $4.50 and someone else was selling it for $3.50, along with everything else in the grocery aisle, which would you prefer? Who would you buy your food from? Same for clothes and shoes.

Let's say that Anti-Walmart has just began and is equal in every way to Walmart (minus the structural changes to ownership). People are initially enticed by rebates or Anti-Walmart immediately undercuts Walmart as per its mandate. Remember, these prices are still at markup. Anti-Walmart is still making a profit as long as people are buying their things. Again, if all things are equal, people will go where they dollar can be stretched farthest.

The Anti-Walmart is now bringing in profit. As per its mandate it must do something with it. Probably it will be initially paying off debt. Again, a public company that can finance itself and pay off its debt looks very good to right wing average Joes. Especially if it saves them money.

Currently the Anti-Walmart, with it's more motivated workforce (because they KNOW if the company turns a profit it will eventually be forced to raise wages) and better prices, is now more attractive than Walmart for the same customer base. Walmart must respond in some way but ultimately the Anti-Walmart is mandated to basically always respond to any change by Walmart by stealing their idea and then undercutting it. If Walmart tries to play chicken by intentionally dropping the price of things to severely undercut the Anti-Walmart, the Anti-Walmart will simply match. The fact still remains that as long as people choose to go to the Anti-Walmart, they will always get more back than they would from the regular Walmart. The Anti-Walmart only has to make sure it can pay for its employees and other expenses. It's a publicly owned company. A publicly owned company that is making several million in profit isn't doing anything for the public with that money if it just sits there. The Anti-Walmart's mandate means that if it does turn profits, it finds expenses to fill them. It wants profits, but that's because it really wants to undercut and drive out other retailers to make that profit.

Eventually you come to a point, however, where you cannot lower the price of goods or raise wages without going into the red. This is generally due to the cost of manufacturing and logistics. Thus the price will stagnate at this point. If it is sufficiently low, people may not care. Since the Anti-Walmart is mandated to always look for local sources first, this will promote local merchants to sell basic things to it. If the Anti-Walmart can find a source that has cheaper shipping costs locally, it will always choose that vendor over a multinational outside the state because of its mandate. By having the Anti-Walmart focus on basic needs, it will purchase basic versions of local goods and ignore specialty things. Local vendors would be free to sell their goods as per normal knowing:'

A - Their basic goods has a customer in the form of the Anti-Walmart who is always going to be there as a customer of last resort.

and

B - The Anti-Walmart isn't going to compete for these specialty goods since it can be mandated to only sell basic wares, leaving the specialty vendor to offer upgraded services that the Anti-Walmart won't offer.

Again, the price of things all contains a markup, the goal is to get that markup as low as possible so that it makes things as cheap as possible to extend people's money farther.

Since inflation is a thing, either the price of goods must be artificially lowered or the living wage must be increased. Even if all markups were eliminated, the price of things will increase as long as inflation does. If the Anti-Walmart is driving out other retailers such that it can no longer expand and can no longer lower prices without going into the red, then its only choice to offset its profits is by wage increases, hiring more people, or offering new services.

Wage increases increase the buying power of a company's employees. If these employees are also its customers, they will buy more at that company. This increases this company's own internal demand. This increases sales, which in turn increases profits. As more people get hired on, they now re-enter the workforce and are also becoming paying customers. Since they also own a portion of the business they work at, and know that profits where prices are stagnate = wage increases, they will still be motivated to work there over other retailers. People like knowing there is a light at the end of the tunnel instead of just hoping it's not a train and move forward anyway.

Eventually it will hit a point where it cannot increase wages, hire more people, lower the cost of goods, or increase sales due to market saturation. In private businesses, this is usually when anti-trust laws kick in to break up a monopoly and enforce competition. As made evident by companies like Air Canada, this isn't always the case and as long as the government sees nothing wrong with it, they'll continue to price gouge. Since the Anti-Walmart is owned by the people who would normally be hurt by a monopoly, they can reign it back in if it goes off track. It must ultimately bow to its shareholders and if your shareholders are your customers, then the customer knows best.

As long as the mandate is in place, the Anti-Walmart will basically maintain the status quo. It can't lower prices until manufacturing costs go down, and that won't happen until robotics becomes the absolute norm. Logistics costs will also be a factor as long as there remains gaps between resource collection to refining/manufacturing to distributors to retailers to customers. As these decrease, the cost will decrease as well. As long as the Anti-Walmart is there to help prop up local economies, people will have more money and freedom to invest back into their communities and take more chances starting up new businesses. Just like welfare and food stamps do. Except this is not welfare, it's just an incredibly efficient pricing machine that causes a basically similar affect and can be defended as a market option in the face of people who claim public businesses cannot work.

Kudos for obviously coming up with all of this on your own.

Unfortunately it drifts randomly between reality and fantasy and spends most of the time in the latter.

You seem to understand what some of the pieces are here but not actually how they work. Wal-mart has low prices partly because of its ruthlessness on wages and economies of scale. You can't magically replicate low prices without those things.

This whole thing amounts to "Hey let's take this thing that tons of really smart, motivated people are already trying really hard to do [compete in the retail marketplace] and just do it better!"

Falstaff posted:

Yeah, this isn't true at all, at least not in Canada where HBNRW is posting from.

This is a stupid canard (as expected because it's huffpost). Money is always invested in something and even if it's a bank checking account it's available for use by someone. Though it's never a bank checking account.

Baudolino posted:

Walmart and every other largish private company would use all their influence to destroy anti-walmart. I am afraid that this plan is unlikely as hell to work.
Pundits would be talking about the threat posed by " commie-capitalists". The mere perception that this store is pro-goverment would be enough to make many People refuse to buy there, even it does provide the best and cheapest selection of goods. Never underestimate the power of spite.
Some (most?)states would make it illegal for any Company to demand or even recommend it`s employees to be unionized. Banks would find a reason not to extend credit and it would prove extremely hard to get building permissons for new stores. The FBI and local police would probably be constantly on anti-walmart`s rear end to find something incriminating. I can even imagine paying People to falsely claim that they injured themselves in a anti-walmart store. Every false lawsuit that has to be defeated would help exhaust anti-walmart`s limited resources.

Your plan is promising in some ways but it depends on the uber-wealthy being too stupid to realize your intentions and the danger anti-walmart would pose to neo-liberalism. Never make that assumption if you want to change the world. Legally or illegally they would find a way to crush anti-walmart.

Except not really because we know tons of competitors already do exist? Including the co-op supermarket mentioned earlier. Employee owned businesses aren't a threat and allowing anyone control over their property, including employees, is part of the point of capitalism.

asdf32 fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Mar 30, 2015

# ? Mar 30, 2015 17:07

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

It seems you could accomplish a lot of these goals by just shooting the shareholder theory of value with a rocket launcher, even without the accompanying modifications to capitalism and contradictory messages.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 18:12

wateroverfire: Jul 3, 2010

HBNRW posted:

So how do you stop this spiral from starting? The copy of the Walmart must have something that encourages people to choose it over Walmart. Costco tries to do this by selling everything in bulk for slightly cheaper than the average going price. However, as evidenced by the fact they have membership fees, either this causes too many people to come to the store (thus causing shortages which can't be managed) or it doesn't make as much money (so it's being made up in the form of membership fees) or Costco just likes nickle and diming too (which wouldn't surprise me). But, as made evident that lots of people still buy food at Walmart when a Costco is up the street, that is either not enough incentive, or we have a lot of people who aren't willing to/can't pay a membership fee.

Costco's business model is to use cheap bulk goods to sell memberships, iirc.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 19:22

Grognan: Jan 23, 2007; by Fluffdaddy

tsa posted:

This is laughably false, though I'm sure some leftist blog somewhere made up some numbers that made you believe this. In the real world even 'liberal' cities have just started paying for busing tickets because they can't handle the costs at all.

http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/Salt-Lake-City-a-model-for-S-F-on-homeless-5587357.php

Pretty sure you're full of poo poo on this.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 22:03

My Imaginary GF: Jul 17, 2005; by R. Guyovich

HBNRW posted:

"Hey Shareholders! The GOVERNMENT is trying to confiscate YOUR COMPANY and sell it to Walmart for next to NOTHING! Are YOU going to let BIG GOVERNMENT take YOUR BUSINESS?! What is NEXT; your HOME?! STOP BIG GOVERNMENT AND WALMART FROM TAKING YOUR MONEY AND PROPERTY! CALL YOUR REP/MP/SENATOR/MAYOR/THE PRESIDENT/PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE/THE POPE AND TELL THEM YOU WON'T LET THEM TAKE YOUR BUSINESS!". I now have every redneck/blue collar nut job foaming at the mouth at both government overreach and painted Walmart as a big bad government welfare queen. What does Walmart do next?

Also, while I do like Costco and generally shop there myself, it is still flawed in how slow it raises wages. While it does it better, it is still too slow to help a lot of people in poor areas get ahead. The extra buck an hour they make over the people who are at Walmart still generally means that have to take a second job if they have a family. If they're single, it's not so bad. But most young and single people have left the city for greener pastures. Which is partially what the Anti-Walmart is designed to help stop, which Costco cannot.

Seriously, man? Yes, I've very aware of this. This is why I want the Anti-Walmart to take the same mentality. I have already, multiple times now, explained this. This is the reason why Walmart is considered the most efficient means of getting basic goods to poor people. It undercuts all competition with cheaper and less expensive versions of everyday things that people are most likely go through and not be concerned that it didn't last two years. It undercuts distributors so that only those that feed Walmart survive. It will go anywhere in the world to get its goods to sell, which promotes industrial expansions in where ever it is most cheap to produce things. This kills industry in developed nations who refuse to stoop to working in sweat shops.

The only thing that could possibly compete against a model like that, is itself. However, the problem is that, as other retailers have demonstrated, you cannot copy Walmart exactly and survive. People will go to what they are familiar with and if Walmart even once gives them a better deal, they'll generally return to Walmart. Why? Why not? So companies react too slow, try to match Walmart, fail to regain lost customers, Walmart does it again, they lose more, death spiral ensues.

So how do you stop this spiral from starting? The copy of the Walmart must have something that encourages people to choose it over Walmart. Costco tries to do this by selling everything in bulk for slightly cheaper than the average going price. However, as evidenced by the fact they have membership fees, either this causes too many people to come to the store (thus causing shortages which can't be managed) or it doesn't make as much money (so it's being made up in the form of membership fees) or Costco just likes nickle and diming too (which wouldn't surprise me). But, as made evident that lots of people still buy food at Walmart when a Costco is up the street, that is either not enough incentive, or we have a lot of people who aren't willing to/can't pay a membership fee.

Thus an option that doesn't restrict customer base must be chosen. However, Walmart already holds that niche. So how do we take that niche away? You have to create an incentive that, given everything else being equal, will make people want to go to the Anti-Walmart over Walmart without:

A - Making it obviously transparently Socialist. People will snap and reject it out of spite. Deniability to any government intervention is important. The only way to make a company not actually public is to sell off its shares to a private entity. If you want to make sure that private entity isn't going to turn around and sell out to Walmart (or Walmart doesn't just buy it), then you need to find one that would give an incentive not to do that. One possible solution is a union. People won't sell their own jobs off to a competitor that they know will immediate sell them out. That's stupid and yes there are examples of that happening and obviously people sell their business to competitors all the time. But those people are usually doing so to retire or are incredibly bad businessmen. Most cases of public companies becoming private is because the government sold them to a private individual. The union would hopefully prevent that by owning more of it than the government. The government doesn't really matter in this equation as it can replaced with shareholders, because that's basically what it is at that point. The government exists in this equation to either distribute dividends and/or act as a liaison between the Shareholders and the company. Otherwise, the government does not assist in anyway outside what it could do for Walmart.

and

B - Making it too opaque. People need to be able to see a benefit or they will go to what they know. If the Anti-Walmart is exactly the same as the Walmart, people will go to the Walmart if that's what they always go to. If you don't make immediate benefits obvious, people won't care. If you do, however, then you will set off Walmart's defense reactions. Again, you need to keep the government out of this situation. If the government can't help the Anti-Walmart because that would be socialism, it can't help Walmart because that would be socialism. That's how you have to word it. Walmart can't accuse the Anti-Walmart of being a government stooge and then take money/give bribes. Especially if the Anti-Walmart is YOUR (the shareholders aka the public's) company. The Anti-Walmart needs just as good a propaganda machine as Walmart to remind everyone WHO OWNS ANTI-WALMART. Again, if you were a government who had these options, choosing between the Anti-Walmart or the Walmart, most good people would go with Anti-Walmart. If you're a corrupt dicklord, you would probably go with the Walmart, but given you're a corrupt dicklord, you probably wouldn't have let the Anti-Walmart exist in the first place. :shrugs:

Are you loving kidding me? http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/wmt/financials

Walmart last year made almost 16 BILLION dollars in net profit. That means after expenses. That means above and beyond what was needed to run their business. Are you seriously trying to tell me that Walmart used every last bit of that to build new stores, pay off shareholders, buy off governments, gently caress with poverty rates, poo poo new sweat shops, etc? There is no loving way the Waltons reinvested all that loving money. Especially when it basically made the same amount the year before, and the year before that, etc, etc. There is no loving way it spent over 16 Billion in bribes. No, I would wager that an awfully large chunk of it is doing absolutely nothing but sitting in either the corporate bank account or a whole bunch of small private ones. If you don't think most retail companies are doing the same thing, I welcome you to the great poo poo show of Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. Where the minimum wage is the guideline, not an option. If that's how you want to live, there's a reason why most 80s future movies were dystopian.

Now imagine what Walmart could be doing to help poor communities across a single country with 16 Billion in a year? How much of that 16 Billion would it lose to raise its employee's wages even a dollar to match Costco? To bring in new services? To hire more staff? It won't, because why would it? It can make 16 Billion with its current scheme.

This is why the Anti-Walmart needs its mandate. Because by forcing it to spend that sort of profit rather than maybe, sort of, sometimes I'll use it for this bribe or maybe I'll buy a boat for my boat, you create a corporate atmosphere where banked profit is considered dead weight on the company's long term future and the economy. Because it's union based, a larger chunk of that profit will, most likely, get turned into wage increases. More people with more money equals more sales. Since it has price caps, it can keep people afloat price wise until a raise in wages makes it irrelevant. At that point, you could decide if the caps are still needed. Since it wants to always use its profits for something, it could pay out dividends as incentives to continue coming to it. There are things 16 Billion could go towards that aren't bribes. Even if the Anti-Walmart doesn't make half that in profit because it's forced to buy local, it still has 8 Billion loving Dollars.

Shareholder response? "Shortsell this motherfucker like its K-Mart in 1987"

Stick with CostCo. The market is only large enough for one anti-Walmart.

# ? Mar 30, 2015 22:08

Stretch Marx: Apr 29, 2008; I'm ok with this.

Arglebargle III posted:

Could you explain the difference between price, cost, and value? Because if you can't you need to educate yourself before you go inventing a five-sided wheel.

Value is the subjective desire for a good. We value things in relation to other things. Money is a pretty good meter stick for this. Value, as stated, is subjective and depends on where you are and who you talk to.

Cost is the literal cost of the things that, when put together, constitute your business's expenses. This includes the cost of purchasing raw materials, cost of employee wages, cost of further processing if needed, cost of advertising, etc. Cost is partially subjective as a lot of costs are dependent on current political climates (this place has this as a minimum wage while this place has that as a minimum wage or it costs more in taxes here than there) or how much it costs to find a supplier who's reliable and meets criteria in a given area. Costs change over time as elements of the business change.

Price is what the market determines is the range that a good can be reliably sold. Price is always higher than costs or it will become a loss. Most company's set their prices much higher than the costs so that the expense of said costs are passed onto the consumer.

Thus, under the basic scheme we have now, you price highest what you value most to recoop the costs of getting it. If it is valued just as much by other people, you price to maximize your profits based on the good's value. Go too high and people lose interest and value drops. The price then drops until people agree again that the price matches the good's perceived value. But if that value is ever less than the good's costs, then producing that good is a waste of time.

Please, if that's wrong enlighten me.

Series DD Funding posted:

Luckily, Walmart is publicly owned and we can look at their financials: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/104169/000010416914000019/wmt13114ars.htm

Walmart made 16 billion in profit in fiscal year 2014. They also invested 13 billion of that in new property. 9 billion of that canceled out depreciation of their prior assets, so 4 billion net. The rest went into paying debts, and a large portion went to paying dividends and stock buybacks. That money went back to their investors. They actually ended up with less cash on hand (7.3 billion from 7.8 billion).

See I'm ok with this. This is the first time someone came back with actual numbers. So if this is true, which I would assume that it is based on its source that Walmart does reinvest. Which goes to show that they do in fact have the best money making structure. Which is why I think the Anti-Walmart needs to copy it. It's the only one that has staying power. But obviously something must be different or it will fall like every other company that tries to match this exact scheme. But I have no faith that Walmart will ever improve working conditions as is and I don't have faith that the government will fix that even though I wish both would.

tsa posted:

You have been in a lefty echo chamber a little too long if you think your first bit would get any traction whatsoever. It really sounds like you are just asking for a GMI. The reason people at costco still don't make all that much money is because it is mostly unskilled labor. Unskilled labor has never been well compensated, but now there's just a lot more jobs that fall under this category. This is due to jobs being designed more efficiently (in that they have designed jobs to require less thinking to increase efficiency) along with efficiency gains in general from technology and computing.

This is also why unions have suffered, the jobs of today are so much harder to unionize than a factory job of the 50's. It's a lot loving easier to find a new shelf-stocker than to find someone who can safely and quickly operate large machinery. I would also guess that we have seen an increase in the diversity of workers skills, in other words there's a lot bigger gap between a companies high performers and low performers when compared to many decades ago. This is most obvious in finance. Something like that would also lead to a decrease in union participation, which works best when everyone is of fairly equal skill levels.

I could take most of those words and replace them with Obama and got the same group of idiots actually upset. It has nothing to do with lefty echo chamber. It's all about giving people who are very FYGM a target that isn't the same conservative tropes.

The question then becomes, how do you deal with that gap? People can't supplement their income if they're currently at the bottom, supposing they haven't done anything to gently caress with their credit, like start a business or invest. Could try promotion, along with all 30 of the other people attempting for the same 2 jobs. Even if you start a business, it has to be something amazing or it'll collapse immediately. Obviously if you believe that markets are just automatic then a bunch of stores failing is just how it goes if their products aren't well received. But that just makes investing scarier which means we're back into a loop where no local businesses grow because they either get undercut by a large retailer or don't have a population that is making enough money to support them and everyone is terrified to even try. There aren't enough rich people to make up for the lack of buying power of the poor.

quote:

This is laughably false, though I'm sure some leftist blog somewhere made up some numbers that made you believe this. In the real world even 'liberal' cities have just started paying for busing tickets because they can't handle the costs at all.

Ahh yes. That great ~~bastion~~ terror of American Liberalism... Utah! drat hippies! :argh:

But seriously, please show me how leaving people out in the cold is cheaper by hard numbers on a city. And none of this bullshit "Yeah obviously no upkeep hurr durr" faux smug crap you're doing right now. Should be able to cite a source like Series DD just did. I'll wait.

computer parts posted:

Unskilled labor definitely had unions a hundred years ago. The issue today is more that jobs are becoming increasingly white collar and for whatever reason unions haven't caught on there.

I would say this is mostly because those jobs have always been the domain of the basic corporate structure while union was tied to blue collar. White collar was always inoculated from unions by the fact that their higher ups didn't like them. Now that they're the only real game in most cities, unions are kind of screwed and only now trying to chip away into low level white collar jobs. More evidence that unions are stupid as well and fail to think long term in terms of labour and if they did, they would have been chipping away at low level white collar jobs years ago.

Typo posted:

Because you want your company to make a profit which in turn means that Revenue - Wages - other costs >0. So the implication is that since your revenue comes from sales if you decrease prices you have less money to pay your workers. If you increase wages, prices has to go up. Even if you run at perfect no net profit at all and with complete benevolence, you are still stuck with the contradiction where you can increase prices to benefit workers or decrease prices to benefit consumers.

Of course this would eventually hit a point where you cannot possibly raise wages any further, lower prices any further, hire any more people, offer any more services or new products, without taking a loss. At that point the whole thing would stop until something along the production chain became cheaper, then the system would be forced to start again. But obviously it's not going to be dramatic price reductions or massive wage increases. The system will bounce back and forth slowly since it's still trying to actively resist doing both these things.

The biggest problem is that if any portion of the production chain suddenly becomes cheaper for one reason or another (maybe new technology makes extraction or production cheaper) it's up to the company who gained this advancement to potentially pass on those savings to the next entities down the line. Then the next could, then the next. Maybe. Probably not, but they may all lessen their costs down the line. Sometimes they do. Unfortunately markups still make the price lovely.

The aim of the Anti-Walmart is to try and out limbo Walmart. It just has to do enough to be look better than Walmart until Walmart can't go any lower without going revenue neutral, which is what the Anti-Walmart wants. There's nothing benevolent about it. If it could the Anti-Walmart would try to depress wages as well. The only thing that makes it better is the mandate that would hopefully be upheld by the union. Hopefully. Again, the we wouldn't be having this discussion if human nature wasn't inclined towards being assholes to each other.

Arglebargle III posted:

So... if economies of scale are a problem, wouldn't it be more efficient to simply nationalize Wal-Mart than try to create a competitor?

Your solution makes no sense on a number of levels.

(Did you give up on price controls yet? I haven't read your walls of text.)

You convince people to agree to nationalizing Walmart and I'll back it in a cocaine heartbeat. Yes, I believe that the economics of scale is what is driving global poverty. The availability of cheap goods as created a situation where only high level jobs have value in developed countries but there isn't enough positions to fill the demand. Low level jobs could fill that demand, but do not pay well enough to justify the cost sunk in getting an education or is insufficient to pay for living expenses. People need to take multiple jobs limiting further the number of jobs. Also low level jobs rarely go anywhere and the few positions that do are being fought over by every person in the lower positions. I do not see the current corporate structure fixing this situation since it has been rooted in fighting it for decades. Manufacturing is not coming back unless we figure out a way to make it cheaper. One of those ways is robots and would require people to maintain those robots. But that would still pale in comparison to the work force of a sweat shop and no one would accept those conditions here without union support (if they're smart) and no company will bother if they do.

Also thanks for the patronizing attitude. I'm sure you're a thrill at parties.

asdf32 posted:

Kudos for obviously coming up with all of this on your own.

Unfortunately it drifts randomly between reality and fantasy and spends most of the time in the latter.

You seem to understand what some of the pieces are here but not actually how they work. Wal-mart has low prices partly because of its ruthlessness on wages and economies of scale. You can't magically replicate low prices without those things.

This whole thing amounts to "Hey let's take this thing that tons of really smart, motivated people are already trying really hard to do [compete in the retail marketplace] and just do it better!"

I understand economies of scale. I'm very much aware that most of the crap we own was likely shipped into a city from another city from another country. Walmart has figured out how to milk this for all its worth. Again, you can reiterate this and I will continue to nod my head in agreement. I know this is how Walmart works.

The problem is that Walmart basically has a monopoly on that business scheme. No one can match it because Walmart did it correctly first. Anyone who tries to match it gets outsold by them. So people have to go specialty. However, since they can't match the output of a Walmart, if Walmart ever branches off into that specialty, well that guy is screwed. So Walmart's constant search for cheaper suppliers kills local business forcing people to deal with chains for any goods in poor areas. There is no incentive to start local businesses if they can't compete with a Walmart. They have to focus on things that Walmart does not do. But since Walmart really can branch to whatever this makes it very difficult. This leaves natural resource collection, which basically just makes you a colony of whatever country is making your stuff (which you could be doing, if they weren't cheaper than you), or service jobs (which can never fill the void), or leave. The migration puts stress on jobs in other areas. That's the situation we have now here in New Brunswick. Everyone is afraid of trying anything, everyone is too poor to try anything, people are leaving and making the situation worse, and the only answer people have to suggestions are "Just the way it is.".

quote:

This is a stupid canard (as expected because it's huffpost). Money is always invested in something and even if it's a bank checking account it's available for use by someone. Though it's never a bank checking account.

Potential is not the same as is. Just because it's in a bank account and could be used does not make it equal to money actually being used. I can store potential energy in a spring by squeezing it. But if I don't actually have a use for that spring, I'm just walking around with a spring in my hand.

quote:

Except not really because we know tons of competitors already do exist? Including the co-op supermarket mentioned earlier. Employee owned businesses aren't a threat and allowing anyone control over their property, including employees, is part of the point of capitalism.

Again, I will use my city as an example. We use to have a population of over 120K but now we're down to about half that. The only stores here that do well are Walmart, Costco, Value Village (a thrift store), a few restaurants, and a few specialty stores in the mall like David's Tea who ride the niche of being almost too expensive but not quite. But in my 29 years living here, Zellers and Kmart have both collapsed. Sears is collapsing. Target just fell apart. Future Shop just got bought out by Best Buy. There really isn't any reason to go to Sobeys or the Superstore (both grocery chains here) over Costco or Walmart. This has created a job shortage in a place with 10% unemployment. There aren't enough service level jobs to satisfy the need. Every time a new independent store opens, it collapses by the end of the year due to lack of customers. I really doubt opening up New Brunswick to more potential supermarkets from the states will fix this problem.

We also had a co-op. It died and now is a discount furniture liquidator. That I don't think I've heard anyone buy poo poo from it because they're too expensive.

Also, most of the culture has been sucked out of the city with the brain drain caused by the manufacturing exodus and subsequent population departure. Again, globalization has made things cheaper while somehow also making it impossible to buy anything.

Nessus posted:

It seems you could accomplish a lot of these goals by just shooting the shareholder theory of value with a rocket launcher, even without the accompanying modifications to capitalism and contradictory messages.

Again, if someone nationalized Walmart, I would be ok with that idea.

wateroverfire posted:

Costco's business model is to use cheap bulk goods to sell memberships, iirc.

Then this goes back to number 3: Costco likes nickle and diming as much as the next company. Which doesn't surprise me. If they're selling cheap goods for the purposes of selling memberships, then either their real income comes from memberships (which I doubt) or they just want more money and don't want to use the usual fees other companys use(which I'm more likely to believe).

# ? Mar 30, 2015 22:49

Typo: Aug 19, 2009; Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

HBNRW posted:

Of course this would eventually hit a point where you cannot possibly raise wages any further, lower prices any further, hire any more people, offer any more services or new products, without taking a loss. At that point the whole thing would stop until something along the production chain became cheaper, then the system would be forced to start again. But obviously it's not going to be dramatic price reductions or massive wage increases. The system will bounce back and forth slowly since it's still trying to actively resist doing both these things.

The biggest problem is that if any portion of the production chain suddenly becomes cheaper for one reason or another (maybe new technology makes extraction or production cheaper) it's up to the company who gained this advancement to potentially pass on those savings to the next entities down the line. Then the next could, then the next. Maybe. Probably not, but they may all lessen their costs down the line. Sometimes they do. Unfortunately markups still make the price lovely.

The aim of the Anti-Walmart is to try and out limbo Walmart. It just has to do enough to be look better than Walmart until Walmart can't go any lower without going revenue neutral, which is what the Anti-Walmart wants. There's nothing benevolent about it. If it could the Anti-Walmart would try to depress wages as well. The only thing that makes it better is the mandate that would hopefully be upheld by the union. Hopefully. Again, the we wouldn't be having this discussion if human nature wasn't inclined towards being assholes to each other.

So when the production process becomes cheaper and the cost drops do you decide to

1) Lower prices
2) Keep prices the same but pay the workers more
3) Combination of 1) and 2)

If it's 3), by what process does said your firm choose to allocate consumer and producer surplus?

# ? Mar 30, 2015 23:42

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

HBNRW posted:

I understand economies of scale. I'm very much aware that most of the crap we own was likely shipped into a city from another city from another country. Walmart has figured out how to milk this for all its worth. Again, you can reiterate this and I will continue to nod my head in agreement. I know this is how Walmart works.

The problem is that Walmart basically has a monopoly on that business scheme. No one can match it because Walmart did it correctly first. Anyone who tries to match it gets outsold by them. So people have to go specialty. However, since they can't match the output of a Walmart, if Walmart ever branches off into that specialty, well that guy is screwed. So Walmart's constant search for cheaper suppliers kills local business forcing people to deal with chains for any goods in poor areas. There is no incentive to start local businesses if they can't compete with a Walmart. They have to focus on things that Walmart does not do. But since Walmart really can branch to whatever this makes it very difficult. This leaves natural resource collection, which basically just makes you a colony of whatever country is making your stuff (which you could be doing, if they weren't cheaper than you), or service jobs (which can never fill the void), or leave. The migration puts stress on jobs in other areas. That's the situation we have now here in New Brunswick. Everyone is afraid of trying anything, everyone is too poor to try anything, people are leaving and making the situation worse, and the only answer people have to suggestions are "Just the way it is.".

No Wal-mart doesn't have a monopoly and actually has tons of competitors including other huge chains. They may be the dominant store in a certain local area, but many stores have or have had that advantage in the past.

quote:

Potential is not the same as is. Just because it's in a bank account and could be used does not make it equal to money actually being used. I can store potential energy in a spring by squeezing it. But if I don't actually have a use for that spring, I'm just walking around with a spring in my hand.

That's actually how banking works, unless the banks just don't want to make money anymore. But, like I said, institutional investors and rich people never just leave their money in the bank, despite what "$Money Hoarding!$" huffpost headlines try to make you think.

Wal-mart didn't grow to be the largest retailer on the planet by not re-investing profits. Quite the opposite actually.

quote:

Again, I will use my city as an example. We use to have a population of over 120K but now we're down to about half that. The only stores here that do well are Walmart, Costco, Value Village (a thrift store), a few restaurants, and a few specialty stores in the mall like David's Tea who ride the niche of being almost too expensive but not quite. But in my 29 years living here, Zellers and Kmart have both collapsed. Sears is collapsing. Target just fell apart. Future Shop just got bought out by Best Buy. There really isn't any reason to go to Sobeys or the Superstore (both grocery chains here) over Costco or Walmart. This has created a job shortage in a place with 10% unemployment. There aren't enough service level jobs to satisfy the need. Every time a new independent store opens, it collapses by the end of the year due to lack of customers. I really doubt opening up New Brunswick to more potential supermarkets from the states will fix this problem.

We also had a co-op. It died and now is a discount furniture liquidator. That I don't think I've heard anyone buy poo poo from it because they're too expensive.

Also, most of the culture has been sucked out of the city with the brain drain caused by the manufacturing exodus and subsequent population departure. Again, globalization has made things cheaper while somehow also making it impossible to buy anything.

First remember that you're describing a scenario where the population dropped by half? That's a pretty good explanation for why businesses are failing or disheartening. The range of problems here don't all trace back to one retail chain.

# ? Mar 31, 2015 00:01

Typo: Aug 19, 2009; Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

HBNRW posted:

Potential is not the same as is. Just because it's in a bank account and could be used does not make it equal to money actually being used. I can store potential energy in a spring by squeezing it. But if I don't actually have a use for that spring, I'm just walking around with a spring in my hand.

The bank actively loans out the money you have in a savings account to other people since your deposit is considered part of the bank's reserve and is thus used to create credit for borrowers. That's why your deposit earns interest in the first place.

Typo fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Mar 31, 2015

# ? Mar 31, 2015 00:06

Liquid Communism: Mar 9, 2004; Out here, everything hurts.

HBNRW posted:

"Hey Shareholders! The GOVERNMENT is trying to confiscate YOUR COMPANY and sell it to Walmart for next to NOTHING! Are YOU going to let BIG GOVERNMENT take YOUR BUSINESS?! What is NEXT; your HOME?! STOP BIG GOVERNMENT AND WALMART FROM TAKING YOUR MONEY AND PROPERTY! CALL YOUR REP/MP/SENATOR/MAYOR/THE PRESIDENT/PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE/THE POPE AND TELL THEM YOU WON'T LET THEM TAKE YOUR BUSINESS!". I now have every redneck/blue collar nut job foaming at the mouth at both government overreach and painted Walmart as a big bad government welfare queen. What does Walmart do next?

Also, while I do like Costco and generally shop there myself, it is still flawed in how slow it raises wages. While it does it better, it is still too slow to help a lot of people in poor areas get ahead. The extra buck an hour they make over the people who are at Walmart still generally means that have to take a second job if they have a family. If they're single, it's not so bad. But most young and single people have left the city for greener pastures. Which is partially what the Anti-Walmart is designed to help stop, which Costco cannot.

Seriously, man? Yes, I've very aware of this. This is why I want the Anti-Walmart to take the same mentality. I have already, multiple times now, explained this. This is the reason why Walmart is considered the most efficient means of getting basic goods to poor people. It undercuts all competition with cheaper and less expensive versions of everyday things that people are most likely go through and not be concerned that it didn't last two years. It undercuts distributors so that only those that feed Walmart survive. It will go anywhere in the world to get its goods to sell, which promotes industrial expansions in where ever it is most cheap to produce things. This kills industry in developed nations who refuse to stoop to working in sweat shops.

The only thing that could possibly compete against a model like that, is itself. However, the problem is that, as other retailers have demonstrated, you cannot copy Walmart exactly and survive. People will go to what they are familiar with and if Walmart even once gives them a better deal, they'll generally return to Walmart. Why? Why not? So companies react too slow, try to match Walmart, fail to regain lost customers, Walmart does it again, they lose more, death spiral ensues.

So how do you stop this spiral from starting? The copy of the Walmart must have something that encourages people to choose it over Walmart. Costco tries to do this by selling everything in bulk for slightly cheaper than the average going price. However, as evidenced by the fact they have membership fees, either this causes too many people to come to the store (thus causing shortages which can't be managed) or it doesn't make as much money (so it's being made up in the form of membership fees) or Costco just likes nickle and diming too (which wouldn't surprise me). But, as made evident that lots of people still buy food at Walmart when a Costco is up the street, that is either not enough incentive, or we have a lot of people who aren't willing to/can't pay a membership fee.

Thus an option that doesn't restrict customer base must be chosen. However, Walmart already holds that niche. So how do we take that niche away? You have to create an incentive that, given everything else being equal, will make people want to go to the Anti-Walmart over Walmart without:

A - Making it obviously transparently Socialist. People will snap and reject it out of spite. Deniability to any government intervention is important. The only way to make a company not actually public is to sell off its shares to a private entity. If you want to make sure that private entity isn't going to turn around and sell out to Walmart (or Walmart doesn't just buy it), then you need to find one that would give an incentive not to do that. One possible solution is a union. People won't sell their own jobs off to a competitor that they know will immediate sell them out. That's stupid and yes there are examples of that happening and obviously people sell their business to competitors all the time. But those people are usually doing so to retire or are incredibly bad businessmen. Most cases of public companies becoming private is because the government sold them to a private individual. The union would hopefully prevent that by owning more of it than the government. The government doesn't really matter in this equation as it can replaced with shareholders, because that's basically what it is at that point. The government exists in this equation to either distribute dividends and/or act as a liaison between the Shareholders and the company. Otherwise, the government does not assist in anyway outside what it could do for Walmart.

and

B - Making it too opaque. People need to be able to see a benefit or they will go to what they know. If the Anti-Walmart is exactly the same as the Walmart, people will go to the Walmart if that's what they always go to. If you don't make immediate benefits obvious, people won't care. If you do, however, then you will set off Walmart's defense reactions. Again, you need to keep the government out of this situation. If the government can't help the Anti-Walmart because that would be socialism, it can't help Walmart because that would be socialism. That's how you have to word it. Walmart can't accuse the Anti-Walmart of being a government stooge and then take money/give bribes. Especially if the Anti-Walmart is YOUR (the shareholders aka the public's) company. The Anti-Walmart needs just as good a propaganda machine as Walmart to remind everyone WHO OWNS ANTI-WALMART. Again, if you were a government who had these options, choosing between the Anti-Walmart or the Walmart, most good people would go with Anti-Walmart. If you're a corrupt dicklord, you would probably go with the Walmart, but given you're a corrupt dicklord, you probably wouldn't have let the Anti-Walmart exist in the first place. :shrugs:

Or rather than reinventing the wheel or rebuilding a decades-old megacorporation from the ground up on the public dollar, you correctly identify that the vast majority of the problem you are trying to solve lies in the creation of a class of people too poor to have any other option and work on labor and compensation laws to correct that.

# ? Mar 31, 2015 09:05

His Divine Shadow: Aug 7, 2000; I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.

Maybe shift the tax burden more to the rich side of the spectrum too, I mean just saying...

# ? Mar 31, 2015 09:11

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Liquid Communism posted:

Or rather than reinventing the wheel or rebuilding a decades-old megacorporation from the ground up on the public dollar, you correctly identify that the vast majority of the problem you are trying to solve lies in the creation of a class of people too poor to have any other option and work on labor and compensation laws to correct that.

The problem is the fundamental lack of power low skilled workers have in an economy where outsourcing, foreign competition and technology are directly competing with them. Labor and compensation laws are not really a solution to this and have the potential to exacerbate the problem by tilting the equation further towards the above.

Reforming taxes to get the rich to pay a more reasonable share and investing more directly in things like infrastructure is a logical start because it actually increases demand in the target demographic. Beyond that it's pretty complicated.

# ? Mar 31, 2015 16:39

archangelwar: Oct 28, 2004; Teaching Moments

Outsourcing cannot replace a WalMart shelf stocker. To use your own words "this is a stupid candard."

# ? Mar 31, 2015 20:24

Series DD Funding: Nov 25, 2014; by exmarx

Sure it can. Chinese-made stocking robots.

# ? Mar 31, 2015 22:05

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

archangelwar posted:

Outsourcing cannot replace a WalMart shelf stocker. To use your own words "this is a stupid candard."

You can hang the economy on that if you want. I'd rather not.

# ? Mar 31, 2015 23:23

archangelwar: Oct 28, 2004; Teaching Moments

asdf32 posted:

You can hang the economy on that if you want. I'd rather not.

What, the laws of physics?

# ? Apr 1, 2015 02:49

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

archangelwar posted:

What, the laws of physics?

Certainly they don't prevent automated shelf stocking nor less obvious improvements that amount to the same thing like RFID's automating inventory etc. We already have examples of fully automated ports and warehouses that arn't close to fully deployed and are still undergoing rapid development.

So you want to sit there and claim "all the jobs that can be automated already have been", you can do that, and there is a chance you're right. My stance, given history, is "probably not".

The only caveat is that wholesale outsourcing might actually be on the wane, though you never know if/when another market is going to flood open. But the China thing is probably starting to balance out overall.

# ? Apr 1, 2015 03:23

archangelwar: Oct 28, 2004; Teaching Moments

asdf32 posted:

Certainly they don't prevent automated shelf stocking nor less obvious improvements that amount to the same thing like RFID's automating inventory etc. We already have examples of fully automated ports and warehouses that arn't close to fully deployed and are still undergoing rapid development.

So you want to sit there and claim "all the jobs that can be automated already have been", you can do that, and there is a chance you're right. My stance, given history, is "probably not".

The only caveat is that wholesale outsourcing might actually be on the wane, though you never know if/when another market is going to flood open. But the China thing is probably starting to balance out overall.

Outsourcing and automation are not the same. I specifically mentioned outsourcing. So you have decided that your claim is actually "we should keep wages low to prevent automation?" Because that is sillier than keeping wages low to prevent outsourcing.

# ? Apr 1, 2015 04:31

Series DD Funding: Nov 25, 2014; by exmarx

archangelwar posted:

Outsourcing and automation are not the same. I specifically mentioned outsourcing. So you have decided that your claim is actually "we should keep wages low to prevent automation?" Because that is sillier than keeping wages low to prevent outsourcing.

It's outsourcing in a sense, because the American retail jobs are replaced with X country manufacturing ones.

# ? Apr 1, 2015 04:42

Liquid Communism: Mar 9, 2004; Out here, everything hurts.

asdf32 posted:

The problem is the fundamental lack of power low skilled workers have in an economy where outsourcing, foreign competition and technology are directly competing with them. Labor and compensation laws are not really a solution to this and have the potential to exacerbate the problem by tilting the equation further towards the above.

Reforming taxes to get the rich to pay a more reasonable share and investing more directly in things like infrastructure is a logical start because it actually increases demand in the target demographic. Beyond that it's pretty complicated.

Labor and compensation laws are the only viable solution, because the alternative is relying on the charitable nature of publicly owned corporations who have a legal and fiduciary responsibility to profit their shareholders as much as feasible within the law. Maintaining large chunks of the population in misery and literally killing them faster via being unable to afford necessities like medical care for the sake of theoretically preventing someone inventing a device that can replace them is a terrible solution.

I'm with you on the tax reform, and a decent solution to the whole lack of worthwhile work for the low-skilled worker and the rotten state of infrastructure in this country are a pair of problems that solve each other, should we ever get the political will to actually act on it. Not going to happen until things get to Great Depression levels again, though.

# ? Apr 1, 2015 06:07

JohnGalt: Aug 7, 2012

This whole experiment is flawed on its basic premise: that Walmart is the best at what it does. Walmart is facing pressure from two sides that are taking market share. Dollar stores are able to reduce costs on some good even further while more affluent dollars are going towards competitors attempting to provide higher end goods and more services.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 02:56

Thursday Next: Jan 11, 2004; FUCK THE ISLE OF APPLES. FUCK THEM IN THEIR STUPID ASSES.

Cicero posted:

Yeah it's a weird combination of socialist and libertarian ~*~magical thinking~*~ where with the right kind of labor-friendly corporation, the market will solve all problems.

Thank you. I don't often venture in to this forum, so it's great to know that this reads as magical thinking (in alphabetized thesis-length format) with an overuse of "thus".

I don't understand how you think this could be more profitable.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 06:32

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Liquid Communism posted:

Labor and compensation laws are the only viable solution, because the alternative is relying on the charitable nature of publicly owned corporations who have a legal and fiduciary responsibility to profit their shareholders as much as feasible within the law.

This is what I meant about the shareholder theory of value. This idea that companies exist primarily and solely to profit their shareholders and the devil take everything else is a relatively recent innovation.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-origin-of-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-milton-friedman/ is one of several articles on the matter.

Now this doesn't actually make capitalism nice and cuddly, of course, nor does it guarantee any protection for workers. Big companies would still like to pay as little as they can get away with to get the labor inputs they need to function. But by God, this isn't revealed eternal truth that corporations have to suck off shareholders and absolutely nothing else.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 07:15

Liquid Communism: Mar 9, 2004; Out here, everything hurts.

Eternal truth? No. Present truth? Pretty much, given that most are incorporated with shareholder elected directors, and offer executives large stock packages as incentives.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 07:48

Stretch Marx: Apr 29, 2008; I'm ok with this.

JohnGalt posted:

This whole experiment is flawed on its basic premise: that Walmart is the best at what it does. Walmart is facing pressure from two sides that are taking market share. Dollar stores are able to reduce costs on some good even further while more affluent dollars are going towards competitors attempting to provide higher end goods and more services.

The problem isn't a lack of goods. You can find all goods at your local locations online and more. It's a lack of work, thus a lack of income, to purchase said goods. How do you create jobs, when the things that make goods so cheap are the reason you have no jobs? How do you stop the government from wiping away, again, reforms if tories get in power for any length of time? Again, people are too poor to buy expensive, higher quality goods, there's not enough jobs to help them not be poor, and the only poor selection comes from one store that actively would prefer them be poor.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 13:25

JohnGalt: Aug 7, 2012

I don't even follow where you are trying to go with this. You want to make a Walmart that is handicapped by a certain set of rules and expect it to succeed. At the same time, non handicapped Walmart is struggling to maintain its position in the market. How does this work?

# ? Apr 2, 2015 14:26

Doorknob Slobber: Sep 10, 2006; by Fluffdaddy

waitwhatno posted:

Like most things that you can think of, this already exists and is called a Government-owned corporation

If you could find a reliable way to make people buy high quality local products over the cheapest stuff that they can get their hands on you would need no government companies anyway. Private companies would fill that niche in seconds. People and attitudes are the main problem here, not state ownership. Walmart only gives people what they want.

I disagree with the notion that most people want cheap poo poo from Walmart. Its probably more that the majority of people(that shop at Walmart) are so poor that they have to buy things at the cheapest prices possible because if they didn't they wouldn't be able to eat.

# ? Apr 2, 2015 17:02

Arglebargle III: Feb 21, 2006

In my experience most people who shop at wal-mart do it out of sheer apathy more than anything else.

# ? Apr 5, 2015 05:42

Accretionist: Nov 7, 2012; I BELIEVE IN STUPID CONSPIRACY THEORIES

tl;dr: A public sector cut-rate big-box store which cannibalizes the private sector cut-rate big-box store. It can be heard muttering, "If I kill you, I become you," when not baying at suppliers.

tsa posted:

This is laughably false, though I'm sure some leftist blog somewhere made up some numbers that made you believe this. In the real world even 'liberal' cities have just started paying for busing tickets because they can't handle the costs at all.

It's a real thing, actually. For example, homeless people in central Florida cost about ~$30,000/head/year, mostly by way of law enforcement and medical costs. A comprehensive housing program would likely cut that to ~$10,000/head/year. Given their population, that's a difference of $100,000,000+ over ten years.

# ? Apr 5, 2015 09:31

Scrub-Niggurath: Nov 27, 2007

Typo posted:

So when the production process becomes cheaper and the cost drops do you decide to

1) Lower prices
2) Keep prices the same but pay the workers more
3) Combination of 1) and 2)

If it's 3), by what process does said your firm choose to allocate consumer and producer surplus?

I mean, isn't a majority of the company owned by the workers? I cant imagine why they wouldn't just pick 2 a majority of the time

# ? Apr 5, 2015 15:04

WeedlordGoku69: Feb 12, 2015; by Cyrano4747

My Imaginary GF posted:

How you gonna protect your anti-walmart when wallyworld bribes the local township to eminent domain your outlet and sell it to wallyworld at a firesale price?

Then a few key members of the township board get shot execution-style in the head by mysterious assailants. If the deal goes through anyways, the rest follow, and a fertilizer truck crashes through the loading dock of the building before Wal-Mart can open it.

The only viable way to combat dirty tactics is with dirtier tactics. Make it clear that if they try to game the system, Bad Things Happen.

# ? Apr 6, 2015 02:50

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# ? May 9, 2024 01:52

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

For all the walls of text and nonsense I'm at a complete loss as to how you think raising a company's cost by restricting it from the cheaper supply sources Walmart uses, increasing a companies cost be having it pay higher wages, and lowering its revenue by forcing it to sell at even lower prices, is a remotely viable way to make more profit no how much feel good magical worker's paradise poo poo you add in.

A-B > (A-n)-(B+n)

# ? Apr 6, 2015 15:16

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Thought Experiment: Rise of the Anti-Walmart

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