I could drink a cup and go straight to sleep too. Even a double espresso.Wrong thread, but....
Did you know caffeine has absolutely zippo effect on me? I can drink a full cup of caffeinated coffee and go right to sleep. It doesn't help me wake up in the morning either.
ETA: It also seems to be strangely addicting. I can't stop.....
It's been almost 2 years since I quit.
Do you mean why are they the worst company in America and will never get a dime of my money?
Let me count the ways.
Firstly, they are the demise of small town America. It is their intended practice of forcing every small business person out through closure or bankruptcy. Take for example, the small town near where our farm was and where we shopped when I was growing up - Fredericktown, MO. There was a thriving town square with the roads emanating from city hall teeming with grocery stores, a sporting goods store, clothing stores, shoe stores, feed stores, a furniture store, a theater - all owned by entrepreneurs that grew up in that town. After Walmart moved in, those people are now retired, unemployed or greeters. Those stores are now vacant. The Walmart is over a mile out to the main highway. How do elderly town dwellers get there? They don't.
Go to any small town in the US with a Walmart store and you will find a ghost town in the town square.
As the empire was growing, executives would travel frequently from Bentonville, AR to all parts of the globe. There was a travel agency in town they used for their travel. Then they decided they didn't want to pay the commission. They wanted to buy the agency. The agency didn't want to sell. They said, "If you don't sell your business to us, we'll build a travel agency across the street from you and run you out of business". That's exactly what happened.
That has been their practice around the world wherever they do business. Destroy entrepreneurs to build their empire.
As an alternative, if they didn't want to pay commission, they could have made their own in-house agency to handle travel without starting a business to directly compete with the other and undercut prices to destroy their business.
That's the practice the Japanese employ to compete with the world. The government subsidizes their steel industry, undercutting our prices, to run businesses like U.S. Steel and Granite City Steel out of business. Then they have a monopoly.
Add to that, Walmart does little to bolster the local economy. It is an unsustainable economic model for small communities.
A study shows that when Walmart moves into a town, it is an economic negative for the community.
Without pension and health care benefits, Walmart has cost the state of California an additional $9 million annually in health care costs. The loss in pensions and the pursuant burden on social services cannot be covered by state and local taxes.
Lowe's and Home Depot exist side by side with small local hardware stores that still prosper. All 3 are a block away from each other here and have been here for many years.
Their goal isn't to dominate the entire community marketplace. Walmart's goal is to decimate every market niche.
This has been Walmart's pattern in all small towns across the country and is being replicated worldwide.
It will have little impact, but I view the company as an evil empire and they will never get a dime of my money.
Over 50% of Walmart goods come from overseas suppliers. This doesn't only eliminate U.S. jobs but also utilizes children and slave labor.
A great example of this is Bangladesh, where the minimum wage for garment industry workers is just $37 a month. The conditions in the facilities where these products are made are incredibly unsafe. A 2012 fire in one factory which made garments for Walmart killed 111 people, while another in 1990 killed 32. And a class-action lawsuit from 2010 alleged that one woman worked seven days a week, from 7:45am to 10pm, putting chalk marks on pants, without a day off for six months.
Walmart has been linked to the slave trade in Thailand.
Most of Walmart employees overseas are underage. Children beaten and slapped because they collapsed working 14 to 20 hour days, 7 days a week for as low as 7 cents an hour. They brush their teeth with their fingers because they can't afford a toothbrush.
In the U.S., women at Walmart are earning over $1 less per hour than men. Women are overworked when pregnant and frequently fired if they can't carry the load.
They discriminate against disabled and elderly workers. In a single year, WM paid 6 million to settle 13 lawsuits brought by disabled workers.
Workers have been forced to work through unpaid breaks and mealtimes. That is a violation of law.
One case forced Walmart to pay $150 million to workers plus 33 million in attorney fees.
Walmart employees have been found to be sicker on average than most American workers while they lowered health care benefits - if they were provided at all.
Animal welfare is a problem for Walmart including a store in Mexico that hosts cock fighting to encourage people to shop there.
In one year, the Walton family received $8 billion in tax breaks, $6 billion of which came from federal taxpayer subsidies handed to them because employee wages are so low. Currently, the company also has $21 billion in offshore accounts, that is untaxed by the U.S. government. In another year, as Walmart failed to meet shareholder expectations, the company figured out a way to give the CEO a $1.5 million bonus for performing poorly at his job.
As its overworked and underpaid employees struggle to make ends meet, Walmart's top brass make billions, even as stock is dropping. Capitalism at its worst.
I don't know any of the victims in China, Thailand, Bangladesh or other countries, but I do know the victims here and their lives have been devastated.
On to my story. Walmart has been trying to get a store built in this area for a long time. Most communities have voted it down. They kept moving to less populous areas to get a store.
My family has been raising chickens within a mile of here since the 1870s. In that 140 years, we have never had a problem with mink.
Just over 2 years ago, the new Walmart store cut down 80 acres of woods along the creek at the bottom of the hill from my house. Within a couple weeks of that clearcutting, mink found my property and killed all the birds in 6 flocks, wiping out $4,000 worth of birds.
I know they didn't intentionally send mink to my property but that was the end result of their construction.
Then lets talk the NFL. I've been a fan since I returned from the Army in the early 70s. After we lost the Cardinals to Arizona (ever see a carinal in Arizona?). The Rams left LA to fill the void in St. Louis.
Stan Kroenke, majority stockholder of the Rams and heir (by marriage) to the Walmart fortune, left St. Louis knowing that the city’s taxpayers still owe five million dollars per year until 2021 that we offered to pay to bring the team here when we paid off 129 million to the former home. Stan Kroenke has not offered to pay those debts.
The city supported the team religiously regardless of the product.
Joe Buck tweeted about Kroenke's activity, “Suck the life out of a team, run it down, raise prices, then say it isn’t supported and leave,”
Since Kroenke gained majority ownership in 2010, the Rams were 36-59. he was virtually nonexistent and focused on his many other franchises: Arsenal, the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche and the Colorado Rapids.
The city spent millions of dollars and borrowed $36 million to satisfy Kroenke's wishes to prepare for a new stadium to satisfy Stan when every other city he was courting had no plan. Didn't matter.
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/02/rams-owner-stan-kroenke-ranch-st-louis-los-angeles
http://www.latimes.com/sports/nfl/la-sp-st-louis-viewpoint-rams-20160113-story.html
I really don't think Sam Walton was a bad guy or would he have condoned these practices.
I can cite countless companies from billion dollar organizations to small one person entrepreneurships that have prospered while benefiting their communities.
Walmart doesn't fit that description. Sam Walton's children, their spouses and executives of Walmart are greedy scum.
IMHO, those that contribute to the Walmart fortune, continue to contribute to that dastardly corporate behavior.
They'll never get a dime of my money even if it were the only stores in the country. I'd scavenge for food and supplies first.
Well our wood stove and space heater kept it in the high 50s to high 60s,
I could sleep 10+ hours easily as could my kids. My parents woke me up once when I had slept 24 hours cause they thought I was dead.
Perhaps I should have slept less.
WOO HOO. That's what I figured.
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