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As if you needed ANOTHER reason not to shop there.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090909/u ... 9192069800

To be honest, this reminds me a lot of what Starbucks was doing. . . What, six months ago?

It's an absolute rotten way to do business, but I suspect the results will be just the same. The article already highlighted a major problem: their PI stores are better than their current stores. They're actually going to force some of their own stores to close their doors by doing this.

It's kind of a rotten way to do business, but at the same time it's a totally legitimate way to do it. Capitalism is all about this sort of stuff. *shrug*

Also:

The article thing wrote:"Their meat is leaky," says Jeff Winter, 30, a West Deptford shopper. "And instead of giving you a wet wipe to clean it off, they give you a dry towel. How's that going to prevent E. coli or whatever?"

Mr. Winter here has no idea how E. Coli bacteria work.

Aki wrote:It's kind of a rotten way to do business, but at the same time it's a totally legitimate way to do it. Capitalism is all about this sort of stuff. *shrug*

Capitalism is all about competition, not crushing it. Monopolies can't exist for long in capitalism, as you can see:

The article wrote:What analysts really want to see from Project Impact, however, is a faster pace of implementation. "The biggest hurdle facing Walmart is the speed with which they can roll this out," says Feldman. As more Project Impact stores pop up, the existing stores appear worse by comparison. [Emphasis added]

They're sacrificing quality for quantity. This is all to make their shareholders and salespeople happy, not their customers.

I've been trying to avoid shopping there, and reading this makes me certain that I'll never shop at walmart again.

No Walt-Mart for me! I had enough of that place.

http://amazon.com/ FTW!!!!

Target, Best Buy, K-Mart, and Toy R' US can beat Wal-Mart.

Terastas wrote:To be honest, this reminds me a lot of what Starbucks was doing. . . What, six months ago?

Starbucks is doing kinda miserably here in Australia. I heard that a few of their branches closed down because customers thought the coffee tasted like water. And seriously, this is coffee country. But what really got me was when I was in an Indonesian branch of Starbucks and asked the people there if they serve coffee the same way regular coffee shops do. They said "No, we have to follow company policy for that".

Company-freakin-policy: THE excuse for when you want to sell rotten coffee beans at the same price as a small cheeseburger meal at McD's. And being the hungry douche I am, it's pretty obvious what my choice is.

In a sort of defense of Wal-Mart, when it started it was a good idea. Volume begat discounts which were passed along to the customer.

Then, Sam Walton got greedy (or more likely, his investors did). They couldn't reduce the discounts, because that was the Customer draw. So, they cut corners elsewhere; usually where the customers couldn't see it up close.
They cut so many corners in pursuit of higher profits (and Wal-Mart was always profitable) that people began to learn of just what the company was doing...and mostly did nothing.

Now, Wal-Mart is a paragon of corporate greed and abuse and destoying competition in communities, and everybody slams the place...
But Wal-Mart is still in business, and still profitable because those same customers who slam the place...
Still buy there.

Ultimately, the source of Wal-mart's continued abuses are the customers who know what is happening but can't resist saving a few dollars.
Don't blame Wal-Mart; blame the hypocrites who keep them in business with their purchases.

End of Sermon.

Don't blame Wal-Mart; blame the hypocrites who keep them in business with their purchases.

I have always blamed both, Wal-Mart for being greedy, cheap, underhanded, not treating people well etc... and for the people that keep them in business they say they hate them.

Only thing in my life I ever bought at Wal-Mart was groceries, and even then only because the only other store within walking distance of where I was living at the time was effectively exploiting the anti-Wal-Mart shoppers with sky-high highway robbery prices (and I mean blatantly high, like "five bucks for bottled water" high).

kitetsu wrote:

Terastas wrote:To be honest, this reminds me a lot of what Starbucks was doing. . . What, six months ago?

Starbucks is doing kinda miserably here in Australia. I heard that a few of their branches closed down because customers thought the coffee tasted like water. And seriously, this is coffee country. But what really got me was when I was in an Indonesian branch of Starbucks and asked the people there if they serve coffee the same way regular coffee shops do. They said "No, we have to follow company policy for that".

That's pretty much what happened. Starbucks started as a gourmet high quality coffee shop, but they got greedy and expanded so far out and opened so many shops that, before long, they were literally opening Starbucks shops directly across from other Starbucks shops (this is mentioned in Lewis Black's "the end of the universe" bit, and also poked fun of in Shrek 2). And yes, most of those new Starbucks shops sucked royally compared to the originals.

Then all of a sudden they announced huuuuuuuuge financial losses (gee, I wonder why) and had to close thousands of locations. People used to joke about Starbucks taking over the world too, but they finally got bigger than they could afford to be and the whole thing collapsed on top of them.

This is what I predict will happen to Wal-Mart. It used to be a good idea, but now they have that same negative stigma building up against them. Wal-Mart has cut enough corners that it is beginning to show, and consumers are beginning to realize that Wal-Mart's fabled convenience isn't always convenient for the customers.

The stores Wal-Mart is deliberately targeting, meanwhile, will continue to get by. They may take a loss, but the sheer size of those Wal-Mart stores actually turns a lot of people away from them and into those smaller, more specialized locations.

Project Impact is going to have three more negative effects. First and foremost, it's going to cost them a crapload. Second (and as this thread would indicate), it's going to attach even more negative stigma to shopping at Wal-Mart, leave their business ethics subject to scrutiny, and as a consequence, they are going to lose some investors, specifically the ones that are only looking for stable investments and those who have made the aforementioned Starbucks connection. Finally, they're going to do as much damage to their original locations as they are going to do to their competitors.

So as a result of PI, I'm willing to bet that Wal-Mart will actually begin to take losses at many of their locations and be forced to shut them down. And boo-hoo to their investors -- as soon as their stock tanks, they'll get new ones.

Gevaudan wrote:

Aki wrote:It's kind of a rotten way to do business, but at the same time it's a totally legitimate way to do it. Capitalism is all about this sort of stuff. *shrug*

Capitalism is all about competition, not crushing it. Monopolies can't exist for long in capitalism, as you can see:

Then they'll crash and burn for lack of foresight. Simple, no?

The problem with monopolies is that they do work. They work very well. That's why there are laws in effect to prevent them. If monopolies collapsed on their own simply from the magic of capitalism, then congress wouldn't care.

Actually, a lot of Walmart's issues began AFTER Sam Walton died. Walton himself was smart but compassionate. After he died, Walmart began its massive campaign of building Super-Walmarts and relocating all their stores every two or three years, leaving derelict ex-Walmart buildings a few blocks over from the Walmart in every small town in America. Walton took care of his employees; it's after his death that we started hearing about benefits problems, hiring illegal immigrants, and so forth.

"Frankly, the difference in sales between Wizards and all other producers of roleplaying games is so staggering that even saying there is an 'RPG industry' at all may be generous." (Cook; The Open Game License as I see it)
WotC seems to have a monopoly there, but I have this strange feeling the government doesn't care...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't what they're trying to do in direct violation of US antitrust laws?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust

Click on the predatory pricing part. You'll see what I mean.

Not really, because predatory pricing is based on the assumption that the perpetrator is selling goods at a price that cannot be sustained by competitors. Target, for example, could easily lower the price of its goods to be equal to Wal-Mart and still stay in business (although Target's goal is to purportedly carry products of superior quality to Wal-Mart, so that might not be a viable business strategy.)

Predatory pricing doesn't really work, and that's why economists think it's a bunch of bologna (or a conspiracy theory, as mentioned in the article.)

Furthermore, clever marketing can trump pricing, as Dollar General and Family Dollar demonstrate. They sell many products at $1 that are actually cheaper at Wal-Mart, but people flock to dollar stores anyway, because the message of "everything is $1" is extremely appealing.

Sebiale wrote:"Frankly, the difference in sales between Wizards and all other producers of roleplaying games is so staggering that even saying there is an 'RPG industry' at all may be generous." (Cook; The Open Game License as I see it)
WotC seems to have a monopoly there, but I have this strange feeling the government doesn't care...

What WotC has doesn't really count as a monopoly. It would be more accurate to say that they specialize in a certain type of game which, with only a couple of exceptions here and there, most other companies completely disregard as a frivolous money-pit.

Compared to the gaming industry as a whole, WotC is actually pretty tiny, even to the point that non-RPG gamers would consider the company to be somewhere within the realm of obscurity. Hell, even people (like me) who play their games sometimes forget that WotC holds the copyrights.

Furthermore, WotC doesn't deliberately target other gaming companies, not even those that also specialize in RPGs (Blizzard, Squaresoft, etc). They just know what they're good at and provide it in bulk.

Wal-Mart, on the other hand, is a massive corporation that already has major industry holdings in multiple markets and is deliberately pushing to acquire more. It's already reached a point where Wal-Mart has more employees than the United States government, and yet they still are somehow not big enough. That is why it's a problem.

That, and you don't see Magic: the Gathering around every aspect of mainstream suburbia, the way you do Walmart.

(OK, back in 1995 you did, but their monopolistic powers ended around the time that "Mercadian Masques" came out and the game jumped the shark. Foil-coated cards finished the job that Pokemon started.)

Scott Gardener wrote:That, and you don't see Magic: the Gathering around every aspect of mainstream suburbia, the way you do Walmart.

(OK, back in 1995 you did, but their monopolistic powers ended around the time that "Mercadian Masques" came out and the game jumped the shark. Foil-coated cards finished the job that Pokemon started.)

Just because the game "jumped the shark" doesn't mean that it isn't twice as popular as it was back in 1995.

Wizard's player base has grown exponentially.

Baneslayer Angel is cheap.

Berserker wrote:The problem with monopolies is that they do work. They work very well. That's why there are laws in effect to prevent them. If monopolies collapsed on their own simply from the magic of capitalism, then congress wouldn't care.

Hey, if Starbucks can crash and burn, why not Wal-Mart?

One could also argue that because of corporate lobbyists, Congress could be passing laws allowing monopolies as well as preventing them.

Sebiale wrote:Baneslayer Angel is cheap.

So is Cursed Scroll

Scott Gardener wrote:That, and you don't see Magic: the Gathering around every aspect of mainstream suburbia, the way you do Walmart.

(OK, back in 1995 you did, but their monopolistic powers ended around the time that "Mercadian Masques" came out and the game jumped the shark. Foil-coated cards finished the job that Pokemon started.)

Magic: The Gathering just went through a fad period, kind of like the Beanie Baby period that came shortly afterward. You used to be able to go into even a convenience store or news stand and pick up a pack of M:tG cards, but to the best of my knowledge, they never actually had stores of their own. WotC's influence is pretty much limited to their own copyrighted gaming universes.

Part of the misconception may be due to the fact that A: "Dungeons & Dragons," has grown in popularity over so long a time that a lot of people have gotten in the habit of referring to it as its own genre apart from all other RPGs, and B: A lot of independently developed titles are D&D ripoffs, both creatively and mechanically. They are the kings of D&D games the same way Game Freak and Nintendo have dominance over the monster battle concept (Pokemon). They both specialize in a certain type of RPG and the quality of their product alone crushes the majority of their imitators, but they both have what only amounts to a niche in the gaming industry as a whole.

WotC also never made any move to directly attack and put out of business the companies that were licensing / producing the Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh trading cards to the best of my knowledge. I don't even know how WotC even entered into this -- it's a whole different world entirely.

"Another is friendlier customer service"
sooooo..... pot and prozac for the associates?

seriously folks, Im overjoyed with the news recently that the local Giant Eagle finally opened the doors to its new local store, and immediately began kicking the @$$ of the local hellmart. Wallmart was doing so bad, that around 70% of its customers immediately cancelled their prescriptions with walmart and transferred them to Giant Eagle AND walmart's store-wide sales went down a full 65% the day the new Giant Eagle opened. I also got fired, but it was worth it to sit back and watch the chaos ensue as the store began tearing itself apart trying to stay afloat. They are losing huge sales these days because they are slowly dismantling their sporting goods department IN THE MIDDLE OF HUNTING SEASON!!!! Its priceless to watch. Granted, yes, my financial status is totally screwed, but oddly enough, Im fairly satisfied with my current situation. Granted, yes, ill soon have to push for a new job, but hey, in the mean time... *gets out the popcorn*

cjkrythos wrote:"Another is friendlier customer service"
sooooo..... pot and prozac for the associates?

seriously folks, Im overjoyed with the news recently that the local Giant Eagle finally opened the doors to its new local store, and immediately began kicking the @$$ of the local hellmart. Wallmart was doing so bad, that around 70% of its customers immediately cancelled their prescriptions with walmart and transferred them to Giant Eagle AND walmart's store-wide sales went down a full 65% the day the new Giant Eagle opened. I also got fired, but it was worth it to sit back and watch the chaos ensue as the store began tearing itself apart trying to stay afloat. They are losing huge sales these days because they are slowly dismantling their sporting goods department IN THE MIDDLE OF HUNTING SEASON!!!! Its priceless to watch. Granted, yes, my financial status is totally screwed, but oddly enough, Im fairly satisfied with my current situation. Granted, yes, ill soon have to push for a new job, but hey, in the mean time... *gets out the popcorn*

That is freakin' awesome. I'm sorry you lost your job over it though.