Monday, December 04, 2006
Wal-Mart: Jack of all trades, master of none.
Before typing this, I will have any of my readers know that my opinion is biased. I may seem dogmatic in that I have been raised by experience, and I have yet to hear an opinion that has swayed me otherwise.
As the majority of the blog discussions will probably follow suit, I'd like to take this time to talk about Wal-mart. I am yet to have to obtain many of the things wal-mart provides, so I will speak on an issue with which I am quite familiar: video games. I am rather a bit of a picky gamer myself in that I require all of my games be awesome. Sadly, very few games in this day provide the sort of immersion or challenge that I crave, so the majority of the games I own are all rather sleeper-titles or 'cult' games. When I go to Wal-mart, I do not expect to be able to buy much software at all there. Gamestop, on the other hand, goes one step further and contains tons of games of all sorts of varieties.
That having been said, Gamestop provides something Wal-mart doesn't: a wide-variety, or specialized assortment of an item that I, the consumer, desire. This can be taken in a few different directions though, as Gamestop is itself almost too mainstream nowadays and is losing its touch, and perhaps the way they make most of their money is in the used game business, where the buy games for an almost absurd price, then sell it for 80-90% of its new price making a ton of profit for them and providing no benefit to the people that made and published the game.
Moving to another point which others might relate to easier, Wal-mart sells shoes. When I go shoe shopping, I look for price-effective shoes that are still reasonably comfortable and generally all-black or all-white. I refuse to pay $90 for a pair of shoes. Wal-mart helps me out with this sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't, and then they lose my business and I go to a plethora of stores in an attempt to purchase shoes without having the amount of time spent outweigh the price I'm looking for.
On to the actual point of this, my younger brother has feet the size of a small car (seriously, cars are pretty small these days). We don't even attempt to go to Wal-mart. We used to go to the supposed "mom and pop" shoe store in town, but they no longer help. I think the only reason it's there is because my town likes keeping its uppity-atmosphere in the silly old-people store part of town. Well, when I go to a shoe store - especially a specialized one - I want specialized shoes, not the same thing I could get at Wal-mart for an increased price for the sake of the store owner or the town's image. We drive for about 30 minutes, then we find another small family-owned shoe store where the people there actually carry shoes equipped for elephant children - errr.... kids with big feet. These guys stay in business amongst tons of huge shoe retailers and huge wide-variety stores like Wal-mart by carrying specialized goods.
Afterwards, we head over to Wal-mart to buy some small plants for the garden, a new controller for the gamecube, some socks for my dad (because he keeps trying to take mine), and a ton of school supplies because I like "rolling ball" pens and nice notebooks, etc.
In summary: step up and provide goods that people need that Wal-mart (or any larger retail store) can't, join Wal-mart, or get out of the merchant business. There are other jobs as well, and holding back the economy because you feel bad about someone going out of business is just as selfish as Wal-mart underpaying its employees. Which I might not be a fan of, but that won't stop me from buying they're cheaper-yet-same-quality goods.
As the majority of the blog discussions will probably follow suit, I'd like to take this time to talk about Wal-mart. I am yet to have to obtain many of the things wal-mart provides, so I will speak on an issue with which I am quite familiar: video games. I am rather a bit of a picky gamer myself in that I require all of my games be awesome. Sadly, very few games in this day provide the sort of immersion or challenge that I crave, so the majority of the games I own are all rather sleeper-titles or 'cult' games. When I go to Wal-mart, I do not expect to be able to buy much software at all there. Gamestop, on the other hand, goes one step further and contains tons of games of all sorts of varieties.
That having been said, Gamestop provides something Wal-mart doesn't: a wide-variety, or specialized assortment of an item that I, the consumer, desire. This can be taken in a few different directions though, as Gamestop is itself almost too mainstream nowadays and is losing its touch, and perhaps the way they make most of their money is in the used game business, where the buy games for an almost absurd price, then sell it for 80-90% of its new price making a ton of profit for them and providing no benefit to the people that made and published the game.
Moving to another point which others might relate to easier, Wal-mart sells shoes. When I go shoe shopping, I look for price-effective shoes that are still reasonably comfortable and generally all-black or all-white. I refuse to pay $90 for a pair of shoes. Wal-mart helps me out with this sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't, and then they lose my business and I go to a plethora of stores in an attempt to purchase shoes without having the amount of time spent outweigh the price I'm looking for.
On to the actual point of this, my younger brother has feet the size of a small car (seriously, cars are pretty small these days). We don't even attempt to go to Wal-mart. We used to go to the supposed "mom and pop" shoe store in town, but they no longer help. I think the only reason it's there is because my town likes keeping its uppity-atmosphere in the silly old-people store part of town. Well, when I go to a shoe store - especially a specialized one - I want specialized shoes, not the same thing I could get at Wal-mart for an increased price for the sake of the store owner or the town's image. We drive for about 30 minutes, then we find another small family-owned shoe store where the people there actually carry shoes equipped for elephant children - errr.... kids with big feet. These guys stay in business amongst tons of huge shoe retailers and huge wide-variety stores like Wal-mart by carrying specialized goods.
Afterwards, we head over to Wal-mart to buy some small plants for the garden, a new controller for the gamecube, some socks for my dad (because he keeps trying to take mine), and a ton of school supplies because I like "rolling ball" pens and nice notebooks, etc.
In summary: step up and provide goods that people need that Wal-mart (or any larger retail store) can't, join Wal-mart, or get out of the merchant business. There are other jobs as well, and holding back the economy because you feel bad about someone going out of business is just as selfish as Wal-mart underpaying its employees. Which I might not be a fan of, but that won't stop me from buying they're cheaper-yet-same-quality goods.
# posted by Anonymous @ 12:54 PM 
