Why buy 10 widgets for $1 in a year at Wal-Mart because they keep breaking when you can buy a better quality one for $7 at a small competitor, which will last longer than a year?

Oh boy, no that makes the employee of Taco Bell just REALLY uneducated. But that’s a whole other story altogether, the poor quality of education (when people can’t figure out simple things, know little history and can’t spell worth a darn).

Seriously though Kim, it merely sounds like an incompetent manager and an overzealous PD.

Different story if it were company policy to refuse to cash large money orders and press charges against the presenters for forgery. I would agree that a company wide policy is evil. But with real evil in the world, it’s distracting to call a bloated corporate bureaucracy and incompetent local managers “evil.”

Here where I live, a gentleman ordered a burrito from a Taco Bell and tried to pay for his $1.98 order with a $2 bill (legal US tender and still in circulation although no longer printed by the Treasury). The store manager called mall security and threatened to call the police on the man claiming he was trying to pass a forged bill. Does that make Taco Bell evil also?

http://www.khou.com/topstories/stories/khou080610_tj_walmartforgery.1d77d917.html

I’ve lived and worked in many very small towns in many states in the U.S. where Wal-Mart is the main attraction. It does change the retail landscape of the town, and some businesses close thereafter. But to imply that Wal-Mart is the only employer in these towns (even very small ones) strains credulity without proof.

I think the problem has more to do with an increasingly mobile and urban society abandoning the rural (“very small towns”). For example, the town where I grew up in the midwest US had a population of 10,000 when I was a child. There were 2 family owned drug-stores, two family owned jewelers, at least three specialty hardware stores, four grocery stores, two historic hotels and a couple of motels, numerous boutique clothing and shoe stores, and a drive-in theater. The big excitement in town came when a McDonald’s and Kmart opened when I was in high school.

Now, there is one drug store, one jeweler (I think 1 is still open), 1 hardware store, one grocery store, a couple of motels, no clothing stores except for the Kmart (which is struggling), and the population is down to about 8,000 and dwindling.

Wal-Mart had nothing to do with this town’s decline and the loss of jobs. It’s a symptom of a rapidly globalizing economy, and it’s just too easy to single out Wal-Mart as the culprit. It also ignores the other problems that contribute to the economic plight of rural towns.

Thanks for the discussion on this once-lifeless thread. :) I’ll go back to letting this sleeping dog lie.

I personally don’t experience this. I don’t go to walmart and would never work there, but it does push out small business.

When there is no where else to work …

Mary, I have yet to find a town where Wal-Mart is the only place to work. It may be a place that will hire readily without much required by way of experience, compared to most other businesses.

But, “no where else to work?” Seriously?

I’ve known plenty of families that needed to pay the bills and feed the family and they didn’t work at Wal-Mart because they knew it wasn’t for them. They were quite desperate and did what they needed to get by, but they weren’t “forced” to work at Wal-Mart. Not even “nearly.” :)