"Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat a path to your door"...a little homily that often gets overlooked when just about any discussion of Wal-Mart, Bill Gates, or AT&T comes up.
By way of example, Wal-Mart, Bill Gates, and AT&T, etc., each in turn, built a better mouse trap and became a target after they established themselves as that better mouse trap! It seems this kind of thing happens often enough in everyday America. Let someone, or something get more exposure than the standard 15 minutes of fame and the iconoclasts eat em' alive! Competition is supposed to be a healthy and good thing...or is it until those being competed with can't or won't change to meet the threat of the new model. I'm no apologist for Wal-Mart, Bill Gates, AT&T, or ExxonMobil (they have PR people for that) but fair, should be fair! Mom & Pop went out of business because their economic model had run its course, and of course, they could never really stand to compete right there in River City anyway, let alone with a big box store over in town. We need to remember that. What about Lowes and Home Depot? How are they so very different compared to WM? What have they done to Mom & Pop's lumber yards, paint stores and hardware stores? The listing could go on almost forever.
Never mind that many anti Wal-Mart arguments are counter to the very democratic/capitalist/free market ideals and concept this country was founded on. Wal-Mart practices some poor personnel policies, as do many another corporation. Like K-Mart, Target, et al. Almost all corporations have some blood on their hands. Exploitation of the lesser skilled and educated wasn't invented by WM. Remember that the immigration of the Irish, Italian and eastern European peoples were primarily for the purpose of the 19th and 20th century cheap labor movements (anti-union), which just happened to dovetail quite conveniently with our great humanitarian ideals. I have to wonder sometimes if it's just currently fasionable to bash WM, or for some interests to promote anti Wal-Martism as unionist disinformation.
As it is, just about the entire consumer goods sector of our economy has "Made in China" written all over them, and goods I've seen sold in every store I've been too in the last few years. Yet some call WM--ChinaMart. One has to really look around to find products that are "Made in the USA." That's hardly unexpected since just about everything that use to be manufactured in America has been moved off shore to some second or third world country and imported back to us for sale by the very same people who use to make their products here! I don't think Wal-Mart accomplished all that on their own.
I'm as quick to gore an ox as the next guy is, especially if'n it ain't my ox! But fair should be fair. Wal-Mart is a symptom of what ails us, not the disease.
