@cranky1950 Probably not, but there is a possibility that Harps Foods will. We have a local drug store that is “Powered by Walgreens” but some insurances don’t recognize them as a provider.

@jsimsace Check with your wife’s insurance, since it’s possible they also have refill-by-mail service available. It’s obviously not as convenient as driving a few blocks, but as an offset it will usually save you on any co-pays. The two companies I’m familiar with require that the refill be for 90 days. If your wife is on maintenance meds (which are usually more or less permanent) it’s pretty easy to use.

@magic_cave Thanks for the advice. That may be a viable option if nothing better pops up.

@haydesigner We virtually boycott Walmart also; on in very rare instances will we shop there. We vacation in some pretty rural areas, and it’s horrifying to drive through small towns and find nearly every store in their “downtown” shuttered.

@haydesigner When I was younger and stupider, I used to boycott by shoplifting. (Buy a cheap item and sneak a more expensive one into the bag.) It was a lot easier when they were the first ones to put up self checkouts.
I think they’ve learned that it takes more than one person to check 5-8 self checkouts, because they have 2-3 monitor it now. However, it still takes casualties in our town of 30k, as we just lost another local grocery store.

@haydesigner Nobody loathes Wal-Mart more than me, but I think the reputation of “intentionally” destroying local businesses is not 100% accurate.

It would be “intentional” if they were using predatory pricing. I.e., selling at a ridiculous price that is below cost, and then raising it back once the competitors go out of business. The truth of the matter is Wal-Mart’s regular prices are low enough, that alone is often enough to drive the little guy out of business. It sucks and I hate it, but I don’t think you can realisticly accuse of them of intentionally killing local businesses.

@DrWorm I agree, if anything I blame local consumers. Wal-Mart doesn’t cause the cost of doing business for mom and pop shops to go up, it doesn’t line people up at gunpoint and force them to shop at their store, people make an active choice to shop there just as I make an active choice to avoid doing so if at all possible. Sure, I might pay a bit more for the same product at my local video game shop, for example, than I would at Wal-Mart or GameStop, but I choose to do so knowing that I am supporting small business in America, never mind that often times my local mom and pop will carry items the big box has no interest in due to specialty nature or low sales volume.

I’m not going to sit here in judgement of people living paycheck to paycheck (or welfare check to welfare check) on canned soup and saltines going to Wal-Mart to stretch their dollar a little further, but we need to recognize that the consumers are to blame more so than the corporation.

</unpopular truth>

@jbartus furthermore the rest of Walmarts policies people don’t like such as treatment of workers fall on the consumer as well. Walmart is told nothing else matters but having low prices and even when scandals are brought to light people keep shopping there. Irresponsible consumerism and people convincing themselves their choice on where to shop holds no power to rationalize continuing to do business with Walmart are responsible. The corporation might be making these choices at the end of the day but we as consumers are letting them get away with it by continuing to do business there. There’s a reason you won’t find a single Nike product in my house.

@DrWorm @jbartus There is some truth to that, at least historically.
Back in the days when I was young and so was Walmart, small towns in the Ozarks would get a new Walmart and the prices would be incredibly low. Coincidentally after all the local businesses disappeared, those prices would drift upwards, but never enough to enable the Mom & Pops to reopen. It was a great business model, but somewhat predatory, especially since now a lot of the money left the local area.
People appreciated the low prices, but the proliferation of minimum-wage part-time jobs with no benefits didn’t help any.

@DrWorm - But that’s exactly what they do. It happened in my town not that long ago. Unconscionable.

Dear Wal Mart,

@jbartus

Walmart plays games with pricing and suppliers and exclusivity. They try to bully suppliers into being available in an area only thru them, and they have it down to a fine art.

First they will sign on a supplier, and for a few years it will be great. Then Walmart, having cut all sorts of special deals and gotten the supplier to make special sizes and bundles available, will sell the hell outta whatever. Then once the supplier has contracts in place, and has ramped up production and hired people because the sales have grown so much, WM sometimes starts turning the screws. To get an exclusive. To radically cut supplier pricing. So that the supplier is suddenly faced with either going along by with WM (whose buyers are nice until they stab you), or downsizing to smaller than they were before they met WL, with attendant layoffs and exited contracts and loss of income and profit.

It can get quite ugly. And that’s all without considering the employee treatment.

I think they have been shown to move into a new market, be all nice for a while, then start the predatory pricing. But only as low as it needs to be. Then, when enough competition has died, the prices inch back up. They know how to keep it subtle.

The thing is, many people can barely afford to shop at WM, let alone other stores.

@f00l Well said.

@f00l gaining exclusive distribution agreements is common across many levels of business, not only at the big box store level. I used to work for a screen printing shop who had to sell Dolfin Swimwear in lieu of Speedo because there was another company some 20 miles away that had exclusivity. The company in question was a small mom and pop swim shop that was very regional and had very little if any overlap with this printer’s territory and yet the exclusivity was there. I can’t speak to your allegations of gouging suppliers, though most every business is going to try to trim costs where they can, but I’d be interested to read some primary sources on the subject. I’d be similarly interested in documentation of the predatory pricing, there should be case studies available after all these years that show a pretty demonstrative curve to the pricing if there’s evidence to back it up.

Either way, consumers are responsible for what they choose to do with their money. Money talks, as they say, so if you care about small businesses keep your money out of Walmart (and Amazon for that matter, pretty much any other B&M big box too) and support your local business owner. The problem is that people don’t, they make short sighted decisions like saving a whopping $30 on a flat screen TV, and small businesses perish. Whatever else you might say it is a truism that the demise of small businesses in a Walmart area is the result of choices made by consumers augmented by whatever Walmart and co. do. Walmart doesn’t post up gunmen outside of people’s businesses and force people to shop elsewhere, it is a free choice made by individuals.

As for your last, many people also choose to live beyond their means and utilize Walmart to facilitate such.

Our modern society is entirely too consumerist with many people considering things to be ‘needs’ that are, in fact, wants. We lack appreciation for that which we have and seek more than we have any real need for because we instill arbitrary and fabricated measurements for success and happiness upon life. The average life for a television has plummeted from 20+ years to 3-4, this is due in large part because of decrease in manufacturing quality but this decrease has been driven by the fact that manufacturers know they can get away with it because consumers are replacing them like crazy, always seeking the biggest, best, most feature-rich even though their current set has no issues. New phones are bought regularly a mere 1-2 years, if not months, after the prior phone was purchased and while that phone was still in good working order. People spend stupid amounts of money on clothes for their labels, shoes are a standout where a $250 pair won’t last you any longer than a $50 pair and yet people pay. People tell themselves they need these things because to them they’re status symbols and you have people forking over money they shouldn’t to buy these things to achieve some perverse sense of self worth, it’s a real sickness.

@jbartus

I agree with quite a lot of what you say.

I suspect pricing + convenience + aggressively pursuing biz opps are what make WM the master of its market space. All of these are reasonable biz pursuits.

I’ve heard quite a few documents ed stories about documented WM ugly buyer conduct over the years. I’m not tracking them down, but a famous one involved pickles somehow or other.

I remember another story from a retired guy (prev successful businessman) who created and made some sort of specialized sporting equipment. Someone in FL I think. M WM wanted it. Great. They wanted an exclusive. Great. He made plans to ramp up production, called off negotiations with other potential outlets, flew around making arrangement for manufacturing to meet up to expected demand.

Everything looked good. Then WM called. Last minute demand, never before mentioned. They demanded he cancel the tiny # of single-item orders from existing contracts he had signed before WM ever came to him in the first place. He refused. He said he would fulfill his existing contracts (a few one time, one-piece orders of customized to the customer sports equipment) and not renew them or sign new contracts. WM would be his only customer.

WM argued with him a bit and then dumped him. Shortly after, they had signed with some Chinese company and within a year had a similar exclusive product in the store.

I don’t know if intellectual property rights were an issue. The story was about how WM negotiated.

He was a sole proprietor before he met WM and could not afford to take them on, legally.

The whole thing cost him a lot of money. Not sure, but I think he finally abandoned the business and became a hobbyist.

WM buyer are notorious in wholesale and manufacturing circles in a way that not even Amazon can compete with at the moment.

Size and market domination can make it easy to be a bully, or to do underhanded things people can’t afford to fight, unless they are willing to have their lives consumed by the fight and still likely lose.

I don’t know if WM is better or worse now than they were 10 years ago.

As for your last, many people also choose to live beyond their means and utilize Walmart to facilitate such.

Ok plenty do. Perhaps most. And many people either can’t or won’t evaluate the impact of their actions on the community. Many may not know how to do that.

But … how much time have you spent with the genuine poor who work full time amd always have, who live frugally and always have, who are so stressed and tired that they can’t figure out how to jump start themselves to better lives?

Plenty of these people out there too.

@f00l I know there are which is why I qualified it with ‘many’. I am under no delusions that there are not many people who benefit from Walmart’s low prices due to limited means, believe me. But I also know that there are plenty who buy their groceries with food stamps that own bigger TVs than I do.

Regarding the buyer conduct mentioned, my only response would be to note that the only evidence of Walmart not having mentioned it before is probably hearsay from the manufacturer (doubt Walmart would have commented) and while I empathize with what happened to him I can’t help but feel that either 1) he didn’t have a signed contract and invested in ramping up production etc. before anything firm was in place (because if he did have a signed contract that would pretty much have ended any such claim on Walmart’s part) or 2) if he did have a contract it had to be something he overlooked in the language. ‘Exclusive future distribution’ is very different from ‘exclusive distribution’, for example.

Either way I’m not really here to defend Walmart, they are a crummy company with crummy practices, but at the end of the day the masses still choose to shop there, just as they probably buy Nike products despite the many documented examples of unethical practices that company employs.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@f00l They nearly put Rubermaid out of business when that company refused to cave to the bully. Eventually they did cave, but the cost to that company was pretty high.

@f00l That’s how Rubbermaid became a Newell brand, they were at one time actually innovative and creative. They came to depend on wallys for too much of their business.

@jbartus

I don’t know if WM still has, or exercises in bulky fashion, the buying clout and contract clout they had 10-20 years ago. The markets have changed. WM has appeared to try to clean up its image somewhat. No idea if those are “deep changes” or merely cosmetics.

In you lived in a small rural town in a flyover state, you would cost yourself something notable in time and energy, trying to completely avoid shopping at WM.

Whatever locals might have done 50 or more years ago to protect their local biz environments, that’s gone now. The retail in county after county after county has centered on WM for that long. If you avoid them, you drive all over the place, and perhaps to the next town or county.

@f00l I was addressing the topic of Walmart driving local businesses under when they open a new location, not seeking alternatives in a long-established Walmart area, those small businesses are long gone and can’t be brought back easily.

@thismyusername And don’t forget about your VMP membership!

@magic_cave
Thx.

@f00l Oops! I sort of left out the “4” in that message. Try “some of them charge only $4 for certain common meds.”

@medz In the early days of Walmart, they shut out mom and pop shops by buying distribution rights to goods sold by the mom and pop shops. IE. Small town (~,10000 people), mom and pop kitchen store which had been open for something like 40 years closed partly due to not being able to sell Kitchen-aid products. It was more than just Kitchen aid, but it’s the one brand I remember. There was a whole news article on it in the local paper about it. Can’t find the source so it’s all hearsay.

@DrWorm
Well she should have called a supervisor.

Waiting for a supervisor to assist would have only taken a few hours or so.

/giphy waiting

@PocketBrain
/image peopleofwalmart

http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/

@narfcake People of Walmart

@KDemo Thanks for the heads-up, but the nearest Costco is 3 hours away. It will all work out eventually.

@jsimsace - Mail order is also available from Costco, but I suppose you can do that with other pharmacies as well. If you’re curious, here’s the article I quoted:

http://www.savingadvice.com/articles/2015/02/02/1032625_can-i-use-the-costco-pharmacy-without-a-membership.html
Good luck!

@f00l I love the vitamin mishmash! they just have a row of 5 shelves and they shove the vitamins/supplements on there randomly.

WMPT: if you can’t find the supplement in one of the 4 possible locations they should be, just look on the top shelf, it will likely just be sitting there never to be properly stocked!

@f00l there is nothing wrong with going places in PJs. I once went to a gas station in a robe because I needed gas, wasn’t dressed, and it was cold out. Nothing wrong with not wearing undies either.

@medz

@narfcake Yes

https://goo.gl/DpGvXZ

@thismyusername Fuck!

I NEED EYE BLEACH!!