Comments on: FYI

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 20:37:15 +0000

That has been going on a long time and made the routing of roads and railroads one of the biggest generators of graft, greed, and corruption in US history. I would guess that only wars are a larger source of misbegotten wealth.

I drove Route 66 twice before it was subsumed into I-40, and it was a much better drive, if you weren’t pushed for time or not driving a semi. I-40 was the death of an American tradition.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 20:16:31 +0000

Elroon, Winslow was already destroyed before Wal-mart opened up, it just didn’t know it. The few shops that Wal-mart closed down were already on their last legs — no real inventory because they didn’t have the money to buy inventory, the only stuff left in the shops was years old stuff that nobody wanted to buy, they were only open eight hours a day for five days a week (Tuesday through Saturday) because the only employee left was the owner of the business…

Wal-Mart didn’t destroy Winslow. I-40 destroyed Winslow. The people who are shopping at Wal-mart in WInslow weren’t shopping at Wal-Mart in Winslow before the Wal-Mart opened. They were shopping in Flagstaff, which is just an hour away from Winslow via I-40. Wal-Mart can be accused of many things, but destroying Winslow isn’t one of them. If anything can be said to have destroyed Winslow, it is the modern economy and the automobile. The Wal-Mart in Winslow actually did Winslow a favor, because it sucks in people from the surrounding area to spend their money in Winslow who otherwise would have bypassed Winslow and gone straight to Flagstaff.

(Disclaimer: I have not lived in Winslow, but I have lived in towns like Winslow before — and they didn’t need a Wal-mart to look like that, indeed, didn’t have a Wal-Mart, we all drove 50 miles to the nearest city to shop).

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 05:12:37 +0000

If you are looking for anything at the absolutely lowest price anywhere, many below cost, go to a newly opened Wal-Mart. They undercut everyone until they quit, and then the prices start going back up. They always do it, and never get called on it. I guess there’s no law against “dumping” when it’s done by a “US” corporation.

By: ellroon

ellroon — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 04:34:19 +0000

I try very hard to not shop at Wal-Mart. Luckily, there’s enough of a population to balance out Wal-Mart and the mom-and-pop stores, and there’s plenty of places to find the same items for about the same prices.

When we were taking a trip in Arizona, we stayed in a famous hotel in Winslow. The surrounding town was horrible, boarded up shops, empty streets. We stopped at a Goodwill briefly and found that a Wal-Mart had recently opened.

It had destroyed the town.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:52:19 +0000

The South is anti-union, so it didn’t really come up until they went to Supercenters and started to hire skilled workers, like butchers, who already had unions. The old Wal-Marts were better than anyone else locally as far as wages and benefits went, now they are at the bottom.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 07:15:06 +0000

Well, Sam was virulently anti-union, and that was certainly the case when Hillary was on their board too. But she was the first lady of Arkansas, and Wal-Mart was the biggest employer in Arkansas as well as the pride of Arkansas, the only Fortune 50 company to be based there. Being on Wal-Mart’s board was good politics for an Arkansas politician’s wife, and from all accounts she tried her best to nudge Sam and the rest of the board into better policies especially regarding women in the workforce. I’ve known people like Sam Walton before and you wouldn’t have changed his mind about unions, period. About women in the work place… maybe. I can’t blame Hillary for going after the possible rather than the ideal.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 05:34:36 +0000

What’s annoying is that there are good reasons for preferring one or another candidate without all of this crap. Why not deal with difference on issues, or is that too hard?

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 05:22:00 +0000

from your same source, something that ought to be pointed out more often than it is —

“Hillary Clinton was appointed to the Board of the Legal Services Corporation by Jimmy Carter in 1978. Legal Services provides legal aid to the poor, working to ensure voting rights, as well as suing corporations on their behalf.”