I Wonder What The Problem Could Be?
Robert Reich just reports because this stuff writes itself.
It would appear that MalWart just announced it third straight quarter of declining sales and William S. Simon, the CEO, has figured out that his customers income is going down while costs aren’t.
Mr. Reich thinks he might consider giving his employees a raise that might enable some of them to get off all of the public assistance programs they now qualify for, but that would never occur to Mr. Simon who can’t figure out that MalWart is the largest single employer of its customer base.
Between the cut in food stamps and the possibility of another government shutdown in December, I don’t think it is unreasonable to assume that MalWart will have a rather bleak Christmas season, and will post negative numbers for all of 2013.
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I was in Mal-Wart today picking up some odds and ends like oil (cheaper at Mal-Wart), insulating spray foam and Gorilla Tape (to spray in the ends of my bumpers now that I cut the bumpers off, then seal) and it was a ghost town. But they only had three checkouts open so it was a ghost town that you had to wait twenty minutes to exit. And they wonder why it’s a ghost town, with customer service so bad and prices that aren’t so good compared to, say, the dollar stores? Harumph!
Well, let’s see. In each of the last 10 years, I bought from MalWart, ah, $0.00. And this year so far, I’ve bought from MalWart exactly, ah, $0.00.
So MalWart’s profit from me is, no, not $0, but however much its employees collected in SNAP because MalWart doesn’t pay them a living wage, plus any tax breaks local governments gave them to build one of their godforsaken stores in a community, plus any land they acquired cheap by a city’s exercising eminent domain in their behalf, plus… yes, MalWart should be doing quite well off me.
(Sorry SOBs… absent some compelling reason, I won’t trade with a company that treats its people and its communities as badly as MalWart does.)
While my neighbors who used to shop at MalWart have stopped since the Dollar General opened just a few blocks away they noted that is was definitely not cheaper when the shelves weren’t stocked and you couldn’t buy everything you needed in one trip.
The problem is that all changes in sales are ‘remedied’ by adjustment to the work force. It doesn’t occur to them that people will leave if it takes too long to check out, or something they wanted wasn’t on the shelves because there weren’t enough people working to stock the store. It is obvious that management doesn’t understand retail and thinks that people will put up with anything if you have the lowest price.