Posted by BucketButt on 11/15/61 11:25

hawat.thufir@gmail.com wrote:

> Joel wrote:
> ...
>>Buying from
>> Wal-Mart, in particular, means supporting a corrupt, giant company,
>> and all the ones other than iTunes sell WMA files, which means
>> supporting Microsoft's format that is unfairly tied to its OS.
>> iTunes uses an industry-standard format, and there is also another
>> factor that I won't go into on this newsgroup, but truly makes it a
>> no-brainer.
> ...
>
> For the most part a corporation is a corporation, and they all exist
> to
> make money. What's wrong with Wal-Mart being giant? Nothing. Is
> Wal-Mart corrupt? Not sure I follow that reasoning. Is Wal-Mart good
> for China and bad for the U.S.? Yes, but they're just filling a
> niche.

Wal-Mart is good for China, but not entirely bad for the U.S. Yeah,
it's murder on the mom-and-pop retailers that used to monopolize small
towns, but those stores didn't carry anywhere near the selection of
products in their category of merchandise that Wal-Mart does. And
Wal-Mart has "everyday low prices" in all of its stores whether they're
in small towns or major cities; the mom-and-pop stores in small towns
generally charge/charged considerably more for the same items.

Wal-Mart carries its share of cheap junk, of course, but it also carries
more than a little good-quality merchandise. Recently I was looking
for a new 802.11g wireless router and a matching notebook card; I found
products from Belkin, Netgear, Linksys and possibly other major brands,
the exact same models one would find at Best Buy, Circuit City,
CompUSA, CDW or NewEgg. Across the aisle were printers from HP, Epson,
Canon and Lexmark.

I didn't see any iPods in the store -- but I found a display table full
of 20GB "iPod + HP" and accessories next door at Sam's Club. (And
still more at Sam's primary competitor, Costco.) Don't think I've ever
seen any made-in-the-USA clothing in a Wal-Mart store, but then I don't
see many "USA" labels on clothing in *any* store these days.

My dad ran a furniture and appliance store in a very small town most of
his adult life; he finally chose to retire because he could no longer
compete with the big stores in nearby towns. Not Wal-Mart, they hadn't
gotten here yet; his "unfair competition" included Sears, Kmart and
other big retailers that predate Wal-Mart by several decades. When
Wal-Mart did come into the area, he started buying at Wal-Mart and came
to like the stores a lot; thanks to bulk purchase discounts, in some
cases Wal-Mart actually sold major-brand items at retail for less than
he used to pay for them wholesale, which meant his fixed retirement
income went a long way.

I'd be a lot happier if I could find more made-in-the-USA items in my
local Wal-Mart -- but I can say the same thing for just about every
other store from Macy's to Radio Shack. I buy American-made when I
can; my second choice is to buy from an American-owned company even if
the product is made in another country. But if a product made in
China, Indonesia or Bangladesh should turn out to be head-and-shoulders
better than anything else available, I'll opt for quality more often
than not.

What I *don't* like is being locked into anything proprietary. My MP3
player doesn't handle the AAC format, but it does play both WAV and MP3
formats; whether AAC or WMA, proprietary formats rankle me. (My
portable MP3 player also doesn't work with DRM, which is fine with me;
everything I download gets burned onto CD anyway, and then it rips just
as easily as any of the CDs I've bought over the years.)

--
Walter Luffman Medina, TN USA
An equal opportunity annoyer

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