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KNOW-THIS
Joined: 14 Jul 2003
Posts: 3694
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 Wed Dec 03, 2003 8:44 pm
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Walcatraz LOL!!, that's good stuff...... |
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shatoga
Joined: 23 Nov 2002
Posts: 1291
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Thu Dec 04, 2003 3:41 am
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with two Wal Mart supercenters close by (by car),
I stubbornly shopped at three local markets instead, for two years that is.
Just having checked the expiration dates on my canned goods, to find the local markets sold cans about to expire, within weeks in many cases.
Just having pulled out the bags of dried beans, rice, peas, and such, and finding tiny maggots all through almost all of them.
Why did I do these things?
Because a relative just gave me dozens of year old bags of 'cup of soup' type dried noodles w/ flavor packet.
I opened a sealed container to add them to my months old same product from th elocal markets...
locally purchased stuff was full of maggots,
even the bags of dried beans, noodles and such I had placed, "from shopping bag to jar" in sealed storage.
The stuff purchased from Wal-Mart had no worms despite being stored on shelves in the same exact environmental conditions.
Must have been fresher due to
Wal-Mart's huge volume of purchases.
The three local markets seem to be buying up outdated goods on the cheap and still selling for more than Wal-Mart.
I went today and checked expiration dates on shelved cans at two of those markets.
Some of it expired last year!
(Yet sits today on shelves for sale)
I don't like to buy any foreign goods.
I have a relative who just quit Wal-Mart because said person takes a bus to work and got scheduled for shifts when busses do not run.
Talking to management got only a demand to show up as scheduled.
"Your problem how you get to work; Not ours."
Meanwhile thinking about that already soured milk I bought at our good local market, and wondering where to buy food other than Wal-Mart, since the locals are crooks.
BTW the same brands are in local general merchandise stores (whose owners are crying loudest about Wal-Mart)
And now that I know the owner of a local 'American' furniture store;
He told me all his stuff is Chinese made,
and advises that
"If you want American made, buy antiques."
It's global folks, like it or not.
I closed a silk-screen business in 97, because the last American manufacturer of t-shirts joined Fruit of The Loom, and all others, in buying foriegn made.
Their costs had dropped but their prices stayed the same.
It's American businessmen doing it to us and subsidizing that slave labor, in their increasing greed.
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KNOW-THIS
Joined: 14 Jul 2003
Posts: 3694
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Thu Apr 15, 2004 10:38 pm
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The imperialistic globalization marches on!
Moscow Looks Like Wal-Mart's Next Big Move
By Greg Walters
Special to The Moscow Times
Jaconna Aguirre / AP
Wal-Mart posted worldwide revenues of $256 billion in 2003, making it the the world's largest company.
They swore their contacts to secrecy and slipped into the country by stealth. But they still couldn't keep their mission a secret.
Perhaps a quarter of a trillion dollars had something to do with it.
When Wal-Mart, the world's biggest company with sales of $256 billion last year, sent a scout patrol to sniff around Moscow earlier this month, people in the know just couldn't stop talking about it -- off the record.
"It's the best way to have no chance of working with Wal-Mart when they come," said one prominent real estate consultant.
Notice the word "when."
Although the company insists that it hasn't decided whether or not it will roll into Russia, at least six Moscow-focused retail and real estate consultants say they have been advising Wal-Mart confidentially.
The decision is eagerly awaited. A commitment to Russia by Wal-Mart, consultants say, would be a public relations coup akin to oil giant BP's record tie up with TNK last year. More important, it will be a forceful stamp of approval heard by investors worldwide -- particularly Americans, they say.
"For North American companies considering new or further investment in Russia, I think it will be quite significant," said Reece Jenkins, a partner at Ernst & Young. "IKEA and Metro are well respected companies, but to a North American board member, it's not quite as tangible as saying, 'Hey, Wal-Mart's here.'"
Part of the reason for that, of course, is Wal-Mart's sheer size. It generated slightly less than three times more revenues than the Russian government did last year, and more than four of its top competitors -- Kmart, Target, Carrefour and Royal Ahold -- combined.
Since 1991 the company has moved into Germany, Japan, South Korea, Argentina, Brazil, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, China, Canada and Mexico.
Where Wal-Mart goes next is a closely guarded secret, but the company does give clues. In January, CEO Lee Scott named China, Russia and India as prime candidates for future expansion. And although, as Scott said, China is the only country where the company could "replicate" what it has done in America, it doesn't represent a new market.
So if it is down to Russia and India, Russia has at least one distinct advantage. "At the moment India does not allow foreign direct investment in our sector," Bracy said. "Obviously, if we can't invest, we can't be there."
Still, Russia presents its own unique set of problems for a company like Wal-Mart, whose business model is built on mass sales. Its strategy has always been to offer a staggeringly wide range of products under the same roof at discount prices. Success in Russia would mean figuring out how to move massive amounts of goods around the country reliably and cheaply.
"If you come into this market and you have a global supply and inventory management system, you have to work out how you're going to plug that into this environment," Reece said. "It's going to involve even more of a partnering approach, figuring out who the local partners are, and who the distributors are you're going to work with. The product supply and distribution market here is less developed, but it's moving quickly."
In addition to solving logistics issues, the Wal-Mart advance team is likely looking at cultural peculiarities that might affect their strategy, retail analysts say. In Germany, for example, Wal-Mart failed to pick up on certain social nuances -- such as not recognizing that most Germans weren't used to other people bagging their groceries. Partly for this reason, the company has struggled to turn a profit since its entered the country nearly a decade ago.
Wal-Mart admits it's been rough going. "We've had to invest more in people, stores, supply chains," Bracy said.
If the problems were unexpected, so were the solutions. Under its "Singles Shopping" program, which it launched in Germany just before Valentine's Day, customers who want to flirt while they shop were able to pick up special baskets with big red ribbons on them to make it clear they were looking for more than bratwurst.
"It could be quite clever, if it works," said Thomas Lindau, a retail analyst in the Hamburg office of Research International. "We have a large proportion of singles in Germany."
If the decision is made to go forward in Russia, the next question will be how. The move could be sped up if the company buys a pre-existing operator, as Wal-Mart did in Britain in 1999 and Japan in 2002.
But retailers in Russia are generally smaller than Wal-Mart's usual 15,000-20,000 square meter stores. A smattering of big Western retail outlets -- like Auchan's three Moscow hypermarkets, which range between16,000 and 18,000 square meters -- are the exceptions that prove the rule.
"If we're talking about 15,000 to 20,000 meters of retail space, there are no chains that have that kind of format," said Natalya Oreshina, senior director of the retail department at Stiles & Riabokobylko, a commercial real estate agency. "If they come, I think they would try to work on their own. But you never know."
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