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So I went to the Wal-Mart on Alpine today, and it just made me realize how much I like Meijer. You'd think a huge company like Wal-Mart would devote some resources into making their stores a nice place to shop. I guess they made their fortune by having the most efficient distribution system to enable lower prices, but haven't done any sort of work at making their stores not suck.

-nb

Yes. Wally World would have to ---dare I say----rise prices to cover the cost of cleaning their stores. Our dear friend Sam Walton wouln't like that too well.

I can hear him now...

"Throw that mop and bucket in the dumpster, assoiciate! Its cheaper to run a dirty store crawling with roaches than nice clean store."

Even the rough-around-edges Alpine Meijer store has Spic & Span floors.

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It's not so much the cleanliness that I have a problem with. It's that there is absolutely no organization to the store. It's like items are just scattered randomly throughout the store. When you do find what you're looking for it's probably buried under a pile of other stuff because nobody keeps the shelves in order. Then, the checkout line is long and slow, and there's only a few lanes open.

I don't see how shopping at Wal-Mart is any less socially responsible than shopping at Meijer. They're both big box suburban sprawl.

-nb

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So from here on, sombody ahead of me in a Meijer store cleckout lane who insists on paper bags will be hit up side the head with a bannana.

Given the choice between an petroleum based plastic bag and a wood based paper bag, I fing myself requesting paper a lot more lately.

Lucky for me I like bananas...

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I neither love nor "hate" Meijer. Their grocery prices are considerably cheaper than the Family Fare near me (Fulton and Carlton) and their selection of everything is better. So why don't husband-unit and I shop there always? Because it takes gasoline and road time to get there! Meijer places themselves far from where people actually live, thus necessitating a car. That sucks mightily, friends.

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I don't see how shopping at Wal-Mart is any less socially responsible than shopping at Meijer. They're both big box suburban sprawl.

True, but they pay their workers better wages.

It's like Sam's vs. Costco...both suburban sprawl but at least Costco gives healthcare to their workers and keeps CEO pay in line with worker pay.

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To which the libertarian in me says, "so what?"

-nb

Meijer is also locally based right here in Walker, MI and family owned. Supporting local bussiness is a good thing. Although if Wal-Mart were local and Meijer were based out of state, other peeves I have against Wal-Mart would still steer me clear their stores

Meijer has cleaner stores than Wal-Mart. I've been to Wal-Mart stores that make even the 28th St. and K'zoo Maijer look like an Intel microchip production clean room when it comes to cleanliness and upkeep. In short at least I don't get that sleezy feeling that I get from a Wal-Mart when I shop at Meijer even the older stores in the chain. Don't even get me started on the cleanliness of Wal-Mart Restrooms or lack thereof. Yuck!! :sick:

Meijer treats employees better than Wal-Mart. The fact that Meijer accepted Unions back in the 60's where as Wal-Mart is stubbornly arch-nemesis to Union forming pretty much speaks for itself. Yes I've heard horror stories from some Meijer employees. But they work a dream job compared to the BS Wal-Mart puts there slaves through. I've never heard of Meijer hiring illegal aliens and locking them in the stores at night. I also don't see former Meijer employees launching swarms of muilt-million dollar class action law suits against the company for such things as discrimination, or other forms of mistreatment. Meijer may not offer the best working environment in the world. But, what large retail chain does? But its light years better than the slave conditions of Wal-Mart.

Product Quality. Okey. Wal-Mart does have the lowest prices of them all. Nobody can really question that. For a family up against the wall financially and faces hardships, Wal-Mart is an irresistable siren that lures people into their stores enmass. That's what made Wal-Mart such a big and powerful entity But there is a catch to low prices. Case in point, I purchased four tee shirts a few years ago from Wal-Mart for about ten dollars, the price of one tee-shirt at Meijer at the time. I had those tee-shirts for about two weeks before I had to throw them out because the colors bleached out. Blue jeans I bought at Wal-Mart always got holes on the knees. Then I started buying my clothing at Meijer. Prices where more expansive but not by much. However, I never had any problems of clothing wearing out prematurely. After doings some research, I found out that many of the companies and brands represented in Wal-Mart have special "Wal-Mart" lines in their factories that manufacture products of reduced quality in order to meet Wal-Mart's unwaivering demends for reduced cost. Thus when you are buying a pair of Levi's at Wal-Mart, are you really and honestly getting true Levi's quality? Eventhough it says "Levi's" on the label, chances are you're not. Instead, you get what you pay for.

"So What?" is the question. Even though Meijer and Wal-Mart are both text book examples of big box sprawl, both stores are very different. One is local, family owned, treats employees fairly well for a discount retail chain, and offers products of acceptable quality at fair prices. The other is a "humanless" corporate entity that subjects employees to sub-human conditions, sacrafices quality for low prices, and insults customers with dirty and poorly arranged facilities.

So to finally get to my point, having the lowest prices alone holds no value in my book. Other factors as well as prices, such as product quality, store appearance, and corporate responsibiilty influence my decision on where I do bussiness. Thus as I've said before if given a choice between Meijer and Wal-Mart, Meijer would get my patronage hands down.

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Wal-Mart is local to the people in Bentonville. Meijer isn't local to markets outside of Grand Rapids, or Michigan if you interpret "local" a bit more broadly. As a consumer, a nice shopping experience has some value to me, and it's worth paying a few cents extra to shop at Meijer, but it has nothing to do with being local or treating employees better.

-nb

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To which the libertarian in me says, "so what?"

-nb

To which the realist in me says: If Wal-Mart/Sam's doesn't give them health-care, my tax dollars do when they show up in the emergency room and ask for emergency care. Not to mention uninsured workers drive up costs for the rest of us by monopolizing emergency rooms (where they're guaranteed care) as opposed to going to their family practitioner (where they have to pay...since they uninsured).

What's more, someone making enough money to put food on the table probably has kids that do better in school, go to college, don't steal my bike, etc. Face it, paying your lowest level emloyees a decent (not incredible...just decent) wage, pays the rest of us back later.

Edited by suydam
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Wal-Mart is local to the people in Bentonville. Meijer isn't local to markets outside of Grand Rapids, or Michigan if you interpret "local" a bit more broadly. As a consumer, a nice shopping experience has some value to me, and it's worth paying a few cents extra to shop at Meijer, but it has nothing to do with being local or treating employees better.

-nb

I take the treatment of Employees into consideration in my preference to Meijer over Wal-Mart because of real world experience, which says "If a company treats its employees fairly, then better worker performance and lower turnover rates are attain." In a production setting (in my case it was manufacturing interior trim for high end homes) it meant pushing out higher quality products at a higher production rate because employees through bonuses, pay raises, and other perks such as good health care and paid time off, and good managment, were motivated to bust some butt. Plus with lower turnover rates, good production numbers where attained by more job experience. For the home improvment puffs and contractors that my former employer catered to it meant high quality products supported by good customer service at decent prices. For three years the company was at the top of its game until the owner passed away.

New tight fisted managment took over, took away all the incentives and perks employees enjoyed, cut saleries and did a whole number of bad things too many to list here. Guess what happened to worker performance? It went down the tubes. Production numbers fell, product quality fell, turn over rates went though the roof losing the company highly experienced employees that were there since the company's founding 20 some odd years ago. For the customers, it meant shoty products and even worst customer service forcing them to take their business elsewhere. As a result the company is struggleing just to stay afloat. Shoot, I give my former work place barely two years before a pad lock and an "Out of Business" sign goes on the doors.

How this appiles to Meijer and Wal-Mart is this. With only a rare exception, I found that for the most part Meijer employees were more helpful and polite to me than Wal-Mart employees. I alway see somebody cleaning something or organizing stock on shelves at Meijer where at Wal-Mart I do not. I've always seen more smiles on Meijer employee faces than not where as at Wal-Mart all I see is the expresionless "I'm just a worker drone." look on assoicates' faces. I'm no expert in the complexity of the retail sector by any means. But if my experience gain from my former employer applies in this realm, then Meijer's better treatment of employees than Wal-Mart does have an effect on the end customer in the form of customer service and store appearance which is one of the many factors that stears me towards Meijer and not Wal-Mart.

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Having grown up in MI all I ever knew was Meijer, the first Wal-Mart didn't appear until after I had already moved away. I moved to the South, which is of course where Wal-Mart is King. Honestly I never really gave Meijer a second thought until after having moved away and realizing how good Meijer's really is after having to have to shop at Wally World.

Wal-Mart sucks plain and simple. The stores are nasty, the workers are horrible and if your lucky they speak English, the areas where they open seem to go downhill after Wally World opens there, they cater to illegals...I could go on. Like somebody else here mentioned, their chi-com merchandise is garbage, I have no idea if Meijer's uses third-world child labor to the extent Wal-Mart does, but either way, I have noticed a big difference in the quality of the merchandise. Even before we stopped shopping at Wally World, I quit buying any non-food related items because it just seemed like one after another clothing, toys, houseware, etc. it was all junk, in the trash after a few days-few weeks. Even somewhat known brands it almost seemed like it would be worse if it was from Wal-Mart.

Before you jump on the 'it's capitalism the free market will decide' bandwagon realize what Wal-Mart will do to an area. Then after it's too late and your stuck w/ONLY them, then you will really rethink the 'it's capitalism...' crap.

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Well, anyway. A better example of Wal-Mart and Meijer competing with each other is a few miles due south of Ionia. Two years ago, there was a small and very old Meijer store barely the size of the 28th and K'zoo Meijer. About a thousand feet away was a brand new Wal-Mart supercenter. At that time Meijer was behind as Wally World's parking lot was cramed full and the old Meijer parking lot was only 1/4 filled. However when I visted Ionia again a month ago the old Ionia Meijer store was gone, replaced by a brand new 207,000 sq. ft. David Rockwell Designed Meijer store. This time Meijer's parking lot was cramed full of cars while Wal-Mart's parking lot was only a third to half full. Going by that, I'd say the older Meijer stores maybe working a little harder at stealing Wal-Mart's thunder while the new Divid Rockwell Meijer stores have little trouble at giving Wally World a run for its money.

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Tamias,

Could you provide me with how much per hour Wal-Mart pays a full-time employee compared to Meijer?

I also think it is very elitist of you to assume you know that Wal-Mart employees are 'slaves'. Wal-Mart employees have been able to vote whether they want a union or not. Thus far, they've voted against it.

Much like most of the auto-plants in the South run by foreign companies have voted not to go union.

Presumably, these folks know what is in their best interest, no?

I do look forward to you answering my question about comparitve pay between Meijer and Wal-Mart.

Thank you,

Ryan

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Actually, twoshort, if it matters to you (or somehow makes my points more valid to you) I work for MPD Welding as the Treasurer and have my own investment company RAS Capital.

Now, does that make things different for you?

Edited to add: this probably makes me more biased then an employee, but I should add that I do have my clients invested in Wal-Mart stock.

-Ryan

Edited by Ryan68
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"We were duped by the union. There was absolutely no need to unionize," said Rejan Lavoie, 40, a single father who took a job as a department manager at Wal-Mart to be home in the evenings with his 8-year-old son. He fears he will not find another job with a workable schedule.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...005Apr13_4.html

To be fair, the part right after the above quote says:

At its headquarters on the outskirts on Jonquiere, the union is organizing a drive to find jobs for the Wal-Mart union supporters and to provide them with financial assistance.

"We weren't asking for the moon," said Bergeron, who spent two years quietly contacting fellow employees at their homes to enlist them in the union. "It's the largest and richest company in the world. They could afford to improve conditions. We only wanted to be treated like human beings."

It is also why I added the part about Southern auto-plants. Considering the capital already outlayed by, say, Toyota the fear of a plant shutdown isn't as near and dear as it may be with Wal-Mart. And, yet, they reject the union.

Perhaps Toyota is a better employer than Wal-Mart (comparatively speaking within its industry)? Perhaps most Wal-Mart employees truly do not want to start a union?

But Quebec also makes their union votes public, i.e. everyone will know how you voted.

Those who did not want a union say organizers harassed them to join. "People signed the cards just to get some peace" from the union organizers, said Noella Langlois, 53, who works in the clothing department. "They thought they would vote against it in a secret vote."

In fact, there was a vote last April that rejected the union. But under Quebec labor laws, the organizers could try again. When they collected signed union cards from 51 percent of the employees, the law declared the Jonquiere Wal-Mart a union shop.

And certainly, as the largest employer in the U.S. I'm sure Wal-Mart has its labor issues. But, net of it all, Wal-Mart is a big plus to the U.S.

I think Meijer is a fine company as well. Though my preferred shopping experience is found at Big Top...

-Ryan

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Ryan,

I made no comment on the validity or union recruiting tactics. You changed the topic to that by citing the duped workers who mistakenly voted to unionize (or were intimidated into it).

I'm not trying to start a flame war but I posted the article to show that if workers unionize, Wal-Mart shuts down their store. Recruiting tactics don't change that. They just reenforce my argument: Wal-Mart's precident has been set. Unionize (whether you meant to or not) and your store will be shut down.

Edited by suydam
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