Who Belongs On Mount Rushmore?

David Henderson, of The Library Of Economics And Liberty, has made the unlikely claim that Warren Harding belongs on Mount Rushmore. 

In addition to letting Eugene Debs out of prison, Harding also was ahead of his time on racial issues.  Here's a quote from Henderson's post:

Instead of attempting to suppress the black vote, he was a Republican, who, in 1921, made a speech in Jefferson, Ala., supporting the right of black men to vote. 1921!

He said: "Let the black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote." A reporter said that while the white section of the audience remained silent, the black section cheered.

Hardly enough to justify reshaping a mountain, but a good deed nonetheless. 

Other people have made other suggestions....

There's Reagan, who as best I can tell, had the advantage of not being Jimmy Carter....

And, of course, the Obamessiah, who has had the advantage of being black.  (I hate to go down that road, but if that damn fool's name was Barry O'Brien, and he was a white guy from East Armpit, Illinois, with the same non-achievements, he would've never made it into the Illinois State Legislature.)

Don Boudreaux, of the Café Hayek site, has chimed in with his .02 cents. 

I'd remove from Mt. Rushmore all people who are most famous for holding political office - which is to say, I'd blast off all four of the currently sculpted faces. I'd replace them with images of the faces of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Gustavus Swift, J.J. Hill (even though he was Canadian!), and either Gail Borden or Steve Jobs - people who really define, and who helped in notable and noticeable ways to sculpt, what is good about America. (If obliged to include a non-entrepreneur among the four, there's no question that the person whose visage I would choose is that wisest of all Americans, H.L. Mencken.)

If the suggestion is to ban politicians from being carved into mountainsides, I'll go with the following:

Sam Walton.  Walton brought more people out of bone-grinding poverty than anyone else in history.  He deserved a Nobel.  His company has provided millions of jobs to employees that you and I and Microsoft and Starbucks and Costco consider unemployable. 

Let's throw Norman Borlaug up there.  He came up with variations on wheat DNA that quadrupled yields.  He's called "the man who saved a billion lives", and because he did so without help from the Lefties, he's been widely criticized for doing so. 

David Koch.  Mostly to piss off the Statists, but also because he was an early, early advocate of ending the Nixon/Obama Drug War, legalizing Gay Marriage, ending the Fed, staying out of other people's wars, and lobbying for a smaller government.  Conde Nast has called him "one of the most generous, but low-key philanthropists in the USA".  Go here for a breakdown of just some of the money this man has given away.  (He's also given lots and lots of money to defeat the Obamacrats.  Unfortunately, all of it went to Republicans.)  The Libertarians ran him for V.P. in 1980. 

Milton Friedman.  He wrote Capitalism And Freedom, plus Free To Choose.  As a bonus, he and his wife Rose brought David Friedman into the world. 

I like those people.  Maybe one day they'll be carved into a mountainside and properly appreciated by a grateful nation. 

 

The most destructive company in America is about to go bankrupt !!

Busybodies in the USA have spent the last 20 years weeping, wailing, and rending their garments because of the destructive impact of Wal-Mart.  Wal-Mart supposedly kills downtown areas, they don't pay people "enough", and they purchase their merchandise from people of the wrong racial makeup. 
Progressive city councils pass legislation almost every day, trying to force Wal-Mart (and no other company) to pay higher wages, build smaller stores, and basically, stay away. 
They almost always fail. 

(Full Disclosure: I work for a company that makes display fixtures for grocery stores.  All grocery stores, not just Wal-Mart.  I've shipped more fruitstands to more grocery stores than anyone who has ever lived.  Hell, somebody had to do it.) 

But if you think Wal-Mart is destructive, you shoulda seen Safeway.  Back in the day,   Safeway built massive (6,000 square feet in some cases) stores, stores that carried EVERYTHING you could ever want to eat.  Some of their stores even had their own parking lots!!  They didn't offer sales on credit to their customers!!  Safeway was a threat to the American way of life !!  The Mom 'n' Pop stores didn't stand a chance!! 

And before Safeway was A&P, a company that few people under 40 have ever heard of.  A&P's destructive tendencies gave it the reputation of "the most controversial company in the nation". 

Marc Levinson of the Wall Street Journal has written a great piece on the A&P controversy, and I'm scraping and posting it here before it disappears behind a paywall.  I've long known about the evolution of the grocery industry, and how government has fought progress every step of the way, but I've never seen this much online about what A&P went through. 

Every day that you don't have to make your own soap, mix your own toothpaste, or stop at four different places for meat, tomatoes, diapers and razors, you owe that unimaginable luxury to the visionary pioneers at The Great A&P Tea Company, Safeway, and Wal-Mart. 

Here's Mr. Levinson:

***********

A prosecutor in Franklin Roosevelt's administration called it a "giant blood sucker." A federal judge in Woodrow Wilson's day deemed it a "monopolist," and another, during Harry Truman's presidency, convicted it of violating antitrust law. The federal government investigated it almost continuously for a quarter-century, and more than half the states tried to tax it out of business. For its strategy of selling groceries cheaply, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company paid a very heavy price.

Now, more than a century and a half after its birth near the docks of lower Manhattan, the Great A&P is reaching the end. The company, with holdings that include East Coast grocery chains such as Food Emporium and Pathmark, filed for bankruptcy in December 2010 and emerged from Chapter 11 status as a private company. Over the summer, news emerged that A&P had hired Credit Suisse to review its options, with a sale—to either to another grocery company like Kroger Co., or an investment firm like Cerberus Capital Management—a strong likelihood.

So far, no deep-pocketed shopper has plucked A&P off the shelf. The watching and waiting continues. When the company with the familiar name finally fades from the American scene, few will recall what A&P once was: the most controversial company in the country, the center of a struggle over the very nature of American capitalism.

 

© Underwood & Underwood/Corbis
               

Price-cutting A&P stores like this one in 1934 angered competitors—and Washington.

A&P was Wal-Mart long before there was Wal-Mart. Founded around the start of the Civil War, it upset the tradition-encrusted tea trade by selling teas at discount prices by mail and developing the first brand-name tea. A few years later, its tea shops began to stock spices, baking powder and canned goods, making A&P one of the first chain grocers.

Then, in 1912, John A. Hartford, one of the two brothers who had taken over the company from their father, had one of those inspirations that change the course of business. He proposed that the company test a bare-bones format at a tiny store in Jersey City, offering short hours, limited selection and no home delivery, and that it use the cost savings to lower prices. The A&P Economy Store was an instant success. The Great A&P was soon opening one and then two and then three stores per day. By 1920, it had become the largest retailer in the world.

John Hartford and his brother, George, the firm's financial wizard, didn't stop there. In the 1920s, they integrated vertically. They opened a produce brokerage to supply their stores with fruits and vegetables, which many grocery chains didn't carry at the time. They acquired bakeries, canneries and bottling plants—and leveraged their ability to make everything from ketchup to chocolate bars to strike tougher bargains with suppliers. They refused to buy through wholesalers and demanded that suppliers pay A&P the standard wholesale commission. And they plowed A&P's cost savings back into lower prices, fueling relentless growth. In 1929, A&P became the first retailer ever to sell $1 billion of merchandise in a single year.

While shoppers flocked to A&P's 16,000 stores, small grocers and grocery wholesalers didn't share their enthusiasm. The anti-chain-store movement dates back at least to 1913, when the American Fair-Trade League pushed for laws against retail price-cutting. It grew through the 1920s, as groups such as the aptly named Association Opposed to Branch Stores in Missouri demanded action against the chains.

The U.S. Supreme Court lent its support to the movement in 1931, approving taxes based on the number of stores a retailer owned. No company suffered more than A&P, which operated several times more stores than any other retailer.

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal piled on. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, the centerpiece of Roosevelt's economic recovery program, tried to bolster profits by subjecting entire industries to "codes of conduct" created by industry committees. The code for food retailing imposed minimum price markups on almost every product, blocking more efficient retailers from offering lower prices than less efficient competitors. The business sector, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cheered such measures, as did many Republican politicians. When the head of a major trade organization complained that business was "being crucified on the cross of competition," no one thought it strange.

After the Supreme Court struck down Roosevelt's codes in 1935, Wright Patman, a populist congressman from Texas, took up the cause of the country's 600,000 or so mom-and-pop grocers. Restricting chains, Patman declared, would keep "Hitler's methods of government and business in Europe." The Robinson-Patman Act, passed in 1936, kept suppliers from selling more cheaply to large customers than to small ones, stripping A&P of its cost advantage. The law forced up grocery prices and devastated A&P's profits. Six years later, the Justice Department brought one of the most bizarre antitrust cases of all time, accusing A&P and its executives of illegally restraining trade by demanding lower prices from suppliers—and winning.

Thanks in good part to the Hartfords' tenacity, the restraints on discount retailing began to fade away in the 1950s. Chain-store taxes were gradually repealed, and state laws limiting price competition to protect mom and pop were taken off the books. By 1962, when Wal-Mart, Target, Kmart, and other modern discount formats were born, the pendulum had swung in consumers' favor.

By then, John and George Hartford were dead, and their company, after passing into the hands of less competent managers and going public, had entered a death spiral that appears to be in its final stages. A&P, once the country's best-known brand, is by now so tarnished it probably has negative value, and any buyer will likely retire it. But even if the Great Atlantic & Pacific doesn't live on in name, it will leave an important legacy: the idea that capitalism can benefit consumers, if only capitalists will allow it to do so.

***************

The luxuries that A&P brought us are now so commonplace that our miraculous abundance now seems almost normal. 

And somewhere this morning, working in the back room of a Wal-Mart, a stockboy (or girl) has come up with the idea that will destroy Wal-Mart.  Wal-Mart won't stand a chance
 
Progressives and other busybodies will try to stop him, and call him "a giant blood sucker", a vulture, or just a greedy bastard. 
 
He will be accused of cutthroat competition, monopolistic behavior, and being un-American, all for trying to improve on Wal-Mart's methods.
 
I wish I could figure out who he is, and start buying stock early. 


 

On who makes our lives better

This morning I went to Jack-In-The-Box and got a sausage biscuit and some hash browns.  This particular location never closes.  They're open for me, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

I'm not particularly fond of their coffee, though, so I hit my Starbucks at Western Center Boulevard and I-35.  Had a double-espresso.  (Hit that link.  It's a good one.)  The Starbucks doesn't open until 5:30, but the workers had probably been there since 4:00 a.m. 

When I got to work, I looked at all the stuff we're doing for Kroger.  They love it.

I looked at what we're doing for Wal-Mart.  They love us, too.  We're busting our asses for those folks. 

Then I reviewed some stuff we're doing for another company, a company that will remain nameless.  (Don't want to call 'em out by name.  It's not going too well right now.)  If we don't get our shit together soon, they're going to replace us with someone that can keep them happy.  It's all up to us.

I walked through the big project we're doing for Radio Shack.  So far, they love us.

Then I broke open a China shipping container and pulled out a random box.  It's from my buddy Mr. Chen in Xiamen, China.  He provides us with all sorts of metal hardware and display fixtures.  The display dump bin that I pulled out of the container once took 30 minutes to assemble with a drill, a tap and die set, a pop-rivet gun, a rubber mallet and a screwdriver.  After a year's worth of emails, drawing revisions, hardware changes and, well, cussing, Mr. Chen has sent us a display bin that can be assembled in five minutes with nothing but a screwdriver.  I love Mr. Chen like a brother.   

Work, work, work, work. 

Here's something I found at the Cafe Hayek blog today, something on the same subject.  Every day of his life, Don Boudreaux of George Mason University fires off a letter to the editor of some Statist Rag, trying to correct misinformation about how the world really works.  This one was a beauty:

Edward Sage ridicules Charles Koch’s claim – from Mr. Koch’s essay ”Corporate Cronyism Harms America” (Sept. 10) - that “the role of business is to provide products and services that make people’s lives better.” Mr. Sage asks in response: “Since when? This sounds much more like a liberal take on the role of government. As a liberal I’d be over the moon if companies cared primarily about making lives better. Instead, this only happens if it’s the best way to make money” (Letters, Sept. 13).

Mr. Sage uses the word “only” to imply that it’s a mere occasional happenstance that the best way for businesses to make money is to supply goods and services that improve people’s lives. But because no private business (without special privileges granted by government) can force any consumer to buy its products – and because no private business (without special privileges granted by government) can prevent other businesses from competing for consumers’ dollars – no private business (without special privileges granted by government) can survive unless it supplies “products and services that make people’s lives better” (as judged by consumers themselves, of course, rather than by Mr. Sage and his fellow “liberals”).

Businesses do sometimes err. Consumers do sometimes err. But for Mr. Sage not to see that in private markets the profit motive generally drives businesses to seek ceaselessly and frantically for ways to supply outputs that improve people’s lives is for him to be blind to one of the most remarkable and transformative facts of the past two centuries.
Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Well said, sir.  Well said. 
If I ever make a ton of money, and the only honest way I can do this is by keeping a lot of people happy in exchange for their money, I'm going to go to Virginia and take classes from Don Boudreaux. 
It will happen. 

On Greed

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Aconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce.

I’ve had this "money speech" from Atlas Shrugged on the bulletin board over my desk for about a year now.  It's great, and I hope you'll hit the link and read all of it. 

There are three ways to get money:

1) Steal it.
2) Win it/Inherit it/Find it.
3) Swap something of value for it.

On the other hand, there are three things you can do with money:

1) Have it stolen from you/Lose it to taxes.
2) Give it away.
3) Swap something of value for it.

When we say that someone is greedy, we usually mean that he hangs on to more of his money or more of his “stuff” than we think a normal person would. He doesn’t give away much of it or swap much of it for other stuff.

But if the greedy man came by his money honestly, through methods #2 or #3, that means he either swapped something of value for the money, or someone else did (probably a parent) who wanted him to have the proceeds.

Webster defines “Greed” as “a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed”. Whether the following people have that selfish and excessive desire isn’t really known, but they do have far more than is needed. They lead off the Fortune 400 list of richest Americans. Here are the Top Ten:

10. Alice Walton | Worth: $20.9 billion (Wal-Mart)
9. Jim Walton | Worth: $21.1 billion (Wal-Mart)
8. Sheldon Adelson | Worth: $21.5 billion (Casinos)
7. George Soros | Worth: 22 billion (Hedge Funds)
6. Christy Walton | $24.5 billion (Wal-Mart)
4. David Koch | Worth: $25 billion (diversified)
4. Charles Koch | Worth: $25 billion (diversified)
3. Larry Ellison | Worth: $33 billion (Oracle)
2. Warren Buffet | Worth: $39 billion (Berkshire Hathaway)
1. Bill Gates | Worth: $59 billion (Microsoft)

I’m writing this on a computer that uses Microsoft programs, I just finished shipping four truckloads of display equipment to Wal-Mart, the facility I’m working in has leased 30,000 square feet of space to TTI (owned by Warren Buffett), and I read websites partially sponsored by the Koch brothers every week. (The Agitator, Cato, etc.) I have no idea what Larry Ellison does, but I’m sure that this laptop is a better machine as a result. George Soros is the only outlier, in that I can’t quite determine how he’s made my life better, other than donating vast sums of money for drug policy reform in the U.S.

Some of these people give away vast sums of their money. Others don’t.  But they didn't have to give away their money to enrich my life. 

By Webster’s definition, though, all of them still have enough money to be considered “greedy”. They’ve wound up with far, far more than anyone needs.

How did they do this happen? Did they steal it? No. Did they find it? No. Did the government give it to them after taking it from someone else? No.

They, or someone in their family, provided goods and services that were worth more than money. You and I voluntarily gave the Waltons, Bill Gates, and the Koch brothers some vast sums of money in exchange for stuff they provided – garden hoses, underwear, or groceries (in the case of the Waltons) software (in the case of Gates) or oil (in the case of Charles and David Koch).

They Ellisons, Gateses, Waltons and Kochs don’t need or want all of the stuff that their money will now buy. And they don’t want to sell their companies.

Bill Gates wrote computer programs that I’ve purchased. Millions of other people have swapped their money for his computer software.  But dammit, I can’t think of a single thing I could create that Bill Gates would want to buy from me.

I want what he’s got, and I want it badly. Bill Gates doesn’t want anything that I have.

Which one of us is greedy?  And which one of us does the world need more of? 

The People Of Wal-Mart !!!!

In addition to working in freight and shipping, I also supervise an assembly line that produces DVD dump bins for Wal-Mart, probably because my current warehouse had room for the project and nobody else wanted it. 

These things have caused me to miss weekends, birthdays, funerals, dental appointments, and sleep. 
This one has candy signs; others are done for movies.

 
After I missed my 30-year high school reunion (because of dump bins) I asked everyone in my class to have their picture taken with the dump bin at the Wal-Mart nearest their current residence, post the pic on Facebook, and tag me.

I got a nice flurry of dump bin pics from everywhere.  It was funny for a couple of weeks. 

That was nothing.  My project is now famous all across the U.S.A.!!! 

There's a fun website called The People Of Wal-Mart.  The site celebrates the diversity of Rednecks Backward Americans in all their creative, uninhibited glory.  Hit the link. 

Here's the picture of my DVD bin that made it onto the site. 

I don't know what's so strange about it.  It looks like a perfectly constructed DVD display to me. 

Ummmm...We don't believe that our neighbors deserve a choice

Here's Reason magazine's Nick Gillespie laying into assorted idjits who don't want to allow their neighbors to have a choice in department stores.

It's not what you know, it's who you know

From Bloomberg News:

President Barack Obama named Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric Co.’s chief executive officer, to head his outside panel of economic advisers, replacing former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

In announcing Immelt’s appointment to take the helm of the newly renamed President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, Obama said the economy is “in a different place” from where it was during the financial crisis when Volcker was brought on, and new ideas are needed to keep the momentum going.

Go here to read about all the mischief that G.E. can get into with Immelt having access to The Teleprompter's screen.  Worth the read. 

“The past two years was about moving our economy back from the brink,” Obama said alongside Immelt during an event in Schenectady, New York, home to the birthplace of GE’s energy business. “Our job now is putting our economy into overdrive.”

And now for something completely different....From the TaxProf Blog:

During his State of the Union address, President Obama said the current tax system is broken. "Those with accountants or lawyers to work the system can end up paying no taxes at all," he said. "But all the rest are hit with one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and it has to change."


Just how broken is the corporate tax system? Consider the tax rate paid by two of America's biggest companies — Wal-Mart and General Electric. Wal-Mart paid 34 cents in taxes for every dollar of profit it made in the past three years. General Electric paid just 3.6 cents on the dollar.

Welcome to the mysterious world of the corporate income tax, says tax expert Len Burman at Syracuse University. "There are big companies that consider their tax departments to be profit centers," he says.

That's right; instead of concentrating on making light bulbs, power plants or whatnot, companies use the tax system to boost their profits.

Here's what's funny about this....G.E., the ultra-wholesome, greenie, in bed with the Statists company, (and manufacturers of The ObamaBulbs) only paid 3.6 % of its income in taxes. 

Wal-Mart, the great Satan, the destroyer of America, exploiter of the people, torturer of kittens, etc., Wal-Mart graciously allows Obama to have 33.6 % of their income. 

I don't care who you are, that's funny. 

Just Say "No" To Lower Prices !

From Moonbattery, on a recent effort in Washington D.C. to open a Wal-Mart:

Moonbats will never forgive Walmart for proving how effective capitalism is at providing people the goods they need at a price they can afford while creating needed jobs and avoiding unionization. The intimidation tactics are exactly what you would expect of a nascent socialist police state. Obama's SEIU/ACORN friends have made targeting private homes a specialty.

Here's the flyer used to publicize the protest....

Full Disclosure: I work for a Wal-Mart supplier. 

More Disclosure: We supply all the other major grocery chains.

Disclosure Of The Obvious: If the developer purchased the land and wants to lease some of it to Wal-Mart, it is nobody's business except the developer's and Wal-Mart's.  If you don't like Wal-Mart, don't shop there.  That's the difference between the U.S. and a Worker's Paradise like Cuba or North Korea. 

Disclosure Of An Inspired Idea: Libertarians and economic conservatives should spend more time marching and protesting at the homes of, say, lobbyists, politicians, and regulators. 

Disclosure Of The Rejection Of This Idea:  Dammit, we're not in unions.  So we can't get paid to protest.  We gotta work. 

Disclosure Of Laziness On My Part:  I don't have time to list all the occasions where unions have been busted for hiring substitute protesters and paying them the absolute minimum wage.  (That link'll take you to a Great Jon Stewart/Daily Show piece, BTW.)   In the meantime, enjoy this:

Disclosure Of My Priorities For The Rest Of The Day: Gonna go ship some produce displays to Wal-Mart, and I hope they're headed to Washington D.C. 

Nyquil, Guns, and Wal-Mart

My friend Harper at Passed Up Strange, is getting ready for a holiday filled with drugs and guns and other weapons. 

She also has weighed in on Janet Napolitano's ghastly visage appearing on TV screens at Wal-Mart. 

Worth reading every day, that Harper.  Nyquil.  Guns.  Wal-Mart.  The three things that make life worthwhile. 

Big Sister is watching you, and wants you to watch everyone else

I like Wal-Mart.
No, I love Wal-Mart.
My employer, Jukt Micronics, is a Wal-Mart vendor, but that's not why I like the company. 

Wal-Mart has done more to reduce inflation than any other organization in the United States. 
They've done more to improve living standards all over the world than most people will ever know. 
Sam Walton deserves a posthumous Nobel. 

But if I EVER have to wait in a Wal-Mart checkout line and listen to this malignant Big Brotherism.....



....I'm going to abandon my cart full of pork rinds, Chinese denim, and Taiwanese electronics, and start reporting people to the manager.  This is nothing but performance art designed to show that Janet And Company are keeping us safe. 
 
Good God Almighty, is this what we've come to? 

Here's Infowars:

WASHINGTON — Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today announced the expansion of the Department’s national “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign to hundreds of Walmart stores across the country—launching a new partnership between DHS and Walmart to help the American public play an active role in ensuring the safety and security of our nation.


....The “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign—originally implemented by New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and funded, in part, by $13 million from DHS’ Transit Security Grant Program—is a simple and effective program to engage the public and key frontline employees to identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to the proper transportation and law enforcement authorities.

I hate to see Wal-Mart playing along with this.  But they've had to fight tariffs, unions, city councils, and a host of other government roadblocks for decades.  Do you think there might be cut some slack in exchange for allowing this Barackaganda into their shoppers' heads?  Who knows. 

Here's a good rant on some suspicious behavior that should immediately be reported to the Wal-Mart store manager:



Seriously, if you're a Wal-Mart fan, can you imagine buying some T-shirts beneath the hideous, all-seeing visage of Janet "The System Worked" Napolitano ? 

Let's hope that Wal-Mart (and everyone else) drops this program.  We don't need to become a nation of spies. 

The Wal-Mart Greeter Blues

After walking away from it for about 25 years, I've started writing songs again. 

I heard some guy on a radio program say that if you're upper class in America, your name is on the building.  If you're middle class, your name is on your desk.  If you're working class, your name is on your shirt. 

When I heard that, I was reminded of this old-timer I once heard ranting at The White Elephant Saloon in the Fort Worth Stockyards.  He was talking about how his land was disappearing, how he couldn't make it as a rancher, and how "that Wal-Mart Greeter job is looking better every day". 

This is what I did with it.  Will put up a YouTube as soon as I meet someone with the time and the camera.

Intro:

Granddad lifted me up high, and he put me on his saddle,

He said “Look at that horizon, boy, y’know one day soon all of that’ll,

That’ll be the land where your whole clan can feed and herd your cattle.”

But he didn’t prepare me for this concrete prairie,

My new home on the range, where the shopping carts rattle….

Here’s how I got the Wal-Mart Greeter Blues:

Verse:

My granddad built an empire, and my old man drank it dry,

Then I lost a lot in Vegas, and those taxes were so high,

Some went to my last three wives, and the cost of just getting by,

That’s how I got the Wal-Mart Greeter Blues.

Chorus:

So keep those steers a movin’, boys!  Pampers are on aisle four. 

Come on boys, we’re burning daylight!  Just get ‘em in the store. 

Drive that herd to the preferred products on the floor,

Check the receipts, keep the lobby neat, and then

Herd ‘em out the door. 

Verse:

I saw my granddad’s cattle brand all over the West,

I only saw my old man’s name on that sign that was on his desk,

My name ain’t nowhere but on this blue nylon vest,

And now I’ve got the Wal-Mart Greeter Blues. 

Repeat Chorus

So keep those steers a movin’, boys!  Detergent is on aisle four. 

Come on boys, we’re burning daylight!  Just get ‘em in the store. 

Drive that herd to the preferred products on the floor,

Check the receipts, keep the lobby neat, and then

Herd ‘em out the door. 

Verse:

Look at you, you sweet young thing, with that cart there all by yourself.

Girl, I’ve got what your shopping for, and it ain’t on the shelf.

If I wasn’t stuck here, girl, I would help you find it myself. 

Instead, I’ve got the Wal-Mart Greeter Blues. 

Repeat Chorus. 

So keep those steers a movin’, boys!  Wishes are on aisle four. 

Come on boys, we’re burning daylight!  Just get ‘em in the store. 

Drive that herd to the preferred products on the floor,

Check the receipts, keep the lobby neat, and then

Herd ‘em out the door. 

The picture of a Wal-Mart Greeter came from here. 

Unions hire non-union help, at low wages, to protest hiring of non-union help at low wages

When my employer, Jukt Micronics, goes to trade shows, we are invariably confronted with the stereotypical union "help".  (Note the scorn quotes.)
They charge us more to forklift the equipment to our booth than it costs us to ship the equipment from Fort Worth to Chicago, or Fort Worth to Vegas. 
THEN they ask for a kickback, "just to avoid any problems in the future". 

When Yellow Freight and Roadway merged to become YRC Worldwide, The Teamsters sent us a bewildering array of "drivers" (once again, note the scorn quotes) who couldn't succesfully back up to a toilet in just one attempt, much less a freight dock. 

Then there's the glorious mess that you're paying to straighten out at Chrysler and G.M. 

And the teacher's union. 

Well guys, when you've lost Jon Stewart, you've lost America.  Greatest. Daily. Show. Video. EVER ! !

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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An Unfair Comparison

Think of your best experience ever at the Department Of Motor Vehicles.  Then compare that unlikely memory to your worst experience at a Wal-Mart.  The occasional long lines or the difficulty you might have getting help from time to time. 

Think of the busiest Post Office you've seen in the past year.  Compare that to the slowest Wal-Mart (granted, a slow Wal-Mart is sort of a contradiction.) 

If you've ever done any building contracting, think of the most delightful experiences you've had with city electrical, plumbing, and mechanical inspectors.  Think of how prompt they always were for their appointments, plus or minus six hours.  Remember the what it was like navigating through their f***ing automated phone trees and getting sent to the same damn recording multiple times.  Compare that to the times you've found a Wal-Mart out of stock on anything but the hottest Christmas items. 

If you happen to work for a Wal-Mart supplier (Full Disclosure: I do), and you work in the shipping and freight end of things, did you notice some of the guys that The Teamsters started sending out from YRC about a year ago?  I bet it takes some of those guys five or six tries to back up to a handicap-stall toilet.  And yet those dangerous, low end, non-union Wal-Mart drivers can always, without fail, back up to the gates of Hell without pulling forward to straighten up a single time. 

Compare the U.S. government's response to Katrina....

....with that of Wal-Mart. 

  Then, when you're finished with all of those mental gymnastics, go here. 

In Praise Of Wal-Mart

Full Disclosure:  I work for a Wal-Mart supplier.  (We also supply Albertson's, Kroger, Winn-Dixie, Publix, HEB, Central Market, Brookshire's, Brookshire Brothers, and anyone else who wants to keep their groceries off the ground.  We've been keeping food off the floor since nineteen eighty-four, and we're better at it than anybody.  That's just how it is.)

I'm fascinated by Wal-Mart.  Because they bring good products to the masses at a low price, and because Wal-Mart plays a major role in keeping inflation down, and because Sam Walton probably deserved a Nobel prize, and because most low income families wouldn't swap their Wal-Mart for every social worker who has ever lived, and because of their anti-union stance, and because Wal-Mart accomplishes all this down-home Bentonville, Arkansas, goodness with no government aid, well, the lamestream media is required to portray Wal-Mart as downright satanic.   

We now have a few more goodies to add to that pile.  It's about the Wal-Mart produce selection.  Here's Reason magazine's Katherine Mangu-Ward:

(Author Corby) Kummer buys two batches of nearly identical groceries at Wal-Mart and Whole Foods. He has them prepared in a restaurant kitchen and invites taste testers to make a blind side-by-side comparison. The Whole Food grocery set cost $50 more, $20 of which is spent on top of the line chicken breasts (Wal-Mart didn't really offer equivalently high-end meat.)

The taste testers preferred the Wal-Mart veggies overwhelmingly, with complaints about the meat and dairy. "The tasters were surprised," he writes, "when the results were unblinded at the end of the meal and they learned that in a number of instances they had adamantly preferred Walmart produce. And they weren’t entirely happy."

Here's something else from Corby Kummer's original article about the taste test experiment, which is in the March 2010 Atlantic Monthly online edition:

Michelle Harvey, who is in charge of working with Walmart on agriculture programs at the local Environmental Defense Fund office, summarized a long conversation with me on the sustainability efforts she thinks the company is serious about: “It’s getting harder and harder to hate Walmart.”

Of course, it's getting harder and harder to hate Wal-Mart.  But what if hating Wal-Mart is one of the planks in your political party's platform?  I'm sure you'll find a way to continue that policy.
Some cynics think that Wal-Mart's sustainability efforts are nothing but window dressing.  Trust me.  I know differently.  They want everyone up and down their supply chain to operate in a sustainable manner.  Trust me.  I know.  They're for real on this.  I know.  Trust me. 
   
A few other things about the Atlantic Monthly Online's tour of Wal-Mart's produce offerings....Here's the picture they posted at the top of the article:

Are those not the best looking produce displays you've ever seen?  (Except, of course, for the others we have designed and manufactured for other grocery chains, which look just as good, but in a different sort of way?)  WE'VE MADE IT INTO THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !   Mark Twain published in The Atlantic !  So did Hemingway !  And the THE ATLANTIC FREAKIN' MONTHLY is running photos of our fruitstands ! ! ! ! ! 

And if that's not enough, the Atlantic Monthly even made a video.  Corby Kummer has good things to say about the quality of Wal-Mart's vegetables, but that's not the best part.....  Those are our shelves inside the wall refrigeration units !  Those are our new-era Produce Tables at the :40 mark, built by Ray The Wood God and Super Igor The Wonder Serb !  I think that's some of our plastic at the 2:00 mark, built by Danny Ray and company.  Those are our bakery displays over the narrator's left shoulder at the end of the video.

Hit the second button from the right if you want to view it in full screen mode. 
. 

But enough about us. You see, after all those exclamation points that I wasted in the previous paragraph, it might not even be our equipment in the video. WM has at least two suppliers for everything in their stores. (See the link above about how WM keeps inflation down.  Unlike the post office, the Department Of Motor Vehicles, or any other monopoly, we have competitors.  Therefore, we're obligated to build good products for a low price.  Let this be a lesson for anyone wanting a government monopoly in healthcare.)

One last thing....another one of my heroes, Radley Balko, wrote this post called "Does Wal-Mart make you skinny?" for The Daily Beast yesterday.  (It's been a good couple of days online for Wal-Mart.)

.....Economists Art Carden of Rhodes College and Charles Courtemanche of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro....conducted a study to find out (whether Wal-Mart had a positive impact on community health and overall economy.)   Carden and Courtemanche have done a number of studies on Wal-Mart. Carden insists they get no funding from the company, directly or indirectly. Rather, he says, the two free-market economists have been intrigued by the Wal-Mart debate and wanted to test some of the more common criticisms of the store. Generally, they’ve found that the worst fears about Wal-Mart are unfounded, and that the stores have a mostly positive impact on their communities.

But they thought this one might be different. “We expected the study to show an increase in obesity in communities with a Wal-Mart,” Carden says. “We know that Wal-Mart lowers the cost of food, but we figured it’s not always the best food for you.”

To their surprise, they found the opposite—there was a small but statistically significant reduction in obesity rates in communities with a Wal-Mart, perhaps because the store also sells fresh produce of good quality at a good price.....

In a widely cited 2005 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Jerry Hausman and Ephraim Leibtag found that Wal-Mart significantly lowers prices in the communities where it sets up shop, even for people who never shop at the store. On food alone, Hausman and Leibtag found that Wal-Mart delivers a 25 percent benefit to consumers, which has a disproportionately positive effect on the poor because they spend a larger percentage of their income on food.

The mere presence of a Wal-Mart in a community results in the equivalent of a 6.5 percent increase in annual income, which, as The Washington Post’s Sebastian Mallaby has pointed out, makes the store a bigger boon to the poor than the federal government’s food-stamps program. And Carden and Courtemanche began their study before Wal-Mart began its $4 prescription drug program, which also delivers a big potential health benefit both to Wal-Mart customers and other consumers in the area, because many competing stores were moved to implement similar programs.

And here's the typical Radley Balko kicker at the end:

Every time Wal-Mart tries to open a store in a big city like Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York, it encounters a storm of protest from politicians, labor unions and activist groups who claim to speak for the poor and low-wage workers. Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry, who proposed the one-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants on L.A.’s south side to combat childhood obesity, also in 2004, backed a bill to keep Wal-Mart out of that same community.

In Chicago in 2006, a proposed Wal-Mart store met with fierce opposition from groups critical of its labor practices—a position just reiterated by Mayor Richard Daley. So instead, Wal-Mart opened in Evergreen Park, one block outside the Chicago city limits. The store received 24,500 job applications for just 325 positions, and now generates more than $1 million per year in taxes for the small town while boosting revenue for local businesses.

Had Chicago’s politicians not been so obstinate, that economic windfall could have been enjoyed by the city’s low-income, mostly minority Chatham neighborhood—whose residents might have dropped some pounds as well.

The pictures of the GREAT looking produce displays in this post came from The Atlantic Monthly.  Thanks to Instapundit, as usual, for many of the original links.

The Dallas Cowboys' Debt Star Claims Another Casualty

This is the house that the City Of Arlington Texas built with other peoples' money and land. Cowboys Stadium.
When Jerry Jones and the City Of Arlington were conning the taxpayers into building Jerry a new stadium, one of the arguments they used went something like this:

The stadium will increase business in the area around the stadium. There will be a retail and restaurant boom. It will create jobs in Arlington, so many that we'll be justified in taking people's homes by force and bulldozing them for parking space.

People bought the argument.

Well, the new Cowboys Stadium has started claiming casualties.

About a dozen years ago, I was the manager of this Barnes & Noble store near the stadium in North Arlington. It was one of the last ones B&N built with a full book, CD, and software selection, plus a Starbucks coffee bar.


The store closed on New Years Eve.
Guess what killed it? On game days and concert days, customers avoided the neighborhood. On all other days, the city was working on the roads to improve access to The Boss Hawg Bowl, and customers avoided the neighborhood.
As a life-long Mark Twainiac, I loved, loved, loved this mural in the coffee bar:


Ok, so Amazon, file-sharing, and the internet are cutting into book and retail music sales.
The stadium was still supposed to be a godsend for restaurants and bars.
This bar/restaurant (in the picture below) was in the front parking lot of the B&N. It was one of those Hooters/Twin Peaks/Bone Daddy's - type places.
The stadium killed it. There are lots of places in DFW to watch the Cowboys, but one place you don't want to be anywhere near on game day, unless you have a ticket, is within 10 miles of that stadium.
Look at the restaurant/retail wasteland around the old Cowboys Stadium in Irving. Was it ever possible to buy a hamburger within 3 miles of that place?

Here's some empty retail to the west of the Barnes & Noble. I remember it being fully occupied, or close to it. I wish I'd gotten photos a couple of years ago.

I don't think this is what the Arlington City Council had in mind....

Like most libertarians, I have an appreciation for what Joseph Schumpeter called "Creative Destruction". We can't make progress with new ideas if old ideas have to be preserved at all costs. The B&N would've eventually died, but in this case, Dr. Jerry Kevorkian sped things along.

A funny thing happens when government forces a new idea. Jerry Jones didn't have to pay the price that businesses and families were asking for this land in Arlington. The Government determined the price, via an abuse of Eminent Domain. The free market didn't determine if a Debt Star Stadium would ever be profitable in the middle of North Arlington. It was theft by plebiscite. The typical voter probably spent less than two minutes seriously considering the secondary and tertiary effects of buying Jerry Jones a new toy in Arlington.

I'm predicting that the B&N retail site will soon be some variation on a parking lot. Guess which two entities will get the lion's share of the proceeds?

Maybe this store is a poor example. Granted, the retail book business is struggling. Ditto for retail music.

Another business (that operates in the shadow of the new stadium) is one of the few that has done well through the current recession.

In spite of their increased nationwide sales, the Arlington Wal-Mart will be closed by the end of 2011. The stadium is going to kill it.

Hide and watch.

Picture of the Wal-Mart on Death Row came from here.

And Now For Something Completely Different - A Journalist LIkes Wal-Mart!!!!

The guy in the picture is Charles Platt. Mr. Platt went undercover from his usual gig at Wired magazine to work at Wal-Mart, an experience he wrote about for The New York Post.

Some people, usually community activists, loath Wal-Mart. Others, like the family of four struggling to make ends meet, are in love with the chain. I, meanwhile, am in awe of it.
With more than 7,000 facilities worldwide, coordinating more than 2 million employees in its fanatical mission to maintain an inventory from more than 60,000 American suppliers, it has become a system containing more components than the Space Shuttle - yet it runs as reliably as a Timex watch.

Mr. Platt obviously didn't get the memo. Wal-Mart is supposed to be 100% evil, right?

....Considering this is a company that is helping families ride out the economic downturn, which is providing jobs and stimulus while Congress bickers, which had sales growth of 2% this last quarter while other companies struggled, you have to wonder why. At least, I wondered why. And in that spirit of curiosity, I applied for an entry-level position at my local Wal-Mart.

This will be the good part. Here come stories about employees being chained in the back rooms, forced to work off the clock while Simon Legree wannabes spit on their Bibles.

Getting hired turned out to be a challenge. The personnel manager told me she had received more than 100 applications during that month alone, chasing just a handful of jobs. Thus the mystery deepened. If Wal-Mart was such an exploiter of the working poor, why were the working poor so eager to be exploited? And after they were hired, why did they seem so happy to be there? Anytime I shopped at the store, blue-clad Walmartians encouraged me to "Have a nice day" with the sincerity of the pope issuing a benediction.

Yeah, well, in some places with new stores, there are more than 20 applicants for each job. But that's because the masses don't know better, and haven't been exposed to the blessings of giving their pay to union bosses.

.... I sat at a table that was covered in untrimmed fabric under a protective layer of sticky transparent vinyl, like a couch cover. I'd seen better-looking decor at firehouse bingo evenings. Was Wal-Mart going out of its way to emphasize its commitment to cost-cutting? I guessed that the utilitarian ethic was so deeply embedded, it was just taken for granted.

I've been to the Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville Arkansas three or four times. I've been to the Canadian headquarters in Toronto about as many. This guy, Charles Platt, has definitely been in some Wal-Mart offices. The furniture makes the North Sunflower Academy cafeteria look like Tavern On The Green. If they had nicer furniture in their offices, I bet they'd be unprofitable enough to qualify for some bailout money. The Fools ! !

....A week later, I found myself in an elite group of 10 successful applicants convening for two (paid) days of training in the same claustrophobic, windowless room. As we introduced ourselves, I discovered that more than half had already worked at other Wal-Marts. Having relocated to this area, they were eager for more of the same.

These employees simply don't know better. They've been brainwashed. They were graduates of the American school system, and of course weren't qualified for..... oh, never mind.

The article is excellent, and worth reading. I can promise you've never read a Wal-Mart piece like this one. When you get a chance, please read the whole thing.

But I've got to include Platt's closing paragraph:

Based on my experience (admittedly, only at one location) I reached a conclusion which is utterly opposed to almost everything ever written about Wal-Mart. I came to regard it as one of the all-time enlightened American employers, right up there with IBM in the 1960s. Wal-Mart is not the enemy. It's the best friend we could ask for.

Charles Platt is a former senior writer for Wired magazine.

Why Are Democrats Taking Money From Wal-Mart?

Jonathan Tasini of The Huffington Post asks "Why Are Democrats Taking Money From Wal-Mart?"
Kimberley A. Strassel of The Wall Street Journal answers: It's a Protection Racket. Politicians, lobbyists, and consultants cash in by protecting companies from their own party's agenda.

There. Any other questions?

Or does anyone else have a better answer?

Walocaust Denial

A computer store owner in Georgia is enjoying his 15 minutes of fame because of his Walocaust and Wal-Qaeda websites.

Charles Smith, the computer store owner, has also designed some satirical bumperstickers and shirts. Wal-Mart sued him for trademark infringement.

Wal-Mart lost. For several reasons. Here's The Machinist from Slate.com:

"The fact that the real Wal-Mart name and marks are strong and recognizable makes it unlikely that a parody -- particularly one that calls to mind the genocide of millions of people, another that evokes the name of a notorious terrorist organization ... will be confused with Wal-Mart's real products," wrote U.S. District Judge Timothy C. Batten Sr.

The second reason:

As the AP points out, the judge also noted that very few people were even interested in Smith's charming work: He has only sold 62 T-shirts, 15 of them to Wal-Mart's law firms.

They aren't that funny.
What was Charles Smith's motivation in comparing a wildly popular retail chain to the second-worst atrocity in the twentieth century? Here's The Machinist again:

By the way, I bet you're interested in Smith's justification for appropriating Holocaust imagery for his anti-corporate tirade. On Walocaust.com, he writes, "I worry that by even implying that anything could compare to the horror of the Holocaust, the worst tragedy in history, I cheapen the term." But then Smith saw a report "on the TV about how many goods Wal-Mart was importing from China and how many jobs this cost America."

Before I ask the big question, I have to issue a full disclosure....I work for a Wal-Mart supplier.

(Insert audible gasp here....)

We also supply Kroger's, Albertson's, Winn-Dixie, Publix, HEB, Giant Eagle, Joe Bob's Choke'n'Puke, and some places you've never heard of in Mexico and Canada. Australia. The Dominican Republic. Italy. Germany. The World.

We ship to all these places because we are 1) smart, 2) damn good, and 3) we're usually fast.

That's our competitive advantage.

China ships products to a lot of places because they have 1) time, 2) time, and 3) time.

They have lots and lots of people with oodles and boodles of time. Time is so plentiful there that it's cheap. That's their competitive advantage.

That's why Wal-Mart purchases a lot of things from China. We do too. And my employer has doubled its number of U.S. employees since we began sourcing some repetitive parts from China. Doing that was yet another competitive advantage for us.

You benefit from competitive advantages every day. How much more would you be willing to pay for a cell phone that was 100% manufactured in your hometown? Home state? Nation? How about a home-grown iPod?

Locavores, would you be willing to pay twice as much for regional gasoline?

Yes, I admit it. It's not rosy for everyone. When you're the displaced worker, it hurts. Bad. Some people never recover from getting Globalized. But the pluses, in my opinion, far outweigh the minuses. One of the pluses is the computer you're using to read this. You can afford it because it was made by people whose only competitive advantage is....time. Their time isn't worth as much as yours and mine. (Gross Generalization: if you're reading this in English, your time is worth more than that of an Asian assembly line worker.)

Charles Smith, the computer store owner from Conyers, Georgia, apparently dislikes Wal-Mart enough to devote two websites to Wal-Mart's downfall.

His stated reason: Wal-Mart imports products from China.

Can someone in Conyers, Georgia, visit this guy's store and let me know where his computers were made?

I'm just curious.....I bet it's someplace a long way from Conyers, Georgia.