On Sun, Feb 24, 2002 at 10:54:43PM -0600, Samir M. Nassar wrote: > Apples and Oranges Mr. Browne. > > While industrialization of production is indeed beneficial and needed, > industrialization of services is not. There is a good reason the US > enacted anti-monopolization laws. Lawmakers at the time, and until > recently, percieved a monopoly to be a threat to the welfare of the > general public because it can leverage power in a more concentrated and > organized way than the public. > > If Wal-Mart were Wal-Manufacture and were closing out smaller companies > I would not be as worried since they are only producing materiel, And as > you said, ultimately this was beneficial to society. However, having > only one company be the sole provider of goods and services can be > disastrous to a community, especially if they can use their reserves to > starve out 'mom-and-pops'. Then we are left with only one choice and no > recourse. > I'm not sure about other locations, but I lived in a town of 662 people, within a 10 mile radius we had 2 'wal-mart supercenters' (Auto, Garden, Grocery, Bank, Pharmacy, gas station (that undercut every other place in town by no less than 5 cents/gallon) and the eye vision place, all in the same store) one was in a town of about 10,000 people (Gun Barrel), the other was in the county seat (Athens), a town of about 15,000 people. There were no other large towns within 30-40 miles.. Athens had a Sears, K-Mart, Brookshires, and Winn-Dixie (these last two are large grocery store chains) Gun Barrel had a Brookshires and Winn-Dixie as well, along with a cruddy little dirty store that nobody liked to begin with.. When wal-mart 'upgraded' their regular stores in those towns to the supercenters the only noticable side effects were that the dirty grocery store went out of business (which was likely anyway), and k-mart finally decided they couldn't make money, and shut down their store. On the other hand, Winn-Dixie 'upgraded' their stores to include the same services, including the cheap gas stations, and continued to make money, Brookshires did nothing, and last time I was down there it was still chugging along as well. Personally I was glad to see the K-Mart and dirty grocery store go away, both had very nasty stores, and neither were worth going to. As for the community not being able to leverage their power, you should take a look into what happened in Hutchinson, MN.. Cub came in and decided to buy out a store (Save A Lot?), they built one of their huge stores, crammed it full of all the usual Cub foods products, had a get-rid-of-inventory sale at the store they purchased, and opened the new store. It lasted a month - nobody liked it, they wanted their old store back. Cub had another get-rid-of-inventory sale at the new store, closed it, and re-opened the old store, with the old products. There's now a very large, expensive, and 'like new' building sitting in the middle of hutchinson for lease. > This of course is where Wal-Mart starts to look very much like > Microsoft. [snip] > Having options is always a good thing. Definitely. > > -- > Samir M. Nassar > RedConcepts.NET - We Build Communities -- Matthew S. Hallacy FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified http://techmonkeys.org/~poptix GPG public key 0x01938203