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Comment by Mistone | Hacker News Reader

Its so annoying to me that many people (esp in Bay Area) loath Wal-Mart, and then turn around and gush over how cheap they got this or that crappy chinese made product for at Target.

Both are massive big box retailers, both threaten smaller businesses by discounts and volume. Both pay their employees entry level low wages.

Target def has better marketing and gives money to school. But that hardly accounts for the difference in opinions people hold for the two companies. Its nice to see some other opinions about these companies.

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I prefer products from Target over Walmart because they tend to be better designed and higher quality. Walmart is great when you want something really cheap, though, and quality isn't really a concern.

Seems more like Target has better looking products, especially home decor stuff, but it breaks just as much. Walmart has stuff of fine quality if you don't buy the absolute cheapest coffeemaker they sell.

def agree, I prefer Target because they seem to have better designed products and a sense of style. However, I'm fully aware that both companies operate a ruthlessly efficient business focused on maximum volume to drive down costs, and beneath the marketing they are very similar.

Agreed. And I'd say this thing about WalMart is better: I think there is more of a path at WalMart for people moving from the floor, to management, to corporate. Target doesn't seem to intend any floor jobs to lead to anything. They seem to court part-time people, be it part-time students, senior citizens, etc.

My main beef with Walmart is the service. Fry's and Walmart are the only 2 big stores in America I frequent where service is this bad.

Target is much better. Compare returning an item or disputing the scanned price with Walmart; it's night and day.

for the purposes of a conversation about loathing, i think you're presenting a false equivalence here. in such subjective terms it's hard not to admit that despite whatever flaws it may have, target has at least not had books written and movies made [1] about their misdeeds.

[1] on amazon, "target" had one result on the first page related to the company that was positive, whereas with walmart the second result is " How Walmart Is Destroying America And The World: And What You Can Do About It" and it doesn't really improve from there

Target isn't as big as Walmart. When making a book or movie I expect a person to attack the largest company to make their point.

People attack the giant and the giant is Wal-Mart. They are bad because they are golliath.

The truth is, they provide one stop shopping for millions of customers who previously had to drive to many different stores to buy groceries, clothes and other household items -- and gas too!

In this way, not only does wal-mart save customers money, but they also save them time. This is true of Target, et al as well, but my point is that Wal-Mart does good things for a lot of people.

Exactly, everyone with their knives out end up going for the biggest target. Same story with McDonald's, which gets dissed at every turn [1] while Burger King doesn't have to deal with any of that baggage and can happily, you know, sell burgers.

1 - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28967905/

MCD is still doing really well for itself despite the critics. The food there now is much better than I remember it being in years past. I have a lot of respect for how they handled the whole Super Size Me thing.

It's kind of sad that people would break up that statue like that. Regardless of your opinion of MCD, the Ronald McDonald house does a lot of good things for a lot of people.

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