Comment by 001sky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 001sky | Hacker News Reader

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I've already seen what supporting Walmart has done to our country

Have you ever shopped there? Or do you just repeat what you read all the time? Wall mart typically only exists in rural poor areas, and I doubt a drive-by HN commenter has any sense of proportion on the real issues at play. Wall-mart migh mean more competition for mom & pop stores, but they also bring reliable and affordable access to otherwise unaffordable or trans-port prohibitive goods and services to people that don't have the wallet or the access to shop at whole foods or a boutique coffee shop that charges $5/cup. The reality is that even for successful stores such as these, the owners are absent, the employees make non-living wages (corrected for rent), and the extant competitors are out of business or severely harmed. Think of all the gentrification in the mission in the past 15 years...all of those (poor) people are more fucked by hipsters and their fancy shit than anyone ever was by Walmart.

You say "Wall mart typically only exists in rural poor areas", is this true?

Here in Canada, Walmart is pretty much in every city, regardless of income. The only place Walmarts don't exist is in areas where the population is too sparse, or rent is too high (e.g. downtown Toronto).

I find it hard to believe Walmart is only "in rural poor areas", unless their position is radically different in the States.

In the US, Walmarts do not seem to exist inside of cities (other large stores, like K-Marts or whatever seem to more often. This seems to be because Walmart is more conservative with form factor than other large store.) If you find a Walmart in a city, it will typically be in the outskirts or in the suburbs. That might seem like a lot, but contrast this coverage with with the sort of coverage they give small poor towns (seemingly every town over a handful of thousands people has one). A Walmart way out in the suburbs may as well be on the Moon for most city dwellers, particularly when you go down the income scale.

Living in Seattle, it is a half-hour drive to the nearest Walmart (there isn't one in Seattle, you have to go to Renton to find one.) Living in Philadelphia it was about the same. Back at my parents home, deep in central PA (aka, "Pennsyltuckey"), there were three Walmarts within 15 minutes. Medium/large sized rural towns like York PA can get two or more Walmarts. However even when a town starts to get as large as Harrisburg, access to Walmarts starts dropping.

If Walmarts were common in cities, then urban food deserts would not be a thing in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

> In the US, Walmarts do not seem to exist inside of cities

Walmarts don't exist in places where property values are high, as a means of keeping costs low.

> If Walmarts were common in cities, then urban food deserts would not be a thing in the US

Well, no; even if they had no effect on other existing businesses, regular Walmarts would have no effect on food deserts, as they don't carry fresh food. Super Walmarts do, but those are even bigger stores, and even less likely anywhere with significant real estate costs.

But, even if we consider big box food store could well -- through competitive pressure on already marginal smaller stores -- increase the average distance/time for urban residents to reach affordable, healthy food.

Super Walmarts could certainly be justified for the population a Walmart in a city would have. Honestly I forgot non-Super Walmarts were still a thing, I haven't seen on in ages.

Property value is definitely why Walmart (particularly Super Walmarts) doesn't move into cities. Their deal is large sprawling buildings with even larger sprawling parking lots, that isn't the sort of thing that you stick into a city. They don't seem keen on trying the "multilevel, compact, with a parking garage" or "underground complex" sort of form factor that other stores successfully employ inside of cities. I suspect this is because their margins are too tight for even that (and that form factor probably discourages buying in the sort of volume that their preferred store design encourages).

One way or the other, the Walmart:people ratio seems to be far lower in cities than in towns and suburbs. If Seattle had the same Walmart density as York PA, it would have over 30 Walmarts. Walmarts are practically the Starbucks of small-town America. (Briefly sampling a few towns in PA, it seems like for ever Walmart you can expect about two Starbucks. That's actually way fewer Starbucks than I expected, I suspect Google Maps isn't being honest here...)

Really small walmarts have started popping up in city centers. One just opened up in midtown atlanta.

It's not even remotely true.

In reality, it's about the same as you describe in Canada. They're not opening stores in dinky towns of 500 people, and they're not buying expensive premium real estate, but they're almost every where between those extremes.

> rent is too high (e.g. downtown Toronto)

They tried to put a Walmart downtown a few years ago ~2008, and they are currently trying to get approval for a Walmart in a different location that's would be on the edge of the 'official' boundaries of the downtown core.

It's definitely not true. Walmart just opened a store in Tyson's Corner, which is a suburb of DC and is surrounded by some of the richest areas in the country and, though not as urban as downtown DC, it's far from rural.

To add to this: I would hate to be a 3rd shift worker and have to rely on 9am-5pm mom and pop stores for all of my purchasing needs.

Hell, just considering regular office workers, where are you going to go to pick up new diapers in the middle of the night when your kid wakes you up screaming, following a logistics failure? Without Walmarts, the only realistic option for late-night shopping is the local 7-11.

> Wall mart typically only exists in rural poor areas

This is factually wrong. Walmart (note the spelling) follows suburbs and population centers. They may have been mostly rural one or two decades ago, but they are now most likely to be found near an intersection of freeways within 10 miles of a downtown. See http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4330486 for a map.

As for the rest of your screed... it's possible to be down on Walmart AND Whole Foods at the same time.

Looks like the rest of the screed is just copypasta, since in that part Walmart is spelled right. (Pardon my weasely use of the passive voice to avoid specifying the subject to the verb "to spell").

I'm not sure to what degree your apology is tongue-in-cheek, but I'll just leave this here. There is nothing wrong with the passive voice when used correctly; evasive sentences are equally a problem (or not a problem) whether written in the active or passive voice, and it's quite possible to be evasive or not with either.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922

Passive voice is also a bland, meek way to avoid using gendered pronouns. I much prefer using an active verb if I can think of one, and singular them.

I have a question for you: how can you be actively evasive -- care to demonstrate by not actually answering my question? ;)

Interesting. It seems passive voice can be used that way. I don't see any reason to complain unless the usage is strained, though (including, possibly, through the destruction of diversity in sentence structure - a crime that insistence on the active can also commit).

As to your last point, I am not proving witty enough to abide by your request in an amusing manner, so I will simply address your question: it is completely possible to avoid assigning blame with the active. A classic example would be, "They say...". Or compare the active "Someone made a mistake" with the passive "Mistakes were made by Steve."

It might date me, but my English teacher explained the passive voice, and its nefarious uses, by quoting Ronald Reagan on the Iran/Contra Scandal: "Mistakes were made."

Yes, that's quite explicitly what I was referencing. It was weasely and it used the passive voice, but that is more or less coincidental. Your English teacher was wrong.

> Wall mart [sic] typically only exists in rural poor areas

This is just absolutely, unequivocally not true, unless your definition of "rural" and "poor" includes urban centers of cities with tens of thousands of citizens with median incomes ranging from impoverished to affluent, especially in the south.

Walmart comes in and destroys the mom&pop operations who are less pricey than "whole foods or a boutique coffee shop that charge $5/cup" but can't compete with the cheap, shabby crap made by wage-slaves in third-world sweatshops that Walmart brings in.

Your post is very San Francisco-centric. I don't think you understand or have seen what it's like to live elsewhere. "Hipsters" aren't a "problem" anywhere else I've been, anyway.

There are two Walmarts in Bellevue, WA, which has one of the highest incomes per capita in the country.

They import and sell cheap shit designed to break and be replaced and disguise it as value by citing low prices.

I have shopped there. My father currently works at a Walmart in his vicinity. I also grew up in a "rural poor area." I shop at my local discount grocer rather than Whole Foods.

Is it ok for me to criticise now?

You can criticize all you want, but on hn it helps if your criticism is accompanied by an argument.

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