Exercise and Walmart

I ran around the track while my darling was playing basketball. Today, I chalked up a total of 4.4 km. Well I only ran 2.4km, the rest was more walking than anything else. I figured that since I was there, I might as well work out instead of reading a book which I could do at home.

I still have 150 pages of this book I was supposed to finish by Sunday. I could blame it on my final exam which turned out to be extremely easy or the fact that I was reading a lot of other articles online, but I really shouldn't. I need to learn discipline. Or at least the ability to set realistic goals. Well, actually I still have 2 more days but I don't think I can masticate the rest of it by then. I really like this book and I would like to let myself savor it rather than finish it just so I can put a check against my list.

In lieu of my exam, it was slightly anti-climatic to find the questions to be almost exactly the same as the practice final. Granted, she did not provide solutions to the practice. It still made my effort in studying moot. I guess it's kinda like purchasing insurance to hedge against the uncertainty. Or more like I know I would hate myself for not studying if studying would have helped.

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Grocery shopped at Walmart just now. It's amazing how a 1lb 12 oz pack of sandwich meat that costs $7.99 at another supermarket cost only $3.98. That's a 50% difference!

I don't see why so many US people are against Walmart. Is it a us vs. them, little guy vs the evil corporation thing? Or is it something else? As I see it, they give good value to consumers even if they do so by bullying suppliers into submission. If it was really unprofitable for the supplier, they could always not serve Walmart right?

There are complains that Walmart and the big chains put the little honest grocer out of business but people conveniently forget that Walmart started small too and grew because it was successful.

As I see it, the neighbourhood grocer and Walmart really serve different niches, at least it seems to be so in collegetowns. Small grocers have higher margins because people pay a premium for the convenience. They also tend to have more variety compared to Walmart which only stock one or two of the most popular brands. When I shop at Walmart, I always feel that there is a lack of choices in terms of brands. Walmarts are usually much furthur away from residential areas due to their sheer size, making them inaccessible to people without cars and also adding to the cost of shopping in the outlet.

There is also the quality issue, not concerning their groceries but things like apparel and some toys. The clothes there looked obviously cheap and had a stiff, papery-coarse look to it. (Some of the teen clothes looked pretty decent though); The ninja turtle action figurines I saw there were also visually of lower quality compared to what I saw in Target.

Well the company has earned so much negative goodwill, that some guy esteimated that "[e]very third store Wal-Mart tries to build faces community opposition". Of course this coming from a guy who runs a Web site devoted to challenging them, you have to take it with a pinch of salt. [Source: Let Me Count the Ways People Don't Love Wal-Mart]

I'm personally of the mind that the market should decide what's good and what's not. I don't particularly like or dislike Walmart. (After all, it's just a place I buy cheaper groceries from) but Walmart obviously has something to contribute to society. If people think they don't pay good enough wages, go work somewhere else.