Well, paying more to prop up inefficient enterprises only delays the inevitable.
The business should find out how to be more efficient or find justification for higher prices so consumers will buy. Consumers don't treat businesses as charities, willing to pay more; ask Wal Mart.
They save the average family about $2,000 per year. If they stopped doing what made Wally World, Wally World... someone else would come in and kick their asses.
If the price can be justified... OK... but if it's a "personal sacrifice", an act of charity, the business will eventually fail.
I might pay a supplier marginally higher rates if he has the items I need, decent terms, fast service, friendly and easy to deal with individuals or all four. Otherwise it's going to be shopped for the lowest price.
I don't see business as charity.
.
First, cheaper doesn't mean "more efficient". It usually means lower quality and, well, cheaper.
Next, I can't control the idocy of other people who decide to shoot themselves in the foot by looking at the short-term gains they recieve by shopping at megastores and such. When it's their job that gets outsourced due to their inability to have any long-term planning.
Many of th epeople I know who shop at walmart are totally replaceable in thier jobs. They are at high risk for outsourcing. They don't have any legitmate skills and their ultimate fate will probably be working at wal-mart themselves, and thus making a lower wage, and requiring them to look even more closely at their meager savings from wal-mart with appreciation.
Although if they had the cop-on to have avoided it in the first place, they could have kept their jobs and higher incomes by not patronizing these places simply because they were short-sighted and it provided meager gains.
On top of that, they'll constantly bitch about the lower quality of their goods and the horse**** service they receive, while I continue to enjoy being treated like a king at the establishments I frequent.
If I went to walmart instead, I'd spend as much time being frustrated by teh pure crap that I'm buying as I currently do being treated well by the small-businesses I help maintain.
The problem isn't that people want better service. IF that was the case, coporations would fail immediately due to their shoddy customer service. Even the
good ones aren't **** compared to a small local business.
What people want is cheaper. The only thing that matters to them is that they "saved" 20 cents on their roll of toilet paper. It'll be great to wipe the blood from their assholes when they get ****ed in the future.
I don't expect or want the government to step in, however. I would prefer to see peopel stop ****ing themselves through their shortsighted focus on immediate gratification. I think this is one of the biggest problems in American society today. That need for immediate gratification and a comlete and total inability to withold gratification. We have become a shortsighted nation that demands immediate results, no matter how bad it ****s the future up.
Why is their a credit crisis? Immediate gratification.
Why do we have an incompetant and corruptgovernemnt? Immediate gratification.
Why are corporations sending jobs to other countries? Immediate gratification.
When I talk about personal sacrifice, I mean those short-term sacrifices that are of absolutel importance for long-term gains.
Just because I
can buy a bunch of **** I don't really need cheaply at walmart doesn't mean I
should buy a bunch of **** I don't need cheaply at walmart.
If we really analyzed how much people save by buying things at walmart, how much of those savings would be on crap they didn't need in teh first place?
I'm guessing quite a bit of it would be.
Now we've got people who live in shacks who have 50 inch HDTV's. They might have "saved" $500 on that TV, but they had to spend $1000 in order to do so. If they never bought it in the first place, they'd have saved $1000 of real money instead of saving $500 of imaginary money they never had to begin with.
It took a couple of years for me to break my wife of the habit of coming home with crap we didn't need and telling me how much she "saved" on it because it was on sale. That's the walmart mentality in a nutshell.
Simply because it is sold there cheaper than at other places doesn't mean it isn't more expesive to buy it there.
I don't begrude the corporations for making their money on other people's foolishness, though. It's their duty to exploit foolishness for the good of their shareholders and the bottom line.
What I'm talking about is how I won't be party to it. I'd rather make short-term "sacrifices" for long term gains. It isn't charity. It's having a long-term outlook on life.
That's part of the reason why I'm working to enter a field that can't be outsourced.