For all you Walmart haters out there...
Check it out. Their lower prices help poor and middle class urban types like me afford healthy food. People like me who lived in an urban area that had nothing but Whole Foods, posh personal shopping services, fancy caterers and 7-11s understood this, but now there is a published study on it.
Original Post by pgeorgian:
i'm betting those ain't walmart shoes, either.
No I buy $70k of Walmart shoes. It's not easy!
I know this is sick and wrong..... but your post makes me want to add a category to my Quicken so I can actually see how much I spend on shoes in a year.
I don't think I want to know that answer though. ;)
That could be part of the cost problem. Meat is not cheap because it's a highly inefficient way to get calories, at least in the great American CAFO industry.
My husband and I buy no meat and regularly get by on <$100 a week in groceries. Sometimes when we have plenty of staples, we spend about $50 on produce and that's it.
Just another option to consider ...
I gotta say, experience has been weird recently. We went from four people, then down to two (when my husband died and my oldest moved out and started grad school), now just me (the younger is off at school), over the course of two years. So my grocery bills hardly reflect the price increases of the last year or so.
However, we were finding a good intersection of quality and price in the meat department at Costco. Costco, being affiliated with Target, does have better employment practices than Sam's club.
Costco is affiliated with Target?
Wow, I learn something new every day, I had no idea.
Target is affiliated with Mervyns... so if I follow that train of thought... WEIRD!
Now I'm following the train....make it stop.
bring me my hossenfeffer!
#248 - you forgot to mention fresh roadkill as a way to reduce meat costs.
somebody please come up here and trap about seven million bunnies. that will make it a lot easier for me to keep track of my dog.
I just pictured you doing your best Yosemite Sam "I hates rabbits"
hee!
i actually love the bunnies. it's very amusing when the dog is off in the bushes to the right, crashing around like a maniac, while the bunny hops across the trail right in front of me and off into the bushes on the left (every time this happens--and it happens often--i say, aloud, "ooh - bunny!"). then ten seconds later kenya charges across after it, because when her nose is working, she goes blind and deaf. it's amusing.
i just hate standing there listening to kenya's bear bell get more and more distant as she follows bunny-scent and ignores me.
It's amazing how crazy dogs go for bunnies. My hubby wanted wear his rollerblades while walking the dog so he could harness the power of Jakedog (My mother in law's giant Chesepeake lab) and have a fun ride when bunnies appear.
However, I'm slightly less amused by the uncontrollable instinct, cause little old dogless me didn't think to let go of the leash when the dog went bunny crazy, and I almost dislocated my arm!
I had a ton of squirrels at the old house. They would scamper back and forth between the tree in the corner to the top of the shed to the clothesline along the clothesline to the low hanging telephone wire to the pole and back. They'd stop occasionally and chatter at the dogs just to be sarcastic.
I like to feed the birds. At the old house I got so sick of the squirrels taking the bird food. I tried many things to get them to stay away. My son had a sling shot, so I'd sit on my front porch with a stash of his paintballs and shoot the squirrels with them. I became a pretty good shot. The little mafuggas are smart too. If they saw me with the sling shot in my hand they'd stay in the trees. If I was sitting on the porch drinking lemonade they'd go for the bird food.
Bunnies and squirrels don't hang here anymore, not since the Canines of Chaos came to stay.
bagga! LOL - again, you are a refreshing distraction.
Wal-Mart sucks because its just like crack. It offers a promise of short-term savings/panacea, but the long-term effects are detrimental to the consumer. Think about it.
Anyway, Wal-Mart is not the culprit. Its NAFTA. Oh, yes, that ugly acronym had to come up in this discussion. If it weren't for NAFTA, Wal-Mart would not exist and Martha Stewart would not be a jailbird. Well, I'm not so sure about the latter part.
Just keep on buying that stuff from 'em. The only true Democracy left is up to the dollar, at least in the US. So, when you buy Wal-Mart, you are saying you don't care that American corps are shipping manufacturing overseas, putting Americans outta work and flooding our country with useless garbage nobody actually needs, making it impossible for manufacturers like Nike and Adidas to sell their wares to smaller outlets. Did y'all know they have such strong buying-power now that they actually dictate the wholesale prices they pay for goods they sell. Some manufacturers are being put outta biz because they cannot afford to stay in biz with the profit margins Wal-Mart offers them. The more ppl buy from Wal-Mart as opposed to other retailers. the narrower the wholesale market for the manufacturers. The ones who do stay in biz have to raise their wholesale to other smaller retails to make up for the profit-loss to Wal-Mart. Am I the only one who sees this besides the economists on WM's payroll?
You know what? I am just so tired of all of this. Wal-Mart sucks. If you don't understand why by now, you prolly never will. Hey, check this out: Why People Vote Republican. 'Nuff said.
Oh, also, if I suddenly disappear for more than 2 weeks, know that the black suburbans pulled up in my driveway. k?
