I’m processing the weekend papers at the library this morning, due to it being closed for the holidays. Looking at the big Chicago Tribune Sunday edition (the Trib being the town’s supposed comparatively “conservative” paper), I noted the front page (!) story under a “Consumer Watch” header entitled, “Weight of Wal-Mart Crushes Pop Prices”.*
[*Apparently having enduring enough horse laughing over its ridiculously ominous title, it has been renamed–without notification–on the CT website to “Wal-Mart Pops onto Scene, Makes It’s Mark.” However, the article header up on the site bar straddles the two, with “Wal-Mart Impact: Pop Price War Warns of Wal-Mart Impact for Chicago”.]The, again, front page story details the horrors of *gasp* low pricing, at least for the holiday weekend. One typically restrained sentence starts, “Experts [you know the kind] call that kind of intimidating power “disruption,” and it will come to the Chicago area in a bigger way now that Wal-Mart plans to open a second store in the city.
Again, the town’s *cough* “establishment” paper is warning consumers that Wal-Mart is threatening them all with cheap soda, and will do so even more if they can–oh no!–open an entire second store in America’s third largest metropolis.
My favorite part is that Wal-Mart’s ONE STORE, we’ve been told, has been powerful enough to “push other retailers to roll back prices to pre-1990s levels to compete.” Aside from the fact that this would seem like a good thing on the face of it (and the paper’s ‘arguments’ otherwise are rather less than convincing), there’s the fact that it’s…what’s the word…bullshit.
My own pop supplies have been running low, but I’ve been waiting for this last weekend to buy, because, you know, it was the 4th of July holiday weekend. Anything associated with grilling and picnics, including of course pop, is always heavily discounted this weekend every year by our staple grocery chains, Dominick’s and Jewel. This has happened annually like clockwork, with the prices going down to those menacing pre-1990s prices, as they seek to entice shoppers to their stores to buy also more expensive foodstuffs as well.
Of course, even though in the past Wal-Mart didn’t have it’s overpowering ONE STORE looming like Sauron over a quivering Chicago, everyone knew it was out there in less progressive (not to mention bankrupt) states. So I guess that was enough in the past to cow Jewel and Dominick’s into offering, once or twice a year, those horrible, horrible low prices on soda.
Now that Wal-Mart is actually here, though, and might well have TWO stores in Chicago, well. We are doomed. Doomed.
Next to be examined, perhaps: The horrors of Wal-Marts overly long and comprehensive warranties on goods.
