Walmart - Sign of Progress

Recently the town council of Timberville Virginia had before them an application for Walmart to open a store in the community. Various voices, both individuals as well as organized groups, stood against the proposal. Such opposition isn’t new for since the late 1990s Walmart has experienced some opposition from various communities across the nation, and in growing frequency.  Walmart coming into the community will depress wages is one argument put forward.  Another argument they put forward regarded the estimated economic impact upon the community (both wages and tax revenue) that Walmart projects are overly optimistic. The major argument against approving the request was that when Walmart moves into the community, it kills local businesses.

 

Interestingly, the majority of the opposition voices came from outside the Timberville/Broadway community. Many from the community via email, letters and appearances supported the proposal. At the end of the day, the council approved Walmart’s request and the store will likely open in the first half of 2016.

 

That Walmart doesn’t pay well the average store employee in a low skill position is true, but the same can be said for so for food stores, restaurants, and convenient stores. So do the common retail stores like Macys, JCP, Best Buy, Target, etc. If one stands against Walmart because it pays low wages to workers in low skilled positions, then you must also stand against the opening in your community fast food restaurants, food stores, convenient stores, other big box stores, or a even a mall coming to your town. And if you don’t oppose them, then why do you oppose Walmart and not those other places that also pay low wages?    

 

Walmarts’ economic impact statements/figures give a favorable picture. The figures are not false but have to be viewed as incomplete and at places optimistic. This is to be expected as they are casting their argument in the best light. If Ford, Microsoft or another firm was opening a large plant in a community, the figures from the company would likewise be rosy and not taking into account the farther reaching impacts.  Walmart’s figures don’t often include all infrastructure costs that may well be incurred by the town, costs ranging from installing of extra lights along the route to the store to an extra police officer or two. That said, the increase in tax revenue from Walmart will more than offset those costs. So too will revenue from the types of businesses which will in the coming years cluster or expand in the store’s area.

 

The concern about lost of retail businesses is a legitimate concern as some retail businesses will close, but it is a concern that if heeded holds back progress and efficiencies. Change and the successful new ways ultimately bring the relinquishing of the old ways.

 

The railroads of the expanding railroads in the 1870s to 1890s not only united a nation but they made it possible for goods and services to be transported more rapidly and further than ever before. The railroad system transformed the economic and business models. The railroads provided for the great expansion of what had been a limited profession, the traveling salesman. Railroads enabled beef raised in Texas to Wyoming to be moved quickly to new large meat processing plants in centers across the nation and from those plants for fresh meat to find its way into the hands of the local butcher in small towns. The railroads made it possible for S.S. Kresge to bring to his stores thousands of low cost items from afar into his store, a store that would expand into the Kresge chain and then become Kmart. The railroads enabled two salesmen to establish a store with a catalogue and warehouse, and to sell items through the catalogue across the Midwest to people in small towns and on farms, and to grow that company into a major retail giant, Sears (now a dying firm).  

 

Look at how the interstate system transformed Florida and our way of doing business. Do you think Florida would have the even a third of its current tourist, snowbird and retirement communities if there was no interstate system? Much of Florida would be a swamp without the interstate system allowing people to travel five to six hundred miles a day in order to spend time in Florida’s winter sun. That same system now transports goods across the nation, transforming the manufacturing and retail structures of 1950s and 1960s. A local farmer who a hundred years ago could only sell his milk to a few local small towns can now has a heard ten to twenty times the size and sells his/her the milk in communities hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The handful of chickens that once were only sold locally are now raised in the thousands per year at a fraction of former costs, processed in plants that can process and package over a million chickens a year with the products from those plants being sold across the nation.  

 

Gone are the days when the vast majority of one’s furniture and clothing was made within a twenty mile radius of home. Now clothing, furniture and other household items are made thousands, or even tens of thousands of miles away for a fraction of the costs, and for the most part are better quality too (see my posts of August 16 & 23).  

 

Progress and scales of production has brought forth greater efficiencies, lower prices and a greater range of products to every community.  Yes local businesses that made a few furniture items a week have died. They failed to adapt or had products whose quality could not compete with better quality products now reaching their community at a lower cost. Just as businesses like buggy manufacturers and radio tube firms have fallen to the wayside because they failed to adapt, so too will other inefficient businesses.

 

Local businesses will fail when Walmart comes to town mainly because they have failed for a host of reasons to be competitive.  Some of those reasons were outside their control, and others were beyond their control. Kodak is a recent example of a huge company that is a shell of its former glory because it just didn’t adapt to the new trends and technologies quick enough.  Kmart’s decline is a result of its management and model being too slow to change and adapt. If Walmart does not adapt to new trends, products and other changes that will take place in the coming years, it too will fail. As attested by the decline of Sears and Kmart, a profitable formula in one decade may well become unprofitable one a decade or two later.

 

Today Walmart is an example of progress and efficiency. And it is also an example of how its current way of doing business may be at risk from a new form of doing business…the Amazon  model, a digital version and revamping of the Sears catalogue a hundred years ago.

   

Coins in Direct Mail Letters

On Friday I was asked by a friend what I thought of direct mail letters from a nonprofit with a penny or two included. He explained that he recently received such a letter. I noted that I’d received such letters, and some have included a nickel, not just a penny or two.

 

There is evidence that including pennies and nickels will increase response rate, and thereby the number of gifts. My friend confirmed that he was not a particular supporter of the cause but had been thinking of donating to the group because of the two pennies sitting on his desk. The strategy plays to the dynamics being experienced by my fried. The appeal rests more upon appealing to the recipients’ sense of guilt more than a person’s commitment to the cause and a willingness to do something to support the cause.  Many donors will give a small gift, just large enough to satisfy their sense of guilt.  I noted that appealing to guilt is one of the reasons I’m not a fan of such letters for the organization for whom I work.  My organization should appeal to the rightness of the cause, to the need to help people in need rather than play on a person’s sense guilt. It may be a technique that fits with some organizations and their ethos, but I think it is not appropriate for my organization which is faith based and should be above appealing to guilt in such a manner.

 

I noted to him that while the technique does bring in more new donors and gifts, there is a substantial increase in the number of small gifts in the $5 to $20 range. The costs of “servicing” these small donors (costs of thank you letters, data storage, sending subsequent letters, etc.) over the subsequent year will often consume much of the funds received from these small donors. Additionally, as they have given out of guilt more than support for the cause, a very high number of these donors will not give again without another appeal the includes a coin or some other appeal to their guilt, and rarely do they increase the level of the giving.

 

I’m not a fan of this type of technique as it can readily give the impression that the organization has money to waist. My organization is a poverty faith-based organization which prides itself with being efficient with its use of resources, and often speaks to cost efficiency in various newsletters and fundraising documents. It is my opinion that including a coin in a fundraising letter undermines that the organization is careful with how it spends funds. I noted to my friend that I would be unlikely to give to a cause that is not careful with its use of resources.

 

I hope that any direct mail vendor my organization utilizes understands about fiscal efficiency and organizational nature and thereby would not propose the use of such a strategy even if there is evidence that it works for some organizations.

 

Friday, when I got home, what did I have in the mail that day? A prospecting letter with a nickel enclosed. While noting not to give to the organization, and without a second thought or feeling of guilt, the nickel went into my pocket. 

   

A Prime Case for Capital Punishment Becomes a Prime Example Against the Death Penalty

Advocates for capital punishment commonly point to horrendous murders as justification for the citizens to terminate a life of the person convicted of first degree murder. More often than not such cases involve murder of children and/or where gruesome suffering was been involved. One such case used to validate the need for capital punishment was the conviction of Henry Lee McCollum of Sabrina Buie who was raped and murdered in September 1983. 


The rationale and need to execute McCollum was sited by US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia as a prime example as a case that unquestionably supported the value of capital punishment. In addressing another Justice's questioning of the value and appropriateness of capital punishment, Justice Scalia responded that the McCollum case is one preeminent case “cries out for punishment”, and that punishment being capital punishment.

 

Henry Lee “Buddy” McCollum, 19 at the time Buie was murdered, along with his younger half brother (age 15) were arrested and convicted of murdering eleven year old Buie. The police were so certain that McCollum and Brown committed the crime that while McCollum and Brown were in jail, another rape and murder that took place in the same area less than a month later, and with marked similarity as the earlier murder, were never viewed as connected to the Buie murder. The man who lived near where the Buie murder occurred was arrested for the second murder, and later convicted, yet even with similar MOs neither the police nor the District Attorney ever considered that the two murders could be connected. The police and the District Attorney never reconsidered that Buie could be murdered by anyone other than Buddy McCollum and his half brother because they had confessions from the two men.

 

Though the DA and police had confessions from the two teens, other than them knowing the girl and being seen with her, and having no alibi as to their whereabouts at the time of the crime, there was no direct evidence that the teens committed the crime.


What was not considered was that both young men are intellectually handicapped…McCollum’s IQ was between 60 and 69, and that as both were intellectually handicapped, they could easily be led and misled by others. They were likely terrified in being arrested and jailed. Clearly they lacked the capacity to understand their Miranda Rights or the nature of the crime they were being accused of committing. If people with IQs of 125 common police interrogation tactics that can confusing and challenging, what does this say about these two men and their “confessions” that took place without legal representation present both before or during confession. The claim by the police that the confessions were true must be considered with a high level of askance, but the DA's office didn't hold such a view. They had the confessions that would give them the needed conviction and increase their batting rate for convictions.  

 

Despite the other murder, lack of direct evidence and questionable confession, the case moved forward resulting in McCollum and Brown being convicted and with McCollum receiving the death penalty. This case was the first time North Carolina jurors had ever recommended the death penalty for anyone who evidenced mental retardation, let alone with an IQ as low as McCollum. Also this was the first time that capital punishment was recommended for anyone under the age of twenty at the time of the crime. Though the trial judge acknowledged that McCollum lacked the capacity to understand the crime and the proceedings, he supported the jurors recommendation of death. 


The prosecutor and the jury noted that there were two compelling reasons for the citizens of North Carolina to remove Mr. McCollum from breathing on this earth...one, that he killed Buie to keep her going to the police (a conjectured conclusion), and two, the especially heinous nature of the murder and suffering Buie experienced. Since, concurring with the jury and judge, the advocates of capital punishment have sited the McCollum case as a prime example as a just conviction and penalty. They have argued that McCollum confessed to the crime, that the court carefully examined the evidence which definitively points to McCollum and Brown as the murders, and that it is a case where the State and the people of North Carolina justly convicted them and McCollum deserves to be expunged from the earth.  

 

While there were many who questioned whether the ultimate punishment was warranted given McCollum’s intellectual capacity, and questioned the validity of the confession, for the most part their arguments were dismissed as being of little consequence. Even US Supreme Court Justice Scalia in his unabashed certainty and rightness of his views held firmly that the system had got the case correct and that capital punishment of McCollum was more than justified.     

 

To the frustration of many death penalty advocates, McCollum was not been executed as scheduled for since 2006 a series of lawsuits in North Carolina have blocked any capital punishment executions from being carried out in the state. But for those successful lawsuits, Buddy McCollum would have been executed years ago. Advocates for capital punishment were working to remove those blocks with Mr. McCollum being one of the first on the list to be executed. At least his name would have been on that list until September 2014.

 

Thirty years after being arrested, McCollum and his half-brother are free men, thanks to DNA evidence on a piece of preserved evidence. The DNA evidence points to the man arrested for other murder as being Buie's murderer too. Suddenly, the case which was viewed with absolute certainty as being gotten right and execution justified. We now know that if McCollum had been executed that the people of this nation would have executed an innocent man...in other words we the people through our appointed officials would have committed willful murder.


Any human judicial system is highly flawed. The judicial system of the United States is a highly flawed system. Our system is fraught by politics, inequities, and inappropriate economic and racial prejudices. It is filled with snap conclusions by police and the DAs, flawed theories, police investigations that ignore evidence and twisting of evidence to fit a theory. It is a system that too often places value upon conviction and vindictive punishment than upon the seeking of truth and restorative justice. The failings of such a system are so evident that even men and women like Justice Scalia who possess such vast knowledge of the law, exude such confident dogmatic reasoning and judgment can be so wrong. 


Capital punishment has a finality to it that should give us pause. For me, Justice Scalia's citing the McCollum case as substantiating the value of capital punishment now serves as an argument against. This is not a case where the system eventually got it right for if the system had continued as it should have continued, today McCollum would be dead. The system on so many levels got it wrong.  But for factors outside this case McCollum would not be alive today for us to acknowledge the injustice he experienced. The system is flawed and it failed in this case. 

 

A nation's views on capital punishment is one of the clarion declarations of nation’s values, not "the nation" in a general sense, but the values of its citizens like you and I, and with those who walk our streets, work beside us and with whom we recreate. The time to rethink the utilization of capital punishment dawned long ago.   
 

They Don’t Make Things Like They Use To…Thank Goodness They Don’t - Part Two

While many complain that “they don’t make things like they use to,” I’m one person who is most grateful that that is not the case. I will not measure today’s average quality by the best of the best which survives today as examples of the supreme quality of past skills and achievements. The best of past workmanship should be measured against the best of the today's workmanship. 


On the whole the quality of today’s average products are superior to the average products made a century ago, or five decades ago, or even two decades ago. Following is a sampling list for your consideration:

• How many of us would accept today from our primary car the gas mileage of the equivalent car made twenty years ago? Today's large cars far outperform the mileage of the thrifty cars of the 1980s, let alone the thriftiest from the 1960s.
• Forty yeas ago, in the 1970s when a car reached 80,000 it was quickly approaching the end of its life. Rarely did a car from that era hit 100,000 miles. For today’s car is a car, a car hitting 80,000 is only entering its later mid-life state. Cars manufactured today are expected go at least 140,000 miles.
• When was the last time you changed a tire by the side of road? When was the last time you saw someone changing a tire by the side of the road. Fifty years ago changing tires by the side of the road was a common happening. I wouldn’t exchange the average modern tires for the best tires made in the 1960s.
• Would I accept a new television made even twenty years ago. No. I’m certainly pleased to have today’s higher quality televisions with their crisper picture and full sound than the fuzzier picture quality of the televisions from years ago which in themselves were great improvements over the televisions from the mid 70s.
• The modern stoves certainly outperform, outlast and have more features than those made many years ago.
• How many of us would exchange today’s refrigerator for any of the ones made in the 1980s, or the ice chest refrigerators from the 1940s? How many families would like to return to the days of the wringer washing machine? Today's new washers and dryers are more efficient and perform better than those made decades ago. 
• Though today’s average new home may not have solid wood floors which were more common in the new homes of the 1960s and earlier, today's average new home is superior with those from the past. past, which in large measure explains why many people prefer to buy a new home. Today's new home are far more insulated and built to a higher quality than those built in the 1930s, 1950s or even in the 1970s. The windows and doors today seal out the cold/hot air far better than in the past. The wiring and plumbing are of a higher quality and the lighting more efficient. Just look at the improvements in the bathrooms. Our toilets and showers are more efficient than those of yesteryear. How many families would exchange their whirlpool/jet tubs for even the upper end tubs of the 1970s? Today’s homes are for the most part roomier are equipped with more storage.
• Though paint still receives a tough time from the elements, the paints of today do stand up longer than those in the past.
• I’m certainly pleased that the modern train engines do their work (an pulling far greater loads) without spewing black smoke from the coal used to fuel the great engines of the past.
• I would certainly not swap my iPod the early Walkmans. I much prefer the compact iPod with its weeks of stored music stored to the bulkier Walkmans.
• Today we have far more medical devices, equipment and drugs than in the past that enable people to live longer, and remain more mobile and independent than in the past. I would certainly not want to return to the quality of medicine from the past days.
• How many of us are able to do our banking and get cash out of our accounts while thousands of miles from home? Little of what we do today could be done four decades ago without going to the local branch…and in some places your bank was limited to doing business in your state, and in some cases only in your county.  When you went on a trip, you had to use credit cards and make sure you had enough cash with you.
• Whenever I’m sitting behind a transit bus I’m pleased it is not an old model. I never did enjoy the smell of diesel fumes.
• I certainly don’t miss the old diesel trucks with their black exhaust trailing behind them, or the noise created by the old engines.

I hope you too are thankful that they don’t make things like they use to do so.

 

They Don’t Make Things Like They Use To…Thank Goodness They Don’t - Part One

“They don’t make things like they use to” is frequently used as a putdown of modern workmanship. We have around us of homes, buildings, clocks, furniture, jewelry, etc. that are superior when compared to most modern examples  of similar items. When we gravitate to using the phrase in question, I argue that we are uncritically buying into hagiography, the over glorification of the past events/things/people.

Yes, we have examples of fine high quality design and workmanship from a hundred or more years ago that survive today as examples of the quality of their craft. But “fine high quality design and workmanship” is the operative phrase.  The fruits of this high quality workman ship survive because they were crafted with care using high quality materials, and of sufficient skill and quality to endure beyond the common products produced by their peers that haven't lasted. Today, we too have high quality design and workmanship which will continue to stand as signposts to their craftsman's skills for many generations to come.

Today’s fine craftsmanship is not common. We must remember that such high quality craftsmanship was also not common in the every past generation. Many arts of work, music, crafted furniture of past generations have not survived because they were not of superior quality to be cherished, maintained well and passed down. For each item that has survived, hundreds more, whether they be furniture, machines, art, public or private buildings or homes homes have perished because they lacked quality design and workmanship. I’ve seen many old homes that go back a to the early 1900s or earlier that are dilapidated, and which by today’s workmanship and standard are substandard.

Let’s not be premature in dismissing the quality work and labor around us today. We do have poor quality workmanship today, that cannot be denied but the same existed in the past generations since the beginning of time. Just as the common and poor quality work of the past has more or less perished, so too will most of the common and poor quality of our generation’s workmanship.  We can take comfort that our best too will join the collection of the best from the past generations we have inherited.