Everyday Lowest Price

We all benefit by being wise consumers. Even the rich seek a bargain, and in fact bargain hunting often facilitates wealth. [One time when I was about 13, I was with my Mom at a café where she was working, when a rich man came to the cash register to pay his bill. She calculated the sales tax and he said she should just leave that off because the government was already taking too much money. Mom said the government needs to be paid too for what it does and she made him pay the tax. After he left, she told me that is how some people get rich - by cheating.]

Wise consuming means not just looking for a good price, but figuring out if you even need to be a consumer in a particular case. Sometimes using what you already have, borrowing, renting, trading, postponing or just forgoing is the wisest course.

Socially responsible consumers factor into their decisions such issues as who will profit from the purchase and who may have been taken unfair advantage of by the potential profiteer.

Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world. Wise consumers and socially responsible consumers should be extremely reluctant to shop at Wal-Mart. Supposedly everyone knows Wal-Mart has the lowest prices, because they squeeze their suppliers for the lowest cost, hire marginally employable people for the lowest wages, and sell the highest volume by forcing smaller competitors out of business. If you are not a socially responsible consumer then maybe you don’t care about the victims in the Wal-Mart wake: the sweat shop workers in China working for companies steered there by Wal-Mart; the American suppliers forced into bankruptcy because they would not go overseas; the single mothers struggling to make ends meet on the minimal Wal-Mart pay, without any meaningful benefits, and being told to work overtime off the clock and apply for welfare if they can’t make ends meet; and the owners and workers at small local long time businesses which could not compete and had to close.

But all wise consumers should be aware Wal-Mart does not have the lowest prices. Frontline on PBS did an excellent story on Wal-Mart which included an interview with a former manager of six Wal-Mart stores. He said Wal-Mart merchandising is based on a form of bait and switch. A definitely low price, bottom of the line item is placed in the position of prominence in an area of the store, designed to lure customers to that area by the prominently displayed low price. Once going to the area and looking at the item, most customers will see it is extremely poor quality and then will end up buying a better quality item in the department for a higher price, without realizing that price is perhaps even higher than elsewhere in town. Customers have swallowed the myth about lowest prices at Wal-Mart and are presuming that, since the prominent item is obviously the cheapest in town, the whole price list for items in that department is accordingly lower than elsewhere.

Another problem with merchandise from Wal-Mart, and not just the obvious price leader, is that it may be especially supplied with cost cutting in mind and therefore could be of lesser quality. The supplier may make a cheaper product specifically to meet Wal-Mart cost demands, and Wal-Mart still prices the item as if it were the higher quality item, taking the difference as added profit rather than passing the cost reduction on to the customer. Model numbers of particular items from mainstream manufacturers that are available only at Wal-Mart are likely to be in this category.

Being a wise consumer is easier than being a socially responsible one. It is harder to do research on responsibility factors than on prices and quality. But everything I have learned about Wal-Mart tells me that carefully wading through the everyday lowest price myth for a true bargain there is not worth supporting a company leaving so many victims in its wake.