So how has the economy affected you?

[comicalgems]

Your best raised middle finger to the company is to use the card and pay it off every month, so they lose money on you. I agree with you, they're bastards. Screw them by making your credit work for you and not for them.

 

Interesting perspective.

 

definitely interesting but unfortunitely 100% wrong. The credit cards make money even if you pay your bill each month. Sure it is less than they make if you carry a balance but you are still handing them money

 

They make NO money from somebody who pays their bill on time. Please tell me how they make money from me - I'll happily send you my credit card statement where you can show me the magic invisible money they're making from me.

 

They make money from the merchant that you used your CC with.

 

Like I said, they make no money from me.

technically, merchants could charge you 1-3% less if CC were not used, so indirectly they make money from all of us by tacking that 1-3% onto the COG.... but, I am with you... I use my amex for everything and get 1.5% back...I use my visa for everything else that doesn't take amex, and haven't paid for an airline ticket in years!

 

I have yet to meet a merchant who would take less money given the chance

 

If it means charging less to earn more business while still making a profit then you might start understanding what capitalism is based on. Wal-Mart is a prime example.

 

I dont think that there is another merchant in the world that can offer the pricing structure that walmart does and survive...Suggesting that because WalMart can charges less means that everyone else can charge less is quite a leap.

 

Having 4000 stores can do that. With the amount of stores they have it's very difficult for others to price compete. Unless you are an on-line service like Amazon who doesn't have nearly the overhead of Walmart.

 

And their recent price war is good for all consumers. And may signal a fundamental change in how we buy various goods...

 

Jim

 

It definitely is a sign of how they have changed their compensation structure. Wal-Mart used to be a great place to work because there was no cap on earnings. If you were there 20 years and you started at minimum wage and got your max annual raise of 5% and earned any merit raises there was no dollar amount at which you could be capped. Which is why in 1999 when I had a summer job there, the lady working in HR was making nearly $25 per hour.

 

Now their wages are capped at a few dollars higher than min wage for hourly employees and their profit sharing program that made so many millionaires of early employees has dropped off substantially because they continuously open new stores and remodel old stores dipping into profits substantially and cutting the profit shares.

 

Wal-Mart used to be a great place to shop and a great place to work. Now it's just a behemoth that will eventually have an achilles heel exploited.

 

In the game of Risk, the hardest place to conquer is Asia and should be saved for last. Wal-Mart skipped Europe and went straight into Asia.

[qualitycomix]

Your best raised middle finger to the company is to use the card and pay it off every month, so they lose money on you. I agree with you, they're bastards. Screw them by making your credit work for you and not for them.

 

Interesting perspective.

 

definitely interesting but unfortunitely 100% wrong. The credit cards make money even if you pay your bill each month. Sure it is less than they make if you carry a balance but you are still handing them money

 

They make NO money from somebody who pays their bill on time. Please tell me how they make money from me - I'll happily send you my credit card statement where you can show me the magic invisible money they're making from me.

 

They make money from the merchant that you used your CC with.

 

Like I said, they make no money from me.

technically, merchants could charge you 1-3% less if CC were not used, so indirectly they make money from all of us by tacking that 1-3% onto the COG.... but, I am with you... I use my amex for everything and get 1.5% back...I use my visa for everything else that doesn't take amex, and haven't paid for an airline ticket in years!

 

I have yet to meet a merchant who would take less money given the chance

 

If it means charging less to earn more business while still making a profit then you might start understanding what capitalism is based on. Wal-Mart is a prime example.

 

I dont think that there is another merchant in the world that can offer the pricing structure that walmart does and survive...Suggesting that because WalMart can charges less means that everyone else can charge less is quite a leap.

 

Many companies large and small throughout history have been in price wars which have benefited the consumer.

 

The statement that he had yet to meet a merchant that would take less money if given the chance ignores the bigger picture of the merchant wanting to grab more market share, more revenue and more profit in totality and thus is willing to sacrifice bigger profit margins. That has been a business model of millions of companies since the dawn of time and is one of the basic tenets of capitalism.

[BucOne-migration]

Your best raised middle finger to the company is to use the card and pay it off every month, so they lose money on you. I agree with you, they're bastards. Screw them by making your credit work for you and not for them.

 

Interesting perspective.

 

definitely interesting but unfortunitely 100% wrong. The credit cards make money even if you pay your bill each month. Sure it is less than they make if you carry a balance but you are still handing them money

 

They make NO money from somebody who pays their bill on time. Please tell me how they make money from me - I'll happily send you my credit card statement where you can show me the magic invisible money they're making from me.

 

They make money from the merchant that you used your CC with.

 

Like I said, they make no money from me.

technically, merchants could charge you 1-3% less if CC were not used, so indirectly they make money from all of us by tacking that 1-3% onto the COG.... but, I am with you... I use my amex for everything and get 1.5% back...I use my visa for everything else that doesn't take amex, and haven't paid for an airline ticket in years!

 

I have yet to meet a merchant who would take less money given the chance

 

If it means charging less to earn more business while still making a profit then you might start understanding what capitalism is based on. Wal-Mart is a prime example.

 

I dont think that there is another merchant in the world that can offer the pricing structure that walmart does and survive...Suggesting that because WalMart can charges less means that everyone else can charge less is quite a leap.

 

Having 4000 stores can do that. With the amount of stores they have it's very difficult for others to price compete. Unless you are an on-line service like Amazon who doesn't have nearly the overhead of Walmart.

 

And their recent price war is good for all consumers. And may signal a fundamental change in how we buy various goods...

 

Jim

 

It definitely is a sign of how they have changed their compensation structure. Wal-Mart used to be a great place to work because there was no cap on earnings. If you were there 20 years and you started at minimum wage and got your max annual raise of 5% and earned any merit raises there was no dollar amount at which you could be capped. Which is why in 1999 when I had a summer job there, the lady working in HR was making nearly $25 per hour.

 

Now their wages are capped at a few dollars higher than min wage for hourly employees and their profit sharing program that made so many millionaires of early employees has dropped off substantially because they continuously open new stores and remodel old stores dipping into profits substantially and cutting the profit shares.

 

Wal-Mart used to be a great place to shop and a great place to work. Now it's just a behemoth that will eventually have an achilles heel exploited.

 

In the game of Risk, the hardest place to conquer is Asia and should be saved for last. Wal-Mart skipped Europe and went straight into Asia.

 

Disney has capped its hourly workers for years, but yet ppl seem to love working for the mouse.

[FlComicFan]

Nothing good about the big box behemoths such as Wal-Mart The amount of small businesses they have put under is staggering and the jobs they create dont account for near the amount of jobs they have taken away by eliminating all those small businesses. Everything in life cant be about saving a dollar or two. Wal-Mart may have started as a good idea with Sam Walton but its just a conglomerate juugernaut run by bean counters now. Besides they are not all that cheap and for every loss leader that gets you in the store they sell you countless cheap disposable foreign manufactured items they make a killing on. Best Buy is another chain I despise. God help you if you have computer problems and got to those crooks.

[batman_fan]

Nothing good about the big box behemoths such as Wal-Mart The amount of small businesses they have put under is staggering and the jobs they create dont account for near the amount of jobs they have taken away by eliminating all those small businesses. Everything in life cant be about saving a dollar or two. Wal-Mart may have started as a good idea with Sam Walton but its just a conglomerate juugernaut run by bean counters now. Besides they are not all that cheap and for every loss leader that gets you in the store they sell you countless cheap disposable foreign manufactured items they make a killing on. Best Buy is another chain I despise. God help you if you have computer problems and got to those crooks.

 

my primary problem with Walmart is they are not actually cheaper in the grand picture because in their quest for low prices they have gone to the lowest quality. The electronics they carry are the special Walmart version made much cheaper/lower quality. This is true for virtually everything they have except potentially the food products. Their low quality does help fill landfills.

[CHABSENTIA]

There is no way to know how many jobs replaced the jobs lost by stores that may or may have been displaced by Walmart. There is no way to tell how many of those people went to wal-mart, another retail job or obtained a better job either through a better education. networking or better opportunities. So this statement is bonus. Many of these figures are usually bogus and not accurate depending on the source.Take the comments of the previous poster about "caps" and people still working for Disney. One has no idea what compels people to work for a certain industry. It might be as silly as wanting to be discovered such as singers who started there or it might depend on the fact that they live there and cant re-locate for whatever reason etc.Another figure that is bogus is the 10.2% unemployment rate. If you count people that are unemployed and no longer looking for a job and people that lost full time work and had to accept part time work then it is 17.5% and 20% in some states. You can call the latter two areas that aren't reported as "the under-employed" or any other name. If you are unemployed then you are unemployed period.There are sources who dont report it as such and report the lower number because it is more self serving. How often do you hear it reported that there are over 16 million people unemployed?Then there is the so called transparency on a website where it has been discovered that all of the reporting States have reported job creation in Congressional districts that don't even exist. Arizona has only nine Congressional districts and reported job creation in the 152nd etc.You dont think that the government employees that reported these districts didn't know they were non-existent? A mistake here and there is one thing but all 50?

 

One has to be rather naive to believe these so called statistics and figures today just on the premise that they are correct because a government agency or a self serving entity reported them etc.

[FlComicFan]

I doubt local family businesses rolled under by the big box big discounters make out like bandits by being forced out of business. Wal-Mart also holds their suppliers victim using strong arm tactics. No wonder a lot of their suppliers are using cheaper lower quality materials when Wal goes out and demands a $80 skill saw magically be manufactured so they can retail it for $30. Nothing good about the situation other than we fell o so good wasting cash on all garbage that's made to last oh just till next year so we can all run out and have to replace it.

 

Totally agree on the unemployment numbers. I dont take anything the government or media tell me as anything but spin. You dont need to be a mathematician to see the current administration and media are doing their best to convince you were out of the woods. If we all grow to believe the economy is back it will be so simply by power of suggestion. Psychology plays such a huge factor in peoples outlook and spending habits and sadly we are a economy based on us spending to keep it going. We dont produce or manufacture anything anymore that was all outsourced overseas for the good of the global village. So now we have unemployed factory workers in dozens of industries. Luckily we do have nice poisonous Chinese drywall. Hey its a few bucks cheaper who cares if you get sick in your fancy new track home?