Comic Strips

The quintessential Walmart dilemma stops it.

You make a hardware store with knowledgable, helpful, well paid staff, ethically sourced quality products, and sell hammers for $20 because that's what your buying power at your scale allows you to turn a reasonable, sustainable profit on.

Walmart pays overseas slavers to make 10,000 hammers at $1 each and they sell them at the new Walmart that just moved in for $7. Customers need to find it themselves because the employees correctly don't give a shit as they're paid shit.

Sadly, us peasants have proven, given the opportunity and out of necessity, we will support Walmart and their $7 slave labor made, slave labor sold shit hammer, before supporting a local business with ethical business practices selling a $20 hammer, even at higher quality.

Oh and after Walmart has put main street out of business with $7 hammers, they'll raise that price to $18 and pocket the difference, as was the plan.

Integrity costs more to deliver than exploitation, and the less you have the less you can afford to support integrity in business. That's why most of America's main streets are shadows of their former selves, that degradation started far before Amazon and internet shopping started doing to Walmart what Walmart did to honorable entrepreneurs.

Americans sure do love a "great deal." over time though, those great deals cost us all more than we could imagine. We never considered the inevitable outcome of those great deals we got by dealing with amoral, exploitative businesses. We were so short sighted that we just assumed that those amoral businesses willing to hurt anyone from employees to suppliers still had the customer's best interests at heart. We thought we were in on the hustle with those $7 hammers, when we were just another mark.