The Top 40

Wal-Mart provides products so well and so cheaply that one class of competitor is driven out of business and a second class of competitor makes changes to improve itself. Government has no competition to improve it or put it out of business. In government, the least effective parts receive the greatest funding increases.

Richard Fernandez related a great description of the modern State. It is a macabre construction, with the bone and muscle on the outside, protecting the fat inside. You want to cut the fat, they will make you cut muscle first. Be prepared to knock down the Washington monument before taking food stamps out of the 7-11.

The basis of much of Wal-Mart's success is access to goods made under the lash of a communist dictatorship, and along with this comes the trade deficit, which may or may not be able to be borne indefinitely. A lot of jobs in this country got outsourced, very many from firms which relocated production to the communist dictatorship, and people frequently have no other option these days than to shop at Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart itself might turn out to be a creature which cannot survive outside of an unprecedented, unsustainable bout of borrowing and debt.

Please understand, cheap is good, sticking it to liberals even better, but there is no guarantee that Wal-Mart will continue into the endless, and now seemingly alarming, future.

And while I don't wish failure upon Wal-Mart, I don't want to find out what would happen if they were given the economy to run. They've partnered up with a totalitarian nightmare of an anthill republic to line their pockets with American cash, and I guess I'm just not too good a sport about it.

Respect to bgarrett, but he's wrong.

Leaving aside that Hillary Clinton served on the board there, I find your premise pretty good. One can also see the unreported inflationary cycle by watching the WalMart shelves. 3 years ago, a whole aisle was devoted to loaves of bread of all types. I watched the bread shrink to about half of the aisle during the reign of Obama. Don't get me started on coffee prices.

Down the street from WalMart, Burger King is no more, and McDonald's is getting a face-lift.

Makes you wonder why the left side of the aisle in congress opposes WalMart and McDonalds, doesn't it? As a wise man said, WalMart is economic stimulus.

Calculated out the profit margin based on the numbers provided ... pretty small at 0.058 percent. Not much of a margin there.

If Alexander Hamilton were President and there were no imports, Wal-Mart would still be the go-to place. Wal-Mart does not determine economic or foreign policy, they react to it. Wal-Mart is not like GE, in partnership with USG forcing me to use bad light. Yet.

If Obama gets a second term, maybe they will throw in as well.

Re: Walmart profit margin:
$36,000,000 in sales per hour divided by 60 minutes = $600,000 in sales per minute.

$20,928 profit per minute divided by $600,000 sales per minute = 3.488% profit margin.

Walmart knows how to grow. I want no Walmart ideas anywhere near the U.S. government. I want the government to shrink, not grow. Leave the growing and the economy to the private sector. Just get the gubmint the H### out of the way.

Wal-Mart would be the perfect entity to run the country, because Wal-Mart specializes in satisfying the needs, expectations, and tastes of ghetto goons, illegal immigrants, and poor white trash -- the three groups that make up the majority of the American population.

Wal-Mart is a feeding trough for Morlocks. I'd eat bark off a tree before I'd set foot in one of those hellholes again.

Yes, Wal Mart is highly competent. WM also has the benefit of not having half of it's workforce and half of its management devoted to its destruction. Everyone at Wal Mart may not have the same vision, but they all more or less want WM to make money.

The ideology of the DNC is to break what is left of the historical America and punish the people that won't submit to their utopian plan.

WM can be successful because they have a unified command authority and they enforce compliance with their goals. There is no magic solution to our problems. No solution to avoid settling the fundamental conflict at the heart of the battle between Left and Right. Nobody will ride to our rescue. Nobody is left to bail us out. There is no gimmick we can hope for. There is a solution ,but unfortunately, it requires Conservatives to come out from their hiding places and chase the commielibs from power, if not the country.

All we have to do is recognize The Left has given us a blueprint to take power back from them. Get over our religious devotion to passive-aggressive tactics of mumbling under our breath or rushing to find a safe spot to whisper how un-conservative the latest commielib plan really is. Our majority is worthless as long as our majority act as approval-seeking cowards. If you aren't pissing people off daily with your opinions you might as well not have any opinions.

The Left won't stop because of anyone's opinion. They will stop when we take their power. The strong desire for a gimmick to save us just announces we are unable or unwilling to fight. The whole point of The Left's use of outrageous and angry tactics is to scare the Mayberry Crowd away from the battlefield. We are so averse to conflict The Left need only ritually hint at the possibility of unpleasantness to win a victory.

As an over the road truck driver I like delivering to Wal Mart distribution centers. You can often deliver early and they tend to be near the interstates. Their system is so efficient there is minimal down time, which counts when you get paid by the mile. Of course they abuse their power, they are run by humans.

Convince me why an entity whose main purpose is to return value to its shareholders should be a model for an entity whose main purpose is effective public administration. Wal-Mart maximizes its profits because it can sell mass-market, high-volume goods cheaper than other retailers. It is not especially good at serving niche markets (try finding left-handed golf clubs, a nice chianti, or a decent suit at Wal-Mart), nor is its service all that great. It seems to me that one-size-fits-all solutions and poor service are two things that we already complain about regarding government. It's likely there are some lessons government could learn about Wal-Mart's efficiencies, but government is not a business, nor should a business attempt to govern.

Yeah for Walmart. They make it affordable to keep our dog that has diabetes. Insulin is more than double at other pharmacies. And it works that way for people too!

Becky: Re Walmart pharmacies - As a war veteran I receive a blood pressure med from the VA for which I used to 'co-pay' $24. On a tip, I visited the pharmacy at a Walmart whose regular price for the same med & quantity was ten bucks... total. Just sayin'