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Originally Posted by Bams  No argument there they have effectively screwed over most of the smaller/medium sized towns by driving their local stores out of business. Gone are the days of the local hardware chain and even the local grocery stores in some instances where they are 'lucky' enough to have a super Walmart.
While this may be true once they had you locked into doing it there way they could then do pretty much whatever the hell they wanted and we're all stuck with it. That's how corporations work, they befriend you by presenting you with all of the 'good' they can do and then once they have usurped all of the control from the consumer they turn around and give you the old  with a little bit of  thrown in hoping we will all  ourselves into oblivion and no longer care. Did I mention how much I love the smilies here?  dancing pickle! WOOT |
And that concept has permeated in just about every aspect of business as well. Nothing is marketed to be better for us anymore, the people who do surveys at the malls--they're not testing as much whether people actually like a product as it is testing how people react to the way the product is advertised.
Even cereal box tops--they're designed to rip easily so you'll want to buy more soon. Isles at stores are not laid out in a way that is good for the consumer, it's PURELY laid out for impulse buying. Traffic lights in shopping districts in big cities COST so much because they aren't actually there to make traffic flow smoother, they're there to make people have to stop or slow down in areas that could make them want to park and shop, and it costs a lot of money for the hardware and software capable of handling that kind of task.
CD's cost much less to make than vinyl records or audiocasettes, and they pretty much always have, but they continued to charge double the price, and now a typical price for a CD that isn't on clearance or something is $20, and the artists don't make jack shit from it, it VIRTUALLY all goes to the record companies--the artists MIGHT see 5 cents from it. They've had many points that they could have lowered the price before the internet piracy came into place.
But here's a sad fact though--Grey Poupon was originally released as a budget mustard with a typical cheap mustard kind of container. It didn't sell at all. Then they made the container look nice and tripled the price, started the "pardon me" ads and it took off better than just about any product that year. The reason I mentioned this is the fact that there still remains a lot of people out there who think that because you spend more on something means it's going to be higher quality, or that if you spend $400 on a short skirt and the money mainly goes to the person who made it, it somehow makes you more conscientious about slave labor in China, even though it simply means you paid for a price-gouged skirt and someone is happy that you gave them so much money. I also said it to show that we can be tricked easily into a lot of things by the way something is marketed.
When I still believed that businesses were really interested in our well being and what is important to us, I used to do those surveys at malls, I used to do the phone surveys, at one point I even worked as a survey intake person at one of those places at malls, and now I avoid them completely because I know it has nothing to do with what benefits the consumer. I'm rambling and have been for the past two paragraphs.... Okay, tell me to shut up now.
