God Agrees with Me About the Big Box Stores

By Editor |

Friday, October 6, 2017

Home Depot

Up until 2013 I had been using CFL (curly fluorescent) light bulbs.  However, those bulbs have mercury in them, and they are fragile, so I decided that I wanted to switch to the new LED bulbs which had recently come out.  LED bulbs look like traditional incandescent bulbs, which is good, and they are less fragile than CFL bulbs.  I don't like Home Depot (for reasons which I'll explain shortly), but a friend took me there, and I found some Cree LED bulbs that were reasonably priced, so I bought them.  I decided that I wanted more, so I went on Amazon, but the bulbs were selling for a much higher price.  I couldn't find a good price anywhere, so I went to Home Depot's site, where I found them selling for a reasonable price, and I ordered them.

What arrived was a box of rubber food-service gloves, the kind that a deli person puts on when he serves you food (and which I consider to be an environmental waste -- washed hands are good enough, in my opinion).  So I prevailed upon my friend with the car to drive me to Home Depot, where I returned the gloves.  Days later, however, I got the Cree light bulbs, and then I got a refund from Home Depot (since I had returned the gloves to them), so I got the light bulbs for free.

There are two things that I dislike about Home Depot.  First, its owner is a conservative Republican who has spent money to sway elections around the country.  In other words, he is a rich person who uses his money to buy elections (thanks to the conservatives on the Supreme Court, he can legally do that).  I think it's un-American.

The second thing I dislike about Home Depot is that they waste huge amounts of energy.  In the lamp departments in their stores, they keep thousands of lamps lit and burning all the time.  They should keep the lights turned off until a customer wants to see what a lamp looks like with the bulb lit, and then they could turn it on.

So do I feel bad about cheating Home Depot?  No.  The owner is still a billionarie jerk who is doing bad things.

Walmart

Walmart is a bad company because they were the first American retailer to start importing cheap goods from China, and by doing that, they drove many American manufacturers out of business.  Walmart was also responsible for shutting down local stores in many towns and cities throughout the country.  Typically, what would happen is this:  Walmart would open a big box store in some town.  Everyone would start shopping at Walmart, and the local mom & pop stores would go out of business.  Then, Walmart would decide that they weren't making enough money from the store, and they would close it -- leaving the town without any stores.  Walmart did this kind of thing repeatedly.

Walmart also pays its employees poorly.  It employs many of them as part-time workers so that it doesn't have to give them benefits.

In 2017, I was in need of a new television.  The television I had purchased nine years earlier never worked properly, and it was getting to the point where I couldn't get it to stay on.  I went onto the sites for Amazon and Best Buy and couldn't find anything I wanted, so as a last resort I went onto Walmart's site, and I immediately found the perfect TV -- and at a good price, too.  So I purchased it.  But then I realized that I had typed in the wrong email address for myself.  That error meant that I would not be notified when the TV shipped.  I tried to change my email address on their site, but I wasn't able to because there was an open order (i.e., my TV).  So I cancelled the order, and I started over again with a new account.  The following week, two televisions arrived, though I was charged for only one.  Eventually, I returned the second TV and I got a refund -- so I paid nothing for the TV that I kept.  Did I feel guilty?  Nope.

Thank you, Walmart and Home Depot, for giving me free stuff.