Sept. 10, 2004 - 19:39 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

BYOB

Looks to me as if Wal Mart, Super Target, Costco and others of their ilk are trying to run smaller businesses out completely.

I remember when discount stores first started in our area. Bare bones they were. Customer supplied the muscle and schlepped the bargains to the car.

Anybody who is of a certain age can remember GEM. What was it ? Government Employees Mutual ? Bargains could be had at the start. But somehow ownership farmed out departments to stores in town. Furniture supplied by a store in town. Appliances large and small the same way. Grocery items as well. Guess it didn't work too good after that started. Understandable to me. Stores in town supplying GEM raising their prices to GEM -- voila ! GEM out of business.

If it were under my control, groceries would not be sold by discount houses, health reasons as well as others.

Pretty soon you will be able to have teeth pulled, minor surgery and most anything else a person could want or need in one of the huge biggies. They already have branch offices of banks in the big places, opotometry and hearing aid departments, prescription drug purveyors.

So what makes me wonder, will our country become a place where everything is bought from the BIG discount stores ? And the smaller businesses driven out of town completely ? They are sort of dying out here because of the ever expanding Wal Mart.

One thing the supermarket grocery stores have been doing for ages is supplying courtesy clerks to push the grocery carts to customer cars, to get carts in the parking lot and bring them back in. Courtesy clerks bag the groceries. Many other advantages to using supermarkets over the discount houses, the way I see it. And the hired help in the supermarket are being told by management that management can't meet the competition paying the wages they have been. Unfair competition by the huge, monster stores of course.

So why not, by ordinance, law or whatever make it be that discount stores would go back to the bare bones warehouses of old, where customers had to bag their own stuff with no fancy service included ?

One unfair thing it seems to me is the supplying of grocery carts to push around carrying the items bought, supplying courtesy clerks to bring the buggies in out of the parking lot. Of course it seems to me that customers of the huge establishments are paying the price for those conveniences, if in no other way than by the lower wages the employees get. I fear that soon our country will be just one giant parking lot around one big Wal Mart . . . . . .

So why not go back to the customer supplying the muscle and effort to get a bargain ?

Maybe we should go back to using your own muscles and effort and along with that BYOB . . . . . . . . .

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