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Buying socks unnecessarily wastes energy and results in larger piles of discarded clothes, both of which are bad for the environment. Agree/disagree?
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Lowering wages forces more families into poverty and increases dependence on charities/welfare. Agree/disagree?
Cutting margins is not a productivity improvement. (at least not if you measure sock per person-hour)
If you can cut wages easily, there is already pressure from shareholders to do so, regardless of what Costco does.
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They do so because they think it’s going to be profitable. Sometimes they’re right; sometimes they’re wrong.
I’m going to go into the wildfire thread and tell everyone to stop complaining and that fire has done a lot of good for humanity.
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Too often the leftist (whatever term we want to use) critique of large companies like Costco and Walmart ignores the benefit of cheap goods for the bottom quartile.
This in no way negates the other completely justified critiques around pay etc.
So if you can afford to you should at least boycott them and let the bottom quartile shop there.
I have shopped at Costco maybe 3 times in my life and I shop at Walmart maybe once a year. Not because I am boycotting but because I hate shopping in mega stores. The whole experience is misery.
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Lockdown has been a godsend for me in this respect, as now I have an excuse to rush around the local supermarket in as little time as possible.
AFAICT, not one poster who is criticizing capitalism, consumerism, or Costco is doing that ITT.
Good. The big boy is Amazon. Some might say they are saving the world by making it so people can have more and cheaper stuff, but I don’t think they’re right. I think they’re already the useful campfire that’s gone out of control, but at least they are a harbinger of doom.
You would love the latest Chapo where they argue that immigration is bad for the environment and clown on YIMBYism for 30 minutes straight.
Just checking in, but, if the Wookie household shops at Costco weekly, but pretty much only for food, are we basically the cause of the downfall of humanity?
Only if you’re picking up socks just for the hell of it.
I didn’t say they were. I was just pointing out there are significant benefits for the bottom quartile with massively available cheap goods. Those benefits rarely get brought up in these discussions. I’d be curious to see an economic analysis as to how those balance against the bad things that are much more commonly discussed.
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sure. I mean, we all know where this is going. Are you going to be the sock police and have people submit approval for new sock purchases? I mean, lots of things waste energy. Watching TV, going on vacation, shit, reading a book wastes energy.
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sure. and where you’re going with this line might be interesting if people were assigned jobs at birth and had no chance to ever do anything other than make socks.
making more jobs available for lower skilled people is ultimately a good thing for everyone.
No, but one person who votes for Trump doesn’t cause the downfall of humanity either.
I mean, yeah. But, it’s also not ruining the environment. I mean you can make this argument but it invalidates everything else you’re trying to say.
Here is an actual live shot of the socks I am wearing right now. Behold the horror of Socialist Canada anti consumer policy.
Sure, we have universal health care. But at what cost?
At what cost?
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so now the argument is shifting to “we should subsidize bad businesses in perpetuity because otherwise someone might have to find a new job”