Where To Post?

I was a bit miffed this evening as to where to post this one so I’ll run it through here anyway as it’s only a thought at the moment.

I sat tonight and watched the “Wall Mart – The High Cost Of Low Prices” movie and, I have to say, it has sort of wound me up and, in a strange way at the end, reminded me of why I do a lot of what I do.

The basic premise of it is that Wall Mart move into a town and target local and often long established businesses to get rid of the competition. Then they underpay the staff and basically screw everyone over. Meanwhile they get a load of crap made cheap in next to third world countries in not so clever conditions whilst preaching environmental and social benefits that they bring… yeah right.

And, as they expand and build more stores they get huge government or local government grants to “bring employment“ to the area!

The body of evidence would appear to largely support this with even the little I know about of the company. It also struck me that Tesco, Currys and a host of others seem to have adopted this model.

Wipe out the local service or sales, move on and to hell with the consequences.

Apart from seeming pretty nasty is this sounding at all familiar?

However, as I have a nasty tendency to do, I started to ponder how I’d go about combating this and I have to say that, to my absolute surprise, I almost modelled ISE/UKW as a vehicle to start a fight back combined with a voice to scream at government with, the TA.

The thing we lack, for now, is the support of retailers. But that will come in time I reckon.

But it also struck me that RETRA, DASA and CIH are all trying to fight their own little corner, or have been. This is stupid and a needless waste of time and energy as they are, in fact, fighting the same fight as every other small business TA or organisation, they all have the same enemy in the end, the global corporations. It makes a lot more sense to fight as one and save resources. It’s sort of like world war 2, a whole heap of people with axes to grind had to join forces to ensure a victory and I have to ask, why can’t the local retailers do this? Is it really such a crazy idea?

Maybe I’m not so stupid after all or maybe I’m totally insane and should start looking at a comfy cell. 😕

K.