[tivodan1116]

A few statements of my own to add to this:

1) Commonsense is clearly correct about the free market being the answer to problems.

2) Bearing that in mind, it is important to remember that price is not the only dictator of free market success. There are hundreds of models of car that are less expensive then a Cadillac CTS-V, but if i had $55,000 to spend on a car, would i be buying one? Hell yeah.

To take that prospect to our Wal-Mart situation: I live in a small town which is a satellite of the third largest city in NY. As such, our shopping options are generally unlimited as long as we are willing to drive 15 minutes or so. We have a Wal-Mart supercenter 15 minutes away (and may be getting one about a mile away) that I do not patronize. Why? Because in our town we have a little unstoppable juggernaut of a grocery store called Wegmans. Wegmans is consistently rated as one of the top 100 companies to work for (now in the top 10) by Fortune magazine. They give all of their employees and their families free health and dental insurance. They also realize that, being a grocery store, a large percentage of their retail employees are young people, and as such, have given out more than $16,000,000 in scholarships to over 16,000 employees since 1984. Their company headquarters also happens to be in that large city right nearby.

Beyond Wegmans good will policies, I shop there simply because I find their products to be vastly superior to that of Wal-Mart groceries. Wegmans uses local growers wherever possible, and their produce and meat goods are absolutely world-class fantastic. The people they hire seem to be some kind of grocery savants, or at the very least absurdly friendly.

Do I pay an extra $5 or so per $100 shopping trip to the grocery store? Perhaps, although Wegmans prices are quite reasonable. Why do I not care? Because of the reasons i listed above.

This brings me to the point of this whole exercise: Competing with Wal-Mart. Around here, Wegmans absolutely crushes Wal-Mart in grocery sales because they have decided not to compete on Wal-Mart's playing field. By shrugging their shoulders at price wars and instead focusing on quality, service, and being a good neighbor in their community, Wegmans has found their unique selling proposition (USP). That is the way a business succeeds in a free-market economy, by having a USP; that is, something that absolutely makes a person purchase from your business instead of another business that offers the same product or service. You've got to "own your own hill" as we said when i sold advertising.