Whether in the US or overseas, leave it to Wal-Mart to find new and exciting ways to do the absolute bare minimum for their employees :smt009
I've always found that Target has better quality merchandise that Wal-Mart, at least here in the southeast. I normally shop for clothing at department stores or places like TJ Maxx/Marshall's but when I do go to Target their clothes look a lot better than anything I've seen at any of the Wal-Marts nearby. As far as prices go, I read an article sometime last year that compared prices at various stores and the total price for all of the items at Target was about the same as Wal-Mart. In fact, there were more than a few items that cost less at Target than they did at Wal-Mart. If I can ever find that article again I'll post a link to it. The main reason for that is because Wal-Mart skimps on employee hours as much as possible to keep their profits sky-high. One of the major downsides to building increasingly massive stores is that those stores take a lot of manpower to keep fully staffed. In the Wal-Marts here, you'd be lucky to find anyone working in the store to answer any questions about anything really. Wal-Mart even basically admitted that they can't keep shelves stocked: http://business.time.com/2013/04/09/the-trouble-lurking-on-walmarts-empty-shelves/ That kind of attitude royally pisses me off for two reasons. First, it shows a gross lack of respect for their employees because they literally have to run around massive stores to help customers despite the fact that their employer is raking in massive profits on an annual basis. Second, it shows a gross lack of respect for the customers who actually put money in that corporation's pockets because a lack of staffing and empty shelves just underscore the fact that Wal-Mart simply doesn't give a shit when it comes to taking care of its customers. Despite having 30 or so checkouts at a lot of their stores I'm often hard pressed to see more than three or four of them open at once. Of course, all of these differences could be regional as opposed to national but it still burns me up to see Wal-Mart behave the way that it does yet suffer next to no consequences because of it.
You're not kidding, either. They could wring blood from a turnip. And I agree with your later post about Target being a generally better shopping experience. Better quality products, a much more pleasant shopping experience, cleaner, and more and nearly as cheap. I don't mind paying a few cents more for a better feeling at the end of the day.
Hopefully someday Wal-Mart will realize the same thing and improve it's customer service...but I won't hold my breath. Another thing that I've also noticed about Target is that if a line has more than five or six people in it, another cashier will open up a register to speed up the checkout process. When I'm in Wal-Mart I'm lucky if that happens when lines have 20 people in them.
The Wal-Mart ethos seems to be about sucking as much $ out as possible. They're like the retail equivalent of people who bring nothing to the party, don't help set up or clean up afterward, but want to eat and drink their fill.
