Blog 8: Is Walmart setting the right price?

Recently some of my co-workers and I had a discussion about "super power" stores like Wal-mart and Target. Most agreed that Wal-mart and Target stores were the best thing to happen to mankind since the invention of the wheel. I agree. I am one of those people enslaved to the commercial enterprise that Wal-mart and Target provide for the pliable human being. Each time I go into one of these stores I go in with a small list of items I need and walk out with a shopping cart full of stuff I don't necessarily need or even want. It is almost like as soon as you enter through the automatic doors, the Wal-mart greeter's "welcome" puts you into a kind of hypnosis and that's when the madness starts. Like a kid in a candy shop I can't keep my hands in the cart. I reach for everything on the shelf. One of my co-workers, whose belief that both stores are the bully on the block, brought up a good point that whenever one or both of these two giants move into a town or city, all the little mom and pop stores which for years have been a corner stone for most local markets, are being shut down, unable to compete with these juggernauts. These stores have what seems like a self-contained market and their own ecosystem. We see the commercials, the little yellow smiley face flying around knocking down price tags throughout the store, advertising Wal-mart’s ability to set their prices at whatever they want, sometimes setting them so low that it makes it impossible for the smaller stores to compete. Is it ethical for a company to have such a hold as this? How would a new company choose a pricing strategy going up against what seems like a supernatural power? Would it have to offer goods with exceptional quality? It would be extremely difficult to compete with lowering prices. Even if they were to start off with the average price of a certain good or service, there is always the threat of one of the two stores lowering it's prices. So where does the onslaught end? Is Wal-mart the new "wheel" or the end of the road for small business owners?