See How They Manipulate My Shopping List

Two issues to discuss that are sort of related. First off, sponges.

I recently bought these two sponges, your typical yellow sponge with the green scrubbing pad on the back. After a short time, the sponges just disintegrated. There were small and large chunks of sponge falling off all over the place. Needless to say, I was furious.

Today I went to the store to buy more sponges. Right away I noticed a name brand sponge with the words "extra strong" or something like it printed boldly on the package. Aha, this is what I needed, extra strong sponges. I must have bought some off-brand weak sponge last time. I bought the package, cost was not an issue at this point (which is rare for me).

So I got home and while doing the dishes with my new sponge, I thought of something. I may have just been manipulated by a sponge-making company.

If I had a large multi-national sponge corporation, here is what I would do. I would make my nice name brand sponges. Then, as many large corporations do, I would make off brand or store brand sponges too.

But since the store brand sponges are cheaper, I wouldn't make them as nice. In fact, I would engineer them so they virtually disintegrated after a short use. Then on my package of name brand sponges, I would make sure I noted that they were "extra strong."

So now I've made money by selling crappy sponges under a store name and money by selling nice sponges, stronger than the store brand.

Now of course me being me, in a couple of months I will have forgotten the whole sponge saga and I will buy the cheap store brand sponges, because I am cheap. And the cycle continues.

So why was I formulating this sponge conspiracy while doing the dishes? I happened to read an article yesterday about the evil Wal-Mart.

Apparently, according to this article, Wal-Mart is a very powerful and evil company. It is one of the largest corporations in the world, even bigger than big oil companies like Exxon. The article claimed that 10 percent of U.S. imports from China go to Wal-Mart.

All of this power is used by Wal-Mart to force their suppliers to sell them products at extremely low prices. The example used in the article was Vlasic Pickles. Apparently Wal-Mart asked Vlasic to produce a one-gallon jar of pickles and sold it for less than $3. Many of you know that a much smaller small jar of Vlasic pickles, the premium pickle, costs at least that much any place else.

But Vlasic is forced to either sell the pickles to Wal-Mart at the cost Wal-Mart wants or not sell them at all. Now people can argue that this is just business and Wal-Mart is just looking out for the customer. But should you look out for the customer at the expense of hurting your suppliers?

What happens when suppliers get hurt? Well, in Wal-Mart's case, when suppliers here in the good ol' U.S. of A. can't sell to them, Wal-Mart goes to China and buys the products there cheaper. Now this is Wal-Mart we are talking about, the same Wal-Mart that several years ago touted the "buy American" slogan.

So to get you, the customer a cheaper pickle, Wal-Mart is forcing U.S. companies to lay off workers, cut corners, etc. or they take their business to China.

What does all that mean? I don't know but I think I'm going to stop shopping at Wal-Mart.