[kulahan]

I have no clue if it’s still true, but Wal-Mart back in the day used to go to the manufacturers of some products and request that same product at a lower price. The idea was “get it to us at that cost, no matter what you have to do” - so you would see name brand products meant to be very similar to ones you would see, but with inferior build quality, and the only distinguishing mark is that it has a different product ID from the manufacturer.

Point being: it doesn’t matter if Walmart does this, because it’s already an empty promise from them, too.

Just stop shopping at these behemoths.

[pimlottc]

Fast Company did a famous article about this back in 2003, with the example of a gallon jar of pickles priced at $2.97:

https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know-2

https://archive.is/e25nB

[kulahan]

This was a great read, but one part in particular made me laugh a bit:

>Wal-Mart is not just the world’s largest retailer. It’s the world’s largest company–bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year.

Ah, the innocence of 2003.

[bee_rider]

That is pretty sketchy behavior. But… it still doesn’t seem quite as bad as letting some third party steal an established listing.

At least users will correctly blame some well-known brand for their shoddy craftsmanship.