Walmart Commercial with Mike Rowe

[accadacca]

This video started some very interesting conversation. Thoughts?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv5pBf_-Mf0&sns=em

Mike Rowe
Clean-up In Aisle Four!

This whole Walmart thing. Wow. Just...wow.
If you

[accadacca]

Kevin: Walmart is the last [company] I would ever think you would do anything for! Why?

Rowe: That’s easy. Walmart has committed to purchase 250 billion dollars of American made products over the next decade. In essence, that’s a purchase order made out to the USA for a quarter of a trillion dollars. That means dozens of American factories are going to reopen all over the country. Millions of dollars will pour straight into local economies, and hundreds of thousands of new manufacturing positions will need to be filled.... Isn’t this the kind of initiative we can all get behind?

Walmart, the largest retailer on the planet, with more than two million employees working in over 11,000 stores generating gross revenues approaching half a trillion dollars annually, got there by finding out what customers wanted to buy and then offering it to them at competitive prices. There is only one possible way Walmart can make such a promise: that American manufacturers will offer the best deals to Walmart’s customers. Rowe spent his Sunday afternoon articulating that simple fact to his naysayers:

Romeapple: It’s hypocrisy. Walmart’s products are all made in China. Walmart contributes to those empty [American] factories. What’s so “powerful” about an ad that makes absolutely no sense?

Rowe: That’s not entirely accurate, Romeapple. There’s a lot of merchandise currently in Walmart that’s manufactured right here in the USA.... But let’s assume ... that Walmart did get every single item from China. Wouldn’t you like to see that change? Watch the ad again. Walmart is promising to buy 250 billion dollars of American made stuff and put it on their shelves. Whatever else you might think of the company, can you really root against an initiative like that?

Let me ask it another way. Do you really think America has any hope of reinvigorating our manufacturing base without support from the biggest retailer in the world?

Rowe is behind the curve here, but makes the valid point that Walmart swings a large hammer. According to a report from the Institute for Supply Management released in January, American factory purchasing managers said new orders for goods were the highest since April 2010. Walmart is likely turning a simple fact of life — jobs are coming back to America — into a press release.
But some of Rowe’s former fans aren’t buying it:

Pat: I am uneasy about trusting Walmart to do the right things to better serve this country and its people.

Rowe: They have to make good on it, because if they’re blowing smoke, their detractors will eat them alive. I believe this thing is going to happen.... Walmart is going to buy a quarter trillion dollars of American made goods in the next ten years and put those goods on their shelves. The only question is whether or not Americans will support that effort.

If they do, we just might be looking at a stimulus that actually stimulates something.

Rowe’s contrast of Walmart’s action with the federal government's talk is spot on. The government doesn’t have one single dime to spend on "stimulus" that it hasn’t forcibly taken from someone else. Walmart doesn’t have a dime that it didn’t earn by offering a customer, via the free market in an unforced transaction, a better deal.

But Walmart is greedy, rapacious, self-serving, evil, etc., etc. Rowe’s response to that canard could have come right out of Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson:

Rose: I want "made in America" too but make you’re sure on the side of the WORKER not the corporate greed side ok Mike? Love ya.

Rowe: Love ya back, Rose, but no thanks. You offer up a false and dangerous choice. The world is bigger than “Workers vs. Bosses,” and so is this campaign. Remember, Walmart thrives because a majority of Americans like to shop there. Like Apple, Discovery, Ford, and Facebook, Walmart does not exist for the purpose of employing people. No successful company does. Walmart’s first order of business is to serve their customer. Ultimately, the customer calls the shots. Not management. Not labor. Jobs are just a happy consequence of that success.

Former fan Sean accused Rowe of selling out to the evil empire:

Sean: I thought you were good person. But I just saw your AD that WAL-MART paid for. You’re a corporate suck, Rowe.

Rowe: Well hi there, Sean. From “good person” to corporate suck in 60 seconds! That’s gotta be a record! Let me explain something. Better sit down, as the truth may shock you. Ready? I make my living on commercial television. Not television. COMMERCIAL television.

That means I appear in television shows with commercials, paid for by corporations. I also produce television shows with commercials, paid for by corporations. I sometimes narrate television shows with commercials, paid for by corporations. And occasionally, I appear in the television commercials themselves, also paid for by corporations.

No matter what your job is Sean, if you work in commercial television, the money all flows from the same place. And no — it’s not the advertisers or the corporations that pay the bills. It’s you, Sean. The viewer. Just like the customer in a Walmart, the viewer on the sofa programs the airwaves by deciding what to watch and what to buy. In other words, you’re the boss.

Then Rowe stepped out of his role as kindly father explaining how the world works to his young na

[BruteForce]

Yeah, I could drink beers with Mike Rowe.

[Sombeech]

I don't like how Walmart buys stuff from China so I'm going to shop at Target

HA HA HA HA HA HA ROFL

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk

[accadacca]

Not many comments on this? WTF...

[Taylor]

Probably because we all agree with Mike Rowe?

[Deathcricket]

I'm too spent arguing with all my Obama supporting communist facebook friends to type any more on this subject. Sorry bro's!

[Sombeech]

I guess it's like the Flappy Bird app. You get too wildly successful and people start accusing you of cheating your ratings in the app store, stealing graphics code from Super Mario Bros, and suddenly you're a jerk.

[accadacca]

Mike Rowe is a stud.

http://afl.salsalabs.com/o/4023/c/33/images/mikerowe_header.png

[accadacca]

Oh yeah...Rush


http://youtu.be/0LYI--n-tjE