A piece from the NES Temple archives, we present for your your viewing pleasure the original "I Hate Wal*Mart" editorial. Wow, this seems like forever ago - I still get a might bit irritated when I read this...

Why I Hate Wal*Mart

Wal*Mart: Low, Low Prices Everyday. That's their motto, but is it really true? While I find most of their prices to be great, some of their pricing is irritating as hell. I went to my local Wal*Mart after Christmas to catch some of their sales. As I went to the Electronics Department, something seemed excessively wrong. In the section where the N64 (ugh) and Playstation stuff was located was a large cache of NES stuff. My first though was "JACKPOT!", but my hopes were quickly dashed. They had an NES Advantage, but it was $41! What was up with that? Then I looked at an NES Satellite and a Four-Score. $38 and $34! I didn't think that this could possibly be right, so I went to the counter and asked the guy to run a price check. And lo and behold, the sticker price was right! Dammit! I tried to ask about why it was so high, but couldn't get a straight answer. For pete's sake, an NES Advantage is $20 when you order it directly from NoA! I sent an email to Wal*Mart asking them about it. The transcript is as follows:

I am inquiring about the validity of the pricing on some of your items in the Electronics Department at my local Wal*Mart, located in Sandusky, OH. The items in question are an NES Advantage Controller ($43), an NES Satellite ($38) and an NES Four-Score ($35). Note that these are for the old 8-Bit NES (which your store no longer carries, nor supports) not the Nintendo 64. Why are these prices so high, when the equivalent periphial for the N64/Playstation (etc.) are MUCH lower. When I asked the store manager about this, he said that "they are in high demand" yet they were on the uppermost shelf with an extremely heavy coating of dust on the top, as if they hadn't been moved since 1992! Certainly they couldn't be falsely pushed as a Nintendo 64 periphial? Do you have control over the prices, or is that at the discretion of the store managers? Any feedback on the situation would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,
Dan Fichtel

I made a mistake in saying store manager instead of department manager (oh well) but the letter is none-the-less effective. Notice my accusation on them pushing it as an N64 periphial. This was a theory that I came up with one day, and in discussing this with my friends seems to be a very valid theory.

Large corporations like Wal*Mart can afford to drop their prices, so why can't they drop the NES stuff? More updates to come.

Thunder God
4/25/98

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UPDATE: I was about a week after sending that email, I got a voice-mail message from the customer service manager of my local Wal*Mart. We've been playing phone-tag on and off since then, neither of us being able to get a hold of the other. I guess it's my busy schedule. =) Anyhow, I think my email may have pissed him off. Oh well. More as this story develops.

Thunder God
5/2/98

Of course there haven't been any updates since then. Perhaps I'll force myself to go back in and check out their stock.

Want to know more about the subject? Check out books like these at your local library, or buy them at Amazon.com:

How Wal-Mart is Destroying America and The World and What You Can Do About It by Bill Quinn

Slam-Dunking Wal-Mart by Al Norman