Walmart Quality? - You're Kidding!
Having just returned from a long vacation back in Florida (7 months), I can attest that the quality of a lot of Walmart's products has deteriorated in their quest to dominate the consumer market. For what had formerly been an American company proudly selling mostly American-made products, Walmart has deterioated to below the old K-Mart level with their selling many Chinese and southeast Asian-made products, mostly cheap crap. And in fact K-Mart and Target are now exceeding Walmart in peddling quality products. And what is sad is that Walmart is putting a number of formerly solid-American merchants in financial straits. In Florida alone, both Winn-Dixie and Publix supermarkets (the largest chains with a dominant market share) are struggling to remain competitive in localities that have Walmart superstores with grocery sections. And it's a shame, because if you're a beef-lover and live in Florida (or the southeast US for that matter) you know WD's beef is the best of all the supermarkets' offerings.
Even the electronics we purchased did not come from Walmart as the quality of their offerings was just not there. Best Buy, Circuit City and Radio Shack have got them beat hands down. And my new laptop,...it came direct from Dell replacing my less than 3 years' old IBM Thinkpad that puked it's motherboard. Even IBM's consumer computer products had gotten so bad that they just recently sold that division to a Chinese company, one that had made many of their components. Sayonara Big Blue. And yes I know Dell uses a lot of Chinese and other Asian made components in their computers. The difference is that Dell OWNS these Chinese and Asian factories and manufactures components to their American specifications with higher levels of quality control than their Chinese or Asian-owned counterparts.
And finally, to place Taiwanese-made products with mainland China-made products on the same level is ludicrous. Although producers of cheap, crappy copies in the past, over the years Taiwan has considerably improved the quality of many of their products. The title of the "World's Biggest Producer of Crap" has now passed to the mainland.