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Perhaps my Daughter is Right

Posted on December 18th, 2009 by Retired-Ed in Why do they...?

UPDATE: 19 DEC 09  A front-page article in today’s Stars and Stripes indicates that Wal-Mart has reversed its policy of charging more for APO mailings. It states that they will now charge the same for APO as they do for domestic mailing. Finally, they get it. It’s a good PR thing to support your troops overseas.

I’d like to think that it was my blog post that tipped the scales, but I know better. Chalk this one up to the power of the press.

My kids are pretty smart; they have my genes of course. Well, half of them are their mother’s genes, and she’s really smart too. Anyway, my younger daughter, Allison, refuses to shop at Wal-Mart. She’s a bit of a political animal, and her refusal to shop there is on political or moral grounds. Since we frequently disagree politically, we haven’t fully discussed her reasons to boycott the place, but I assume that they center on their hiring policies and treatment of employees.

I may be joining her in her boycott, but for a practical reason that is dear to me. You see, there was an article in our “local” newspaper yesterday. The Stars and Stripes printed this article about how some retailers jack up the shipment price when sending items to an APO address. For the uninitiated, the APO address stands for Army Post Office (or Air Force Post Office) and gives us government  employees and military members an opportunity to mail and receive goods without paying customs duty and to mail at US domestic rates. For those of us in Europe, a package mailed from the USA will have postage paid to New York, and the Department of Defense picks up the tab from New York to our local mailroom. In the Pacific, the cost is to San Francisco or Seattle and the government likewise picks up the tab for the remainder of the cost.

In theory then, a retailer should charge no more for a package going to an APO address then would be charged for the same package going to New York (or the West Coast). An enterprising reporter compared the cost of items being sent to a single address in Atlanta, GA, and the same item going to an APO address. Now there may be some room for error here because the cost to Atlanta might be different than the cost to NY or SF. But there shouldn’t be huge differences. The article compares four retailers: Amazon.com, Target, Wal-Mart, and JC Penney. Guess which one hoses us the most? Wal-Mart. Amazon had exactly the same cost to an APO address as it did to Atlanta. JC Penney was slightly higher. Target (praise them!) had lower rates to the APO address. Wal-Mart, however,charged almost five times as much to ship the same item to the APO address as it did to Atlanta. Boo! Hiss!

I’m willing to keep an open mind about this, provided that Wal-Mart provides an explanation. When the Stars and Stripes tried to interview them, they declined. So, in this case, it’s “guilty until proven innocent”. I certainly won’t be shopping there. I doubt if they will miss my business, but it’s the principle. The Queen shops a lot at JC Penney online, but she almost always qualifies for free shipping (as much as she shops there, I’m surprised that they don’t send it in a limousine, but I digress). So we’ll give JC Penney a pass and they can keep our business. We also shop a lot with Amazon.com, and they are fair with their shipping costs, so they will keep our business. (Disclaimer: we own some stock in the Amazon.com company).

Because not everything that a person would want is available in the PX or on the German economy, we do a considerable amount of shopping online, and I wish that the retailers would be consistently fair. The best that we can do is to shop with the retailers that show that they want our business.

By the way, our daughters (and son-in-law) will be arriving in the next few days to celebrate the holidays. Some of their presents under the tree will have come from these fair-minded retailers. There won’t be any from Wal-Mart.

Retired-Ed

7 Comments

7 Responses to “Perhaps my Daughter is Right”

  1. citywendy Says:
    December 18th, 2009 at 4:42 pm

    Wal-mart sucks donkey balls!!! I’m with Allison on this — it’s an evil corporation that should be shut down.

  2. Allison Says:
    December 18th, 2009 at 6:27 pm

    Yay for you for getting on the bus! I don’t know much about Wal-Mart’s employee treatment. I hate Wal-Mart because I went to school in a small town. I saw how small businesses were affected by the large box store. Walgreens came in right as I graduated and I’m really curious to see how my local pharmacy was impacted by Walgreens. I was finally able to transfer all my prescriptions to a local pharmacy in the past few months. I believe that supporting locally owned businesses is better for the community and that big box stores, especially Wal-Mart, contribute to the sense of degradation of community and community values.

    I’m really excited about coming home this weekend! Funny that you and Mom come “home” to the states whereas I go home to Germany.

  3. larrybruce Says:
    December 19th, 2009 at 7:35 pm

    Ed,

    You wrote “I’d like to think that it was my blog post that tipped the scales, but I know better. Chalk this one up to the power of the press.”

    This is the press of the 21st Century. The blogosphere has a combined power that the 20th Century did not have. The blogosphere’s influence is immediate!

  4. Retired-Ed Says:
    December 19th, 2009 at 7:42 pm

    Okay. I’ll buy that. And the CEO of Wal-Mart reads my blog. I’ll buy that as well.

  5. larrybruce Says:
    December 20th, 2009 at 10:04 am

    Do a search on Google using the words wal-mart APO and you will find this article on page 8 and the pages go on and on… and you guessed almost all are about Wal-Mart charging more for APO addresses. I’m sure if I can find this and notice how may have written about this “issue” so can the executives of Wal-Mart.

  6. Retired-Ed Says:
    December 20th, 2009 at 11:08 am

    I need to point out to my readers that “larrybruce” is my friend Larry Bruce. He is the person who steered me to my new favorite website: http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/. If you’d like a really good laugh, check it out. It’s a hoot.

  7. Nano Says:
    January 5th, 2010 at 7:26 am

    Nano says that Connie has not shopped at a Walmart since she retired from DoDDS in 2001.

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