I enjoy being a Dierbergs customer, I want to STAY being a Dierbergs customer.

I fear the moment when the Big Box and Brown Sludge chains will drive the local independent out of business, and I’ll have to shop with them because I don’t have any choice.

People need only look to the East to see what I mean.

There are a great MANY cities in the east where your choices are either a Big Box Super Center or a “Gigantic” (cough) food chain store.

The local versions of Schnucks and Dierbergs were effectively murdered there, and people have NO choice in the matter. If you want to buy groceries you HAVE to buy them from one of the two hideous choices.

I’d love to see Dierbergs and Schnucks get their act together to the point where they could beat back the onslaught that is surely coming.

Mac

Both Schnuck’s and Dierberg’s started life in our neighborhood as a Mom and Pop grocery store. If you had taken the time to educate yourself you’d know that.

Neither of them came into our communities as predators. Which is a far cry from what the Big Box Stores are doing.

Anyone who can’t see the difference hasn’t done their homework.

Your examples are pretty laughable really. It wasn’t Schnucks or Dierbergs that killed the Mom and Pop video and pharmacy. It was those other Brown Sludge Monsters BlockBuster and Walgreens. Any fool knows that. Well… most fools do. LOL.

Which is everything that’s wrong with the Republican party and Conservatism in general. The ideology has been hijacked by knee-jerk Gordon Gekko types that simply don’t care about the damage they are doing to society. They only care that big business is allowed to make as much money as they can at any expense. Even if that expense is turning America into a Third World Country.

Real deal conservatives realize this, and also realize that Big Box is ruining America - and want to stop it.

The Gordon Gekko morons don’t care. They just want their piece of the pie.

You’re comment pretty much drives this home.

As an aside that’s an interesting web-site you’ve put in your URL. LOL. I notice that it only has negative stories about blacks and hispanics. Just curious… are you a white supremacist? That site has a definite “skinhead” look to it.

As far as selling things from China … the only reason Schuck’s sells less of them is that most of our food is still grown in the United States. For this reason, the revenue derived from imports will be much lower at a Walmart Supercenter than at a regular Walmart store. But whether you buy it at Walmart or Schnuck’s, the TP, toothpaste, and turnips are all going to be made in USA, while the box fan and DVD player are going to be from China.

Sure, Schnuck’s is a “local independent” to you, today. But to all the “mom and pop” grocery stores that Schnuck’s put out of business, they are a regional conglomerate. According to their website, they have 43 stores in St. Louis city/county, 13 stores elsewhere in Missouri, 12 stores in metro east, 9 in outstate Illinois, 5 in Indiana, 5 in the Rockford, Illinois area, 13 in Tennessee & Mississippi, and one in Bettendorf, Iowa. I have little doubt that the independent grocers in the the many small towns into which Schnuck’s has moved did not view them as a nice, locally owned business, but rather, as a nasty chain store from “the big city.”

Furthermore, Schnuck’s has adopted the “big box” concept by adding additional lines of business in their grocery stores. Each time they open a store with a florist, a “mom and pop” flower shop is put out of business. Each time they open a store with a video department, another locally owned video store bites the dust. Each time they open a store with a pharmacy, another independent pharmacy closes its doors. None of these truly independent businesses view Schnuck’s as anything but a heartless corporate conglomerate out to destroy their business. So you can see why I can do little more than laugh when I hear you defend them like this.

Fact is, Schnuck’s is not a local, independent store - it’s a growing chain whose owner happens to live in a four million dollar house in Clayton instead of a similar one in Bentonville.

True that…

But the point is that the Schnucks and Dierbergs families, growing chain or not are LOCAL INDEPENDENTS and not national mega corps.

And every penny I spend in THIER stores is a penny that goes into MY neighborhoods economy and enriches MY community.

Every penny you spend at Big Box Mart goes out of the community to a corporate HQ in some other state and most of it makes it way back into East Beijing sweatshops that help enrich governments that in no way have the United States best interest at heart.

It also impoverishes local businesses and helps to run them out of business and degrades the quaility and choices of the community.

Now… you can try to make the case that it’s okay to ruin your community and destroy the local independent businesses that are ran by your neighbors and other members of the community so you can save a few pennies, but what it all boils down to is GREED.

Your GREED.

Your greed to save a few pennies at that expense of your community.

Wrapping it around “saving poor people money” is absurd, and intellectually dishonest.

Frame it as you like - it’s still GREED.

The fact is that WalMart saves millions of dollars for millions of people every day. And with their $5 prescriptions, WalMart has done something that even the US government shrank from doing: extracted financial concessions from the greedy, evil drug companies.

The Bubbah family doesn’t care that they’re ruining their neighborhood and destroying their community. They only care that they’re saving 6 cents on a jar of hemorrhoid cream.

I think that pretty much says it all.

I’m always amused at the apocryphal “I was ripped off by a mom and pop store!” stories. This one is especially amusing. $5.00 for a gallon of milk because they just knew that momma was at werk and mah baby brother needed milk.

As your idol and role model Larry the Cable Guy would say… “I don’t care who ya are, dat’s funny.”

We were leaving the grocery store recently — the Wal-Mart, and remind me to tell you bellyaching Wal-Mart-is-going-to-ruin-the-world upper-income types about the sweet old Mom-and-Pop grocer near my house when I was a kid, the ones who charged me five dollars for a gallon of milk because they knew we just had the one car and that my mother was at work, and that my baby brother needed milk, and how these are the people I think of when I hear about Wal-Mart driving small businesses into bankruptcy, which is why I always mutter “good” under my breath when I hear that, because Wal-Mart is like a tax cut for poor people, but all that is another story,

Plus, if you live in a large enough metropolitan area, there are plenty of small groceries–they buy their stuff wholesale from Sam’s Club, in fact.