Corben

Great! After all that guess where the little lady wants me to take her today! @&!#%!!
Might as well rent me a saddle bag.

rllipham

Buying an item with the intent of returning is theft. What else can you call it? Fraud, theft or whatever. It is still wrong. This activity will eventually make it more difficult for an honest customer to make a return. If this happened to a Mom and Pop store is it wrong?


The returned bike will have to be discounted or returned to the warehouse and credited to the store. Someone has to pay/take the loss in terms of store profits or higher prices.

Frizlefrak

Seems like a lot of effort for the "privilege" of riding a Wal-Mart BSO free for a short period of time....

Ramona_W

Every store is different, but @Corben mentioned welds and looking for overspray that indicates someone at the factory had to go back and repair or redo something is a good place to start examining your prospective Walmart bike. Also, if you're looking at a bike with anything other than a quill stem, check before the little lady even gets on to be sure all the bolts are tight and the assembler didn't just do the star fangled nut and neglect the rest.

If you find/found a bike or bikes on your trip to Walmart that you think you might want to pay for and keep, feel free to PM me with questions about the pros and cons of each one and I can give you an opinion based on the track record I've seen with them at my store. (I think I've been very honest in these forums when discussing the limitations of Walmart bikes and I'd hate to see someone get a bike they're disappointed in if it could have been avoided.)

Happy shopping!

Motolegs

Those Jimmy Dean frozen breakfast sammies are actually pretty good. Some of the Hungry Man's too. The fried chicken one is pretty abhorrent...

MattoftheRocks

If you r*pe a serial r*pist, it is a crime, but is it wrong?
If you burn a serial arsonist's house, it is a crime, but is it wrong?
If you steal from a chronic thief it is a crime...

Walmart has systematically stolen billions from momnpop shops across the country and put most of them out of business AND forced communities into lower quality of life.

If you drive through a school zone at 22mph at 5:57pm in a modern well-maintained car equipped with summer performance tires on a sunny 75* day with no children within seventy feet of the crosswalk, or the road at all, you might get a ticket, probably won't, should you have anyone IRL or online browbeating you over it?

F*** walmart.

Seriously, booooohoooo.

They have enough money coming in that a criminally organized protest group could steal and destroy every bicycle from every store after every shipment for a year and neither Ramona nor any other "bike dept" worker would have to be let go- they'd just get transferred to produce or camping.

GP

Calm down, princess. It's a cycling forum, not www.walmartsucks.com.

Wilfred Laurier

my responses to your questions and comments

yes
yes
yes
no but driving 26 in a 25 zone is not in the same category as arson or sexual assault
yes

J.C. Koto

from https://crow202.org/2008/

MattoftheRocks

Just as taking a five dollar item that cost one dollar from a business that nets less than $60k/year is not in the same category as putting fifteen miles on a hundred edollar item that cost twenty dollars from a company that nets a half of a trillion dollars per year. This sub topic should never have come up in this thread. I'm not giving props to the op for his cheap thrill, but I am completely against anyone who would like to make him feel like he needs to go confess to a priest and apologize to Sam Walton and Doug McMillan.

RPK79

So, Walmart stole your customers and Walmart's customers are freaks. In other words you thought your customers were freaks. No wonder you lost them.

Ramona_W

I once got pulled over for doing 24 in a school zone. It was 3 in the afternoon and the lights were flashing but 4 miles an hour isn't much in the grand scheme of things. Ironically, when the cop- who was driving an unmarked red car- asked me where I was going in such a hurry, I had to admit, in all honesty, that I was about to be late picking up my own child from school. He suggested I call and have someone else pick her up. No one was pleased.

Ramona_W

I think people were more concerned with the OP's attitude and with the slippery slope of rationalization they see people headed down. Laundry detergent is expensive even at Walmart so people are stealing it. This is a fact. They're not just stealing enough to do laundry for their family; they're stealing a whole bunch of it and selling it on Craigslist and at swap meets. This is also a fact. Someone I work with said "Of course, people are buying black market detergent. If you're a single mom raising four kids and you're making minimum wage, you do that so you can wash things." My grandmother worked full-time as a waitress and in a variety of jobs where she was lucky to be making much money and raised four kids with an alcoholic who was chronically unemployed and didn't do that but let's leave that aside. Let's take it as read that everyone deserves clean bedding and clothes and so on.

But several times I have found what might be considered non-necessary items stolen as well. A $25 treasure chest filled with fake jewelry that resembles that worn in the movie "Frozen"? Well, maybe the person didn't have the $25 or decided $25 was more than that should cost and wasn't sure where to leave the $4.38 they concluded the factory had to pay the Chinese person who made it. What about the food and drinks people hand their kids as they're walking around the store that they never pay for? I guess those would be necessary items because they kept the kids quiet and happy while the parents were shopping and we all appreciated that. Then how about the woman who shoved $30+ of make-up into the infant seat propped up in the cart? An infant seat, mind you, that her child was currently sleeping in while the mother and an older child shopped? It starts with a $5 item that costs $1 from a big store as a protest but I can see it spreading to bigger items and smaller stores and becoming more generalized and accepted as normal behavior.

I never thought I'd be working for Walmart. I don't agree with some of their business practices and I hope in the future I will be able to work to change them. I never thought I'd be wrangling BSOs. I'm doing my best as an individual to make sure the ones I handle are put together well and to change the reputation of the Walmart bike from being a cheap POS that's thrown together by someone they grabbed from the shoe department. Would I love to go back to working in a shop that sells used bikes that were lovingly rehabbed by people who are passionate about them? Of course, I would. But that place was staffed by volunteers. Probably the only way you could run such a thing and I don't think Walmart is the main influence there.

As for the OP, I consider him the kid who got a spitball all the way to the blackboard but no one noticed. I'm not sure if he was looking for positive reinforcement or negative but he got some of both so he should be happy either way.

MattoftheRocks

Mods- time to move this to trollheim?
@Ramona_W You look down on people who rationalize petit larceny because you had a family member who carried the world through six feet of snow uphill both ways without stealing, lying or cheating, but you rationalize being dependent on a company responsible for virtually eradicating several arms of domestic consumer product production industries because they gave a few bucks to the homeless and distribute maltodextrin and corn syrup to people on the brink?

This is a cycling forum, concern about the slippery slope of running stop signs because nobody is there leading to spitting on cars and kicking baby strollers in the crosswalk is understandable- it apllies to the cycling community at large. Concern about the slippery slope of someone abusing the return policy of a gigantic corporation for amusement leading to becoming a black market mogul does not belong here.

Nermal

I guess anything can be justified if you have the right frame of mind. You've got something I want, and you probably don't deserve it, anyway? What can you not rationalize?

Frizlefrak

I see it this way.....

Do I find some of Wal-Mart's business practices unsavory? Yes. Do I think they're the devil incarnate? No. Can I justify personally stealing from them? No, and for the same reason I can't steal from Mr. Jones Grocery store....because I was brought up not to steal. I feel like taking something that doesn't belong to you is wrong, and that includes uncompensated use of the product. To me, that's the same as stealing Mrs. Dunn's car, driving it all day, and returning it to her driveway at 5 PM....even if she remains unaware that it was ever gone.

At the end of the day, I have to be able to look myself in the mirror and be happy with what I see. If I do something as seemingly innocuous to some as abusing the return policy at a dept store, I can't like what I see in the mirror. It would be like stealing a rich family's garden hose....will it affect them in a substantial way? No. Can they buy another hose? Yes. Would I feel good about myself if I did it? Absolutely not. It's completely irrelevant HOW this rich family made their fortune....perhaps their ancestors owned plantations and slaves and the wealth was passed down. I can't use that as a justification to abscond with their property for my own benefit.

YMMV, of course.

SkyDog75

Yes, yes, and yes. They're all wrong. No question about it. It's not even a gray area. If you r*pe, it's wrong. If you destroy others' property, it's wrong. If you steal, it's wrong. Period.

I can't control what you do, what anyone else does, or what Walmart's business practices are. I'm only in control of my own actions and have enough integrity to make sure those actions are moral and ethical regardless of the level others might stoop to.

<EDIT> A tip of the hat to frizlefrak, who stated similar sentiments just before I did, but with more eloquence.

Frizlefrak

Amen

VegasTriker

If this were for test riding a bike I would have no concern. Bike shops will generally allow for test rides while most mass merchandisers like WalMart, Target, or KMart probably do not. The OP seems to have wanted to ride the bike but had no real interest in buying one. Morality or lack thereof seems to be an issue too.

To the grocery manager: A lot of the problems with the grocery business can be laid at the feet of grocery industry consolidation and the taking on of large amounts of debt while they were at it. Twenty years ago my town (at 1/3 the current population) had about 7 grocery chains and no WalMarts. One by one they merged until we had 3 - Kroger, Albertsons, and Safeway. Albertsons is now owned by a hedge fund but still operates many stores. Lots of them closed during the consolidations. WalMart came to the area a few years ago and opened multiple stores. You have to service (pay off) that debt and it means higher prices in the stores and a difficult time competing with WalMart. They brought it on themselves. I'm not a fan of WalMart and don't buy groceries there. I buy much of my food at local ethnic stores (mainly Hispanic) and the rest at a dollar store nearby. I get much better produce at a fraction of what my nearest chain store charges.

I-Like-To-Bike

Wait! Ya mean to say that all the fine LBS's we hear so much about on BF don't pay all their employees a decent living wage despite their being passionate enough to treat every bike they sell or work on with loving passion? Say it ain't so.

Rowan

Funnily enough, I was thinking the same thing when I finally opened this thread. Seemed rather humorous to be saying what he said, without a single thought for the ethics of what he was doing.

Rowan

Then it went downhill from there.

gpsblake

Oh, stop it... Walmart does exactly what other businesses tried to do for decades, they are just better at it... Walmart has been a boom to mom and pop businesses, just go to any Walmart and see ALL THE SHOPS by it, most of them owned or franchised by Mom and Pop types...

And the traditional Mom and Pop shops never hired from the community, they would always hire their family and closest friends. One LBS that I won't name hires high schools to fix their bikes part-time at minimum wage.

gregjones

Then where are you going to shop? The cashiers and stockers at your "approved" store of choice probably shop at Wal-Mart because your store of choice doesn't pay them enough to shop where they work.....where you shop. Nowhere for for your "service personnel" to provide products for their families=no one for your store to hire to serve you.

Then what happens? You complain about about how bad the service at the "good" store has been lately.

Back to the regular scheduled programming.

Rowan

Yes, child labour/slavery is rife in the Mom and Pop businesses. Along with tax cheating.

But don't let facts like that stand in the way of self-righteous indignation about Walmart.