The day before Christmas I found myself at a Radio Shack looking for jumper wires to go with an Arduino/breadboard kit I bought my daughter for Christmas. (A mix up with my wife's Amazon order left us suddenly without jumpers. Desperate times, desperate measures.) What a sad place. I ended up with some crappy jumpers that cost 2x more than the good ones we wanted from Amazon. The component section of RS is a joke. They used to be my go to in college (early 90s) when I needed components for a project. Now they are just trash. I left there Christmas Eve thankful I had some jumpers but they have now joined Walmart on my list of places I will only go if I am truly desperate and have exhausted all other options.
I always disliked Walmart's selection. The prices are decent, better than I'll pay at most smaller stores, but they basically carry the same products at every location with no regional variation.
For example, in my college town there were two grocery stores: Walmart and Econofoods. Walmart carried it's typical products and was pretty boring. On the other hand, Econofoods had an impressive selection (more so because this was a small, 8,000 person town) of locally made products, alcohol, and ethnic food. It completely blew Walmart out of the water.
Walmart makes me feel depressed. Piles of awful, consumeristic shit everywhere. This, plus the fact that it is owned and run by truly terrible (in my opinion) people mean I go there only as an absolute last resort. I try to buy most things at non-chain or smaller chain stores (especially those that are known to treat their employees better) when I can.
I prefer not to shop at a place where the employees don't look like they can make ends meet. I'm not sure that is helping or hurting people on the whole, but it makes me feel better.
I wish places which underpaid their staff allowed you to pay a surcharge that would be distributed to the staff (plenty of supermarkets, petsmart, etc. will try to hit you up for small charitable donations -- I'd much rather add a few dollars to my bill to pay the employees better).
