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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • So, I’m not trying to be the “ackshually” guy.

    Value Village isn’t owned by Walmart.

    Buuuut, you’re still right. They’re absolutely a shit company. I was an assistant supervisor at Value Village a couple of decades ago. First, they’re 100% for profit but advertise in such a way that consumers believe they’re a charity. What they do is buy donations from charities by the pound. Any donations accepted at the store on behalf of a charity are paid at a drastically reduced rate, so of course they push HARD for customers to bring donations directly to the store.

    The shit cherry on top was the stores lying to charities about the quality of received goods to avoid paying. If clothes, for example, were soiled, they’d refuse to pay for the entire batch. Stores would find a few dirty shirts, claim the entire cart was crap, claw the money back, and sell the rest of the cart.

    The company makes a HUGE profit but pays their employees peanuts. Our head cashier had worked for the company for eight years and capped out at $7.25/hour in 2003, about $14 today. One year, they announced no raises, no reason given. My then girlfriend and I discovered the owners had purchased a cabin in Northern California for use by the c-suite douches. The store manager was pulling in $60k a year, plus bonus, in a very low cost of living area. Me? $8.25 per hour.

    What else? They incentivize under staffing by making a supervisor’s paltry bonuses tied to their staffing budget. Staying at budget meant no bonus. They had to come in under budget for any bonus, and the more “savings” the higher the bonus. I got chewed out when I first started scheduling because I used all the hours allotted in the budget. The store went from a shit hole to being fairly respectable but it would eat into my boss’s bonus. Her maximum annual bonus? $2.5k.

    So they may not be owned by Walmart, but they’re the Walmart of thrift stores. Fuck those guys.



  • I think the brave explorers are still here, they’re now just vastly outnumbered. The early Internet was full of those explorer types because they in particular tended to have enough interest to overcome the hurdles of getting on the Internet: namely computers being expensive and somewhat difficult to use. The early Internet was more accessible to intelligent, innovative users, and it reflected its user base. Many got online to explore and continued to explore and innovate once there.

    Now millions have a user-friendly computer in their pocket, so practically anyone, even flat earthers, is capable and intelligent enough to use the Internet. Most are attracted not by exploration but by access to specific services that have been advertised to them, especially social media. The Internet continues to reflect its user base, but the user base’s composition has… changed. Let’s just call it changed.