http://ourvaluedcustomers.blogspot.com/

Anyone seen this ? Pretty funny quotes overheard in a comic store.

mbassoc2003 wrote:
Similar here in the UK.
Nutters and people who live on benefits mostly.
The put them mostly in amongst social housing projects.

The Wal-Mart I live closest to is frequented mostly by middle-class individuals.  However I live near enough to a large expressway that you get all kinds of people come in the store at any given time.  A few miles away is an affluent upper class neighborhood and there is a Wal-Mart smack dab in the middle of it.  The people that shop there are mostly professional middle to upper class individuals.  However, the employees are the same no matter where you go.  I would rather shop at Target or a regular "grocery" store but we save on the average 20 dollars per trip by going to Wal-Mart.  

By the way....my wife and I went to see Tron Legacy this morning.  This is the same woman who hates the original Tron movie with a passion.  She wont sit in the same room with me if I am watching it and usually gags when I talk about it.  We both loved it.  The story is pretty good.  The FX are unbelievable.  And even though we originally didnt want to see it in 3D (we went to see Avatar in 3D and both got headaches as a result) it was really the perfect movie for it.  Only a couple of drawbacks for me.  The Daft Punk soundtrack, which was excellent, was so overpowering at times that you couldnt really hear what some of the characters were saying during important conversations.  And no matter how good the CGI is, there is just no way to make a CGI character look 100% human.  The 35 year old Jeff Bridges has a funny way of talking (if youve seen the trailer you know what I mean).  I wish it had been a bit longer and explained a bit more backstory but I hear there will be a third movie so maybe there will be more of the story revealed then.

So even if you arent a fan of the first movie, odds are you will like this one.

mbassoc2003 wrote:
Similar here in the UK.
Nutters and people who live on benefits mostly.
The put them mostly in amongst social housing projects.

um ian, not everyone on benefits are bad friend....

some dont have any choice and try not to be (myself included for a good while recently)

Al

Book recommendation, tangentially related to our hobby:
"Priceless," by Robert K. Wittman.

Wittman is a former FBI agent who specialized in investigating art theft and crime within the collectible community.  The book is his memoir of some cases he worked tracking down artifacts and stolen high end paintings. One particularly interesting case involved two con artist hosts from Antiques Roadshow (the tv program) who used their position and fame to solicit appraisals. They would lowball appraise civil war memorabilia for sellers then buy from those sellers, only to turn it around at a hefty profit.  Moral of the story don't sell to your appraiser!

lawrenson wrote:Hi,

Asdas are fairly middle-ish supermarkets.

Lidl, Aldi, Morrisons and Somerfields are a lot more down-market.

Cheers,
Malc

I guess it depends on where you live.  I would have put Asdas in the same league as Morrisons.  Somerfield have gone bust and are now mostly Co-ops.

Anyway, you should be shopping at Waitrose.

I'm working on a new Waitrose building atm, and it's in a neighbourhood where all the locals objected to all the other superstores until Waitrose became to supermarket to take the proposed site. The neighbourhood like to think of themselves as Glasgow's new upper middle class.

It'd be really funny if once the building was up, Waitrose sold their lease to Asda or Aldi or one of the other bottom feeders.

In Scotland we had Presto and Wm Lows.
Both were taken over by Safeways, who then sold some of the sites to Co-op ( or The Co-operative as they like to be known now). Safeways was subsequently taken over by Morrisons, and The Co-operative took over, were taken over by, or merged with Somerfields and Spar. There was also a company called Kwiksave which seemed to have gone bust.

So now we have Asda, Aldi, and Lidl forming the real bottom feaders in the supermarket business, The Co-operative who trade under a variety of names including Spar and Somerfields and feed the bottom end of the local smaller stored, Morrisons and Tescos and Sainsburys, who in Scotland seem to have staked out the middle ground in about that order, and Marks & Spencer and Waitrose who like to think they are better than the rest, but who knows to what degree. Waitrose certainly has very little foothold north of the border, and M&S seems to be pegged at or about the same socio-economic level as Sainsburys.

I have noticed bias towards one store or another as I've moved around the country, but I can only assume that is down to one store or other having acquired real estate in a takeover and deciding to make do.

Obviously, Walmart stores carry some sort of reputation in other parts of the US that does not match their Pacific Northwest image.

Walmart is just another superstore in the Northwest.  They are generally located outside of the major urban areas, where they dominate regional sales.  The main complaint against Walmart is that they undercut the local merchants and drive them out of business.

Of course you see wierd people in Walmart.  There are wierd people everywhere, but no one I know talks about the people who shop there being lowlife.

It is interesting to see things through UK eyes on the Acaeum from time to time.  We don't tend to have the same class consciousness that is expressed by our Brits.   We (or at least I, personally) don't regard everyone who needs government help to be a leech on society.  Rather, I see people who have needs that we all help to meet.  There must be some British spin on the issue that is not immediately visible to American eyes.

There have been a couple of times I have received unemployment compensation.  I could not (and cannot) figure out why I was supposed to apologize for the government giving me back the money I paid into the system.  Since then, I have paid back much more into the system than I ever took out.  That's why we have the system in the first place.

In the US, we have something called "food stamps."  The term is somewhat archaic, since we no longer have actual stamps.  I didn't see why I should apologize for using food stamps to feed my family...I paid for them, never expecting to need them, and I have paid more into the system than I took out.   Now, I decline to judge others who need them.