I was just reading this article on how there are apparently hundreds of Starbucks stores that are closing down due to them being unprofitable. At the end of the article there was sure an interesting contrast to the situation where they state that investors are all happy yet for the economy it is gloomy as thousands of jobs will be lost.

Kind of interesting when you think about it as in one sense I guess it’s true about the lost jobs and all. At the same time, the economy also relies on investors too to create new business which means they need their money. All about balance I suppose.

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In recent news here it appears that Walmart has finally found a location to open up a store in the Vancouver area. The company tried to open up a store here before with a lot of people objecting to it as they felt it would harm the local community such as an increase of air pollution and the possibility of small businesses being forced to close.

It was announced recently that they are going to be taking over the building of an existing Costco wholesale business at Grandview Hwy as the company is planning to relocate to a different location. The Walmart store is set to open sometime near 2009 and is suppose to create hundreds of new jobs. People can’t really argue about the location here either now as it is a busy commercial area as it is.

What is really interesting to me is that just a few blocks away from this location is a supermarket called The Real Canadian Superstore that has been there for ages and is where I normally shop a lot. I’m one of those people who have read the stories on how Walmarts in the US have been able to put companies like these out of business as everyone wants everything cheaper. As a result, it almost becomes as if Walmart is the economy afterwards as people work and purchase goods from it with no one else to really go to.

I’m personally one of the more open minded people in this situation though. I can definitely see how this could have a negative impact as while I’m sure it will enable a lot of people to buy goods for cheaper, in the long run a company with that much control can pretty much dictate things such as wage standards or making it very difficult for local suppliers to compete with others who use cheaper labor.

At the same time, I can’t deny that this has got to be one of the most prolific examples of capitalism as they pretty much earned their success from ground up. If you think about it, they are only really giving what the majority of people want as in the end the consumers control who comes out at the top.

Honestly though, they do have Walmart stores in other cities here within the province and price wise it seems to be on par with a lot of other businesses. Should be interesting to see how this develops.

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What a gloomy view this was on the front page of the newspaper today about the crash on Monday as you can see here particularly the Lululemon stock dropping by 22.7%:

Seems like an event that would have caused a lot of people to curl up considering the billions of dollars in losses. I read that there was suppose to be some kind of new announcement of a bigger rate cut from the bank of Canada later today in response to all this.

Way to test people’s will power when it comes to investing huh?

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