What is Digg?169 Comments
- ragtag, on 10/12/2007, -3/+18WHEN will people stop supporting proprietary lawnmowers?! Open grass cutting standards are the way.
- HarryBauzonia, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7When I buy paper clips, I look for the cheapest price. When I buy tools ( a lawn mower is a tool), I buy the highest quality item that's within my budget.
Walmart isn't evil; I buy paper clips and other throwaway items there. But when I'm looking for quality stuff I go somewhere else or make it myself. - Trjn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8"If you dig(g) deep enough on Snappers web site, you'll find they use Briggs and Stratton engines. Like most mowers. Union groupies have convinced the unthinking that you have to pay higher prices for the same thing. Wal-Mart will end up selling lots and lots of Briggs and Stratton mowers, just not the ones who think their name makes Briggs and Stratton engines somehow better."
But if you dig deep enough through the article, then you'll find out that Briggs and Stratton bought out Snapper in 2004.
Oh, and the quality of the motor is defined by the combination of the quality of all the components and the stringent quality control. Pretty much like most things, sure if one major component is generic then you would assume that they might as well all be the same, but would you say that two computers, both of which share the same high end processors and motherboards, but one has low end everything else, whilst the other has high end everything else, which one is going to perform better?
Which one is likely to last longer because various components aren't failing (pretending that with computers you cannot easily swap things like the RAM, video card, HDD, etc).
This doesn't just apply to lawn mowers.
Personally, I'm of the view that if you have the option between a well made high end product and a poorly made low/mid end range product that does the same thing, you get the high end product because it will last longer.
Tis a shame that I'm a college student working at Burger King, so I don't have that option, but the point remains. - shiftless, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7I love everyone that blames WalMart for its workers not being able to afford healthcare.
Hell, I can't afford healthcare in this country. WalMart isn't the problem!
Also, WalMart doesn't shut down businesses. It's the community that does. The community has the power to help Main Street businesses (has happened where I live and all small town businesses are still open for years) and if it chooses not to the WalMart will dominate. - indydrew, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5For those of you that care to be informed on the subject.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/view/
Frontline did a great piece on Wal-Mart, it really will change the way you look at this company and the effect it has on America. If you still believe Wal-Mart is good for America after watching this you are lost. - Rekkart, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Unlike most Digg readers, I am a homeowner and have a decent sized lawn that I like to mow myself. I'll seriously consider Snapper when I make my next lawnmower purchase. Right now I have a Toro that is working just fine. I always like a company that has high quality standards and I'm willing to consider paying more when I know this is how the company does business.
- q3ctf4, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4To the person who said "Walmart is good for America", I suggest you check this out:
http://www.jibjab.com/Home.aspx (click on the link: bigbox mart).
It's a flash cartoon on Walmart that is real funny. What I find fascinating from this cartoon is that it tells it just like it is! - dizzyd_23, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Same thing happened with dippin dots, the freeze dried ice cream. wal-mart wanted to put a dippin dots in every super wal-mart, but they said no.
- aarondavis, on 10/12/2007, -1/+430% higher price, 100% higher quality
- user1010, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6great advertisement for Snapper. Lets keep things straight; Snapper exists solely to make a profit. Walmart exists solely to make a profit. Many of the comments here seem as if Snapper is the humble under-dog on the consumers side fighting a corporate giant...
the American public needs to realize that Globilization is ocurring, wether it be through mega-stores or software offshoring...it will continue to happen. we cannot stop it..... - Machine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I think it's time to teach the red-neck Wal-Mart lovers a new word...
Monopsony
A monopsony is a market with only one buyer facing many sellers. It's the opposite of a monopoly, in which there is only one seller facing many buyers.
Since Wal-Mart is the biggest buyer of many manufactured products, it gets to set the price of the goods that it wants to buy, which forces the sellers to change their manufacturing techniques, offshore, or (in some cases) go out of business. Because of Wal-Mart, there are no Levi Jeans manufactured in the United States anymore.
Snapper was fortunate that it could sell 80% of it's mowers to other buyers.
I think Wal-Mart shoppers DO get it... they either don't care... or they equate Wal-Mart haters with the left-wing intellectual elite. - tech70a, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4A few comments...
First of all, Briggs and Stratton owns Snapper. Or... I should say that Simplicity is owned by B&S, and Simplicity owns Snapper.
Secondly, a $99 lawnmower is great if you are a person who knows how to adjust carburetors and tweak magnetic-induction ignition systems. Get a higher-quality B&S engine and - believe me - it will last a lot longer, have fewer problems, and will run more efficiently.
Lastly I want to mention that Snapper IS one of those smaller companies who care about their clients. No - they aren't going to give them away - we know that money is the name of the game. But they also know that if you build a high quality machine you will build a good reputation... and that's what keept the folks coming back for more. It's too bad Toro and (most sadly) Troy Bilt ended up selling out to cheapness. - bigboy101011, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4This is the smartest business man in the world.
When I get a lawn to mow, i'll buy a snapper. - diggermike, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I am even more proud of the Snapper in my shed that is still running as well today as it did when I bought it new six years ago
- nekoewen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Which is more annoying: the anti-Wal-Mart stuff or the anti-anti-Wall-Mart stuff?
- DisposableRob, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"Also, have you been to every single wal-mart in America? Maybe the one or two that you've been in aren't the cleanest in the world, who knows. You can't judge a $190Billion dollar company by the two stores you've visited before, can you?"
I've been to Wal-marts in at 8 states and they all pretty much look like ass. - Machine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Levi Strauss & Co sells it's jean at Wal-Mart under the Signature label.
Wal-Mart is successful but at a cost to the rest of us. I could point you towards studies and numbers, but you'll probably call them ***** unless they come from a source you trust, so I won't bother.
You've obviously never met any real liberals nebunezzar. A hippie is a social construct that hasn't existed in 35+ years... before my time. Neo-hippies seem to be all about music, fashion, and pot. I have better things to do that be a cultural stereotype.
When it comes to Wal-Mart, I'm looking at the big picture vs. immediate gratification.
I grew up in a small city that was slowly dying economically when a Wal-Mart was built near it about 10 years ago. Every time I visit my parents, I see more and more long-time family business... some of them going back 100 years... bankrupt. Unemployment has gone up, as has crime. Property values are plummeting since no one wants to move into an economically depressed area.
My own parents business (a bakery) has declined considerably since Wal-Mart moved in... it sells baked goods... and they're going to probably have to shut down a business that has operated profitably for close to 30 years. They were going to retire soon anyway, but were looking forward to passing the business down to one of my sisters. Now they can't and she's probably going to move away since there's no point to staying there anymore.
Wal-Mart isn't the first big-box store to enter the area... in the early 1990s Media Play built a huge store and began to sell CDs and VHS at a considerable discount... they had a huge selection and within a year or so, pretty much all the mom-and-pop music stores disappeared... and then the prices went way up and the selection declined considerably.
Wal-Mart is selling groceries, gasoline, and was about to start buy and operate their own banks... until Greenspan put a halt to those plans. I'm all for businesses being successful, but Wal-Mart has taken things to dangerous extremes. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -9/+11But wait, I thought Walmart was forcing everyone to sell there! How can he say no? Walmart steals choice and destroys small towns by the gross every day. I don't buy this story.
I would have killed to have a Walmart nearby when I was growing up. If you have the luxury of shopping where you want and paying extra if you like, kudos to you. But don't try to restrict others from buying where they choose because Walmart doesn't fit with your worldview. For now, at least, we can do as we please, but I'm sure our lefty busybodies will keep up their good fight to restrict our choices, our pleasures, and growth.
And if you think overpriced independent stores are the pinnacle of humanity, feel free to shop there, but it doesn't make you not an idiot. - orsoihaveheard, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Dugg--many of you miss the point of the article. Not that Snapper has to sell to Wal-Mart, but that the promise of retailing across Wal-Mart's ever-expanding footprint has an seductive pull to its vendors. This leads some firms to make short-sighted strategic choices.
Wal-Mart cuts both ways. Even though everything's completely polar on the internet, gray areas still exist. Wal-Mart forces commoditization and efficiency all throughout the supply change. What most American's don't realize is that they want commodity pricing with (relative) luxury quality. Like all things, we want the world, we just don't want to actually pay for it.
So Wal-Mart definitely helps cut out the fat in the system, it puts products on shelves at more affordable pricings. However, a lot of Americans, good-intentioned and hard-working Americans, are the actual fat in the system. You get cheap products but you also get pressure on Wal-Mart's suppliers--which at this point, as the eighth largest economy in the world, is pretty much anyone in consumer products--their supplier's absolutely must consider leveraging global wage discrepencies to remove cost from the system. Doing so makes goods cheaper at the register. You can naturally conclude what it does to on-shore manufacturing.
Like most things in America these days, it's awesome irony. Wal-Mart's most loyal customers are the blue-collar, lesser-educated folks who need the non-retail/services employment that Wal-Mart is grinding away and pushing offshore. Just like these people vote against their wallet, they also spend against it. Thankfully, it's cultural Darwinism. So for that reason, Wal-Mart's great for America! - blackjack75, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Have you ever been in a Walmart? Everyone looks all retarded. "
Well, I have never been a walmart (obviously since they don't exist in my country)... but if everyone looked retarded and you were there to see it, how did you think you looked? - spectre_25gt, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4"I'm going to look at Snapper when my mower dies!"
Why wait? There's perfectly good snapper all over the net! - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Hey this is odd, my dad always used to buy snappers and ONLY snappers for his landscaping bussiness, but recently with the landescaping bussiness boom and little money he could only afford a maury or something of that sort which just died...after only 1 year or two of working.
- DisposableRob, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"go ahead, you schmucks can shop at your fancy department stores and pay 30% more for the same ***** I buy at Walmart..."
posted by user1010
Except you didn't get the point of the article. If you spend more somewhere else for a higher quality item, you actually get more value because you'll end up spending less in the long term. - tmiller51, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Snapper ranks dead last in Consumer Report's "most frequent repairs" list (as in it needs the most).
- Tekmazter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2To me this seems like an easy choice for Snapper. If a company wants to be known as a highend mower company, then not selling throught WalMart is an obvious choice. People don't go to Hyundai to buy a BMW and associating you name with that of WalMart seems to take away any luster that a previously touted name may have had.
- theblooms, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Anyone who says Snapper is crap just doesn't get it. Like a previous poster said, I own my own house with a decent yard, (1/3rd acre, wish it was 7 acres!) anyway, I have a 1977 (older than probably 75% of the readers of this site!) Snapper Comet with the handle bars. To this day, it will pop a wheelie when I dump the clutch. With my 245 lb fat ass on it! An 8 hp Tecumseh. No other mower will do that. Period. Plus, it is SUPER simple to maintain. And parts are cheap and readily available if something does go wrong. I can change the clutch wheel in like 30 minutes tops. While drinking a beer taking my time.
Buy a Snapper. It will last FOREVER. - indydrew, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3The Frontline piece is far from being biased for or against Wal-Mart. It looks at the story from the pro, and anti Wal-Mart view. To judge it without seeing it is closed minded and deflates anything you have to say on the subject. On another note to turn this into some political argument is nothing less than sad.
- thecoolestcow, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4I've never been to a Wal-Mart in my life.
- fortezza, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3That's the point. If you read the article, it was saying that Wal-Mart sells products so cheaply, that if it breaks, you can just buy a new one. If you pay $100 now and have to buy one in two years again...That'll still only be another $100. Or if you get brand 'b' for $400, you'll still have to replace it in 4 years(for example), so it doesn't matter.
Yep. And since you have to make more to keep replacing the broken ones, you consume more natural resources which deprives future generations of them. In addition, you through more away which increases polution and landfills, etc. Not to mention the waste related to the overhead of all that extra manufacturing and throwing away, which could be better spent, IMHO.
On the society level, it teaches people that lower standards are ok, and it spreads out from manufacturing to other areas, such as politics, manners, science, etc, basically pulling everything else down with it, until the U.S. is a backwards cesspool compared to nations that we once laughed at, who will then be our superiors.
Now do you get it?
Lets get high standards for high quality items that demand higher prices which tranlater into higher wages for employees and higher standards of living for us all. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3This is why Apple computers are not sold at Wal*Mart. They cheapen the product.
- euth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1We have a Snapper that's over 10 years old that we still use to mow our lawn. We've sharpened the blade several times, but other than that, we haven't taken any extraordinary measures to maintain it.
Snapper makes quality mowers. - PlainJoe, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Great Digg! I'm going to buy a Snapper, now all I needs a lawn.
Anyone seen this movie yet?
http://www.walmartmovie.com/ - pjtip, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You guys don't seem to get it. While other retailers figure the costs of healthcare into the price of their products, Wal-Mart dumps the healthcare costs onto the state. I don't shop there and I don't want my taxes going to support your habit of buying cheap crap.
- tonage, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Snapper ranks dead last in Consumer Report's "most frequent repairs" list (as in it needs the most).
WalMart is too good for Snapper anyway. - Genius16, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4man, was anyone else thinking what im thinking? this writer needs to get to the point quicker. i'm a writer myself, and jeebus, history lessons in writing are good to get the reader emotionally intrested in the piece, but this was too far out.
- Savetechtv, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I love WalMart sooo much. Everywhere I look, there something soo cheap that I have to buy it.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I live in the city and don't have a yard, otherwise I'd buy a snapper
- Machine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1nebunezzar... I'm not mad at you in particular... I'm NOT an environmental extremist vegan. I DO however think that we need some controls on big businesses.
I don't think it's possible for my hometown to make a comeback... my parents will probably retire soon and they'll be OK because they made most of their money pre-Wal-Mart. I haven't lived there in years because the best paying job I could find there paid about $18,000 a year... not enough to do much more than survive really... and I have a college degree! Almost all of my friends have left as well. I live in the Northwest now, work for a non-profit children's charity, and do well enough. I like where I live, but I wish I wasn't forced to move.
Wal-Mart does have banks in some of their stores, that's true... but they tend to be branches of local banks that Wal-Mart doesn't own. It was trying to start and OWN a bank outright... and once a corporation can borrow money from itself... there's all sorts of potential for abuse. - tonage, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1If you are an industrial worker in America, don't shop at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is just one more reason your jobs are leaving the country. Say NO to cheap imported goods!
Yea, jobs leaving the country have nothing to do with spoiled workers and unions running up wages to the point where we all just end up paying more for everything does it? - kennon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2we don't want another walmart here
- CyBrShRk, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Kudos to Snapper. Wal-Mart sucks! Sell low-end to mediocre products in some of the filthiest stores I have ever seen. Plus all the stock out in the aisles...it's horrible. A new WallyWorld was built close and open for only about 3-4 months...it's a pig sty already. And does anyone notice that 60-70% of the people shopping at Wallyworld clearly look unintelligent, 30-40% have bad teeth and 80-90% wear horrific NASCAR clothing.
- DierEel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Good for him! I cannot stand Wal-Mart. Most of the products sold there are lower quality items that are sold in bulk. I live in McDonough, Georgia where the Snapper factory is located. There is a lot of pride that goes into these mowers and it shows in the quality of the product. This is what good business is all about - sticking to your values and not selling out to the almighty Dollar.
- stonebear, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4I think the new “business model” has our good jobs, which would have allowed us to pay for a quality, American made lawnmower such as a Snapper, as well as a home with a lawn to mow at all, being outsourced to China, forcing us to get low paying jobs in the “service sector,” which will only allow the purchase of cheap, Chinese made lawn mowers. Losing sales to this cycle, Snapper is forced to outsource it’s lawnmower production to China so it can compete by providing it’s own reduced quality, Chinese lawn care products, which are so in demand now they are all that most Americans can afford.
So, while you want to buy an American made lawnmower, when and if you get a lawn to mow (assuming your low paying, “service sector” job will allow you move out of that converted garage rental), chances are pretty good you will HAVE to go for that inexpensive made-in-China model, whether you like it or not, because that’s all you can afford AND that’s all you will find for sale anyway.
Welcome to the Cultural Revolution, er... I mean new American “business model.” - diggdeeznutz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..............that put me to sleep. I will stick to my Craftsman.
- nebunezzar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Arvest Bank is owned by the Walton family if I'm not mistaken, so in a sense, Walmart does have a bank. It's not very big or influential though, I'd say.
- hwood, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1When my Craftsman dies I'll get myself a Snapper.
I like the fact that he thought long term instead of a quick buck.
I wish more American companies thought this way. - nebunezzar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't remember levis being sold in Wal-Marts. I got all mine elsewhere, including a levi store. Maybe a while back, but I don't really care since I don't buy clothes at Wal-Mart.
...and since when are left-wingers "intellectual elite?" I thought they were just hippies or neo-hippies who spout out made up numbers and declare the successful as evil. :D - Sage-Tech, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That's awesome! Hurray for Snapper! I forgot just how good of a magazine Fast-Company was. I'll have to subscribe again.
- buryme, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Now, at the price I'm selling to you today, I'm not making any money on it. And if we do what you want next year, I'll lose money."
Wow, Wier is a genius! He wasn't making any money selling his product at Wal-Mart, so he decided to say no, despite the fact that he would start losing money this year. Wow, he really knows how to handle his business, incredible! Where does such amazing wisdom come from?
Wal-mart has never been a successful channel for high quality products, what's the big deal? Snapper never should have gotten involved with Wal-mart in the first place... - adml_shake, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Snappers are crap, always have been"
The 35 year old one sitting in my garage that I still use begs to differ. -
Show 51 - 100 of 164 discussions
The Digg Toolbar for Firefox lets you Digg, submit content, and keep track of Digg even when you're not on the Digg site. Download the official 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is