Confirmation, in the Wall Street Journal of all places, that you really aren't saving money by shopping at Wal-Mart, Costco or those other megastores that specialize in putting local, community-oriented Main Street stores out of business:
Consider this brain buster: You go to a discount warehouse and buy two dozen frozen bagels for, say, $9.60. Or you go to your local bagel shop and buy them for 75 cents apiece. Which one saves you more money?As far as I'm aware, no one has researched this question.
... But Priya Raghubir, a marketing professor at New York University, says there's a good deal of research that shows larger portion size is linked to higher consumption. "My personal opinion is that people actually spend more" in the end by going to Costco, she says.
Ms. Raghubir bases that partially on her own experience. Two years ago, she canceled her Costco membership because she was "disgusted" by how much she and her husband were spending there.
Michael Norton, a Harvard University marketing professor, co-authored a yet-to-be-published paper that found people buy more than they intend at Costco because they perce
I do some work with WakeupWalmart.com and I've been saying this for years -- Not only do you end up consuming/spending more, but the residual effects are extremely negative. What I mean by this is that when Walmarts move in, they put local stores out business, drive down wages and wreck the local environment -- The community might save a penny or two in the short term but obviously looses in the long term.
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