General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhen will Walmart discover how profitable churches are, and tax free. I could see
Walmart opening up a bunch of churches as an adjunct to Walmart, Inc. It could attract a significant amount of business to adjoining facilities.
arcane1
(38,613 posts)jmowreader
(50,562 posts)This is the strange thing about the Christian booksellers of America: they see themselves as ministries, but on the day when ministries are most active and when Christian literature sells best--Sunday--they're all closed. Walmart, OTOH, is open 24 hours a day, 363 days a year.
I'm still waiting for Walmart to discover the massive profits that could be had by putting shower facilities in their stores. Go past any Walmart in America during the summer months, and you are almost certain to see RVs in the parking lot. This is because Walmart has inadvertently become the biggest campground in America. If they put showers, RV dumps and other camper-friendly features in their stores, they'd get business.
LeftofObama
(4,243 posts)Every truck driver knows that if there isn't a truck stop close by, or if they are full, you can always park at Wal Mart. I've often said Wal Mart's are fast becoming truck stops.
jmowreader
(50,562 posts)They just recently built a Walmart in the Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, area. (Actually, they built it in Hayden as kind of a fuck-you to the mayor-for-life, a quite decent gentleman who just happens to own a 22-store chain of supermarkets in three states.) On the roads outside of Walmart there are lots of "no truck access" signs, but go past there any time of day or night and there's at least one truck sitting in the parking lot.
RKP5637
(67,112 posts)truebluegreen
(9,033 posts)Arctic Dave
(13,812 posts)They can launder their profits through the church.
Electric Monk
(13,869 posts)RKP5637
(67,112 posts)BlueJazz
(25,348 posts)RKP5637
(67,112 posts)BlueJazz
(25,348 posts)rainin
(3,011 posts)Walmart (or any 1%er who would like to capture all that money) could do the following:
1. Take over the news cycle and start disparaging everything that churches are doing. Say they are ineffective, that the preachers are doing a poor job of fulfilling the mission of religion.
2. Open charter churches that are run by highly paid administrators and unpaid volunteers.
3. Nationalize the church standards so everyone gets the same message.
4. Require some tax for local churches that eventually forces them to close.
5. Extract money from the congregation by making tithing a law.
Done. All the church money is safely in the hands of the owners.
RKP5637
(67,112 posts)distributor. The guy was as far from religious as one could get. He said there's nothing better than a flock like the religious to sell your goods into, it's a ready made market. Then, when New Age came along, he sold into that market too. He just kept targeting the flocks as a distributor to sell into their desires. I have no idea what he's doing now.
truebluegreen
(9,033 posts)Or maybe not. Billionaires are too greedy to retire.