I was just going to post something on that book. Not sure I’d try it.
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More to be able to say you did, we did our long trips with a coleman stove on hand for 3,000mi.
Longest trips we went on when i was a kid were NYC-MIAMI. we traveled on the Silver Meteor, and ate cooked meals in the dining car.
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We had a little portable charcoal stove so we’d stop at parks regularly. Usually we would head west to Yellowstone, glacier, or Colorado, or north to Canada, or east to dc or penn. never went south. We traveled with grandma though so that made some difference. Grandma never
touched alcohol, but must have been 1954, hotter than heck, we stopped at a road side place in the black hills. She drank a full bottle of beer. Never saw that before or since. Lived to be 99 though so can’t knock it.
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My mother didn’t drink booze either, but would down a beer in no time if it was really hot. Beer, such a delightful beverage imo, is a very good thirst quencher when it is really hot. You kids out there less than 21, ignore the above comment … lol …
I don’t drink beer but after spending the day detailing the car, a bottle of mikes hard lemonade hits the spot.
Just to change the subject, I read a report that Walmart is in trouble with increasing losses and closing stores. The thing is they have to carry the stuff that people want, not this cheap China crap. Half the stores are filled with Chinese dry goods. I remember when the signs throughout said made in USA. Two words as they say. Maybe back to sams original plan.
At any rate I use meguiars professional line so just trying to replenish my stock, and four stores do not carry synthetic sealant. Some don’t carry the professional line at all and others just the basic. I’d gladly buy local instead of on line, but they have to carry it. It wasn’t that long ago when they would have a whole shelf. Just a rant.
You want Chinese crap than go to any Bass Pro Shop. It’s extremely difficult to find something made in the USA there. I’d LOVE to just buy Made In America products. Tougher and tougher to find. We have a Army/Navy store not too far away. Walked in there the other day. Again well over the half the stuff I looked at was made in China or India.
Back in the '70s, I used to shop occasionally in a store in Westfield, NJ, whose name was Made in America.
By the late '70s, products that were not “made in America” began to appear, and by the early '80s they were selling only merchandise made overseas–despite the name above their entrance. I guess that I wasn’t the only customer to see the contradiction because w/in a few years they shut down their store.
That’s how tankers in the Army heat up their MREs. With Abrams’ turbine it’s especially fast.
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Or tanks of hot water and never knew what you were getting. Just grab the green can sonny and move along.
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Frankly, I have a different take on Sam Walton. He wasn’t the warm fuzzy altruistic businessman that myth has made him out to be.
In 1969-1970 he still had only two small Wal-Mart stores, the original in Bentonville, AR and a second store in Rogers, AR. He hadn’t gone with a public stock offering yet to build his brand empire.
Already at that early time he was beginning to stock cheap goods from China, cheap in both price and quality, although his two stores still stocked a higher percentage of domestic sourced merchandise than now.
He also must have had a paid agreement with the local small town newspapers because whenever a competing store such as Otasco or Western Auto ran a sale ad in the paper by “coincidence” Wal-Mart had an ad at the same time for the exact same type of items (tires, etc) priced significantly below the competition’s advertised sale price. Consistently. Specific to the exact items. Every time.
Full disclosure: my dad had the Otasco franchise store in Rogers, AR for a year and a half in 1969-1970.
In the 1980s, a relative worked for a computer industrial hardware/software product provider. His bosses sent him to get their comany’s foot in the door with Wal-Mart. He arrived for his appointment to be left alone in a small room for nearly an hour, then when the Wal-Mart exec finally entered it was to demand that the computer company do business exclusively with Wal-Mart, drop all other clients, and sell to Wal-Mart at Wal-Mart’s demand contract price with no negotiation.
In the 1990s a friend worked for a small product quality testing company that made the mistake of doing business with Wal-Mart on those type of terms. Wal-Mart was their only customer who used them until another small vendor was dumb enough to accept those terms and my friend’s employer was dumped on one day’s notice despite having provided services according to WM’s price demands with no negotiation allowed. My friend and her fellow workers were left suddenly unemployed. Vendors do business with Wal-Mart at their peril. Obviously many do, believing the risk worth the business volume of supplying WM. And many make darn good money doing so.
So yes, out of neccessity, I sometimes have shopped at and still occasionally shop at Walmart, but generally prefer to find locally owned businesses to shop at. Prime example, I buy tires for my cars at my locally owned independent mechanic. The prices are competitive, the service excellent, and the tire warranties and ongoing service exemplary.
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On a side note about made in America products. there are a lot of US companies out there that sell Made in America products that are actually made in China. Or they get the parts from China and assemble it in the US.
Yeah no love lost for the guy. I try to stay out of there. There are only a few items I really buy there. What I dislike is they take on product lines to the exclusion of other brands. So they’ll have a big display of one one brand, and it usually is not what I have been using for 30 years. Otoh there just aren’t a lot of other options. Target is equally screwed up and many people refuse to shop there because of their culture. I don’t see anyone else really putting a new marketing scheme together though to compete.
What amazes me though half the store is clothing. So if you took that out, what is left would be very small samplings of auto supplies, sporting goods, paint, etc. and if you took the groceries out, the whole store would be the size of a drug store. So I suppose they make their money on those two items but can’t understand how it could be very profitable. Groceries have a terrible profit margin.
OK , I know that it easy to bash Walmart . But like any retail business not all stores are the same . Our town of 25000 the store is clean , has many long term employees and has a Pharmacy that is about as well run as possible.
That’s why you wrap your lunch in aluminum foil and let it cook on the exhaust manifold while you drive.
Wasn’t Westfield where John List was from?
Yes, indeed, that toney town was where that Bible Thumper hailed from.
The most ironic part of the whole sad saga of him killing his wife, his kids and his mother because of his financial woes was that his mansion–which he never should have bought in the first place–had a ballroom whose huge ceiling contained a Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass mural. If he had only had the sense to sell that virtually priceless artifact, his financial problems would have been over. Instead, he “heard God telling him to kill his entire family”.
Thankfully, he was eventually captured as a result of the America’s Most Wanted TV show, and he died in NJ’s maximum security state prison many years ago. Having to be incarcerated in a prison that dated back to the 1830s hopefully provided sufficient punishment every day until he finally expired.
My biggest disappointment was chickens could be grown in the US, sent to china for processing and still be sold as US. I do not trust that system .
After broasting a few thousand of them, I kinda lost my appetite for chicken anyway.