Personally, I don't want to eat beef which has been fattened up on corn, which is not part of the bovine diet, and non-US producers smelled out a market here.

This is where governments take each other to the WTO charging the other country has underwritten its lower costs through subsidies. Since almost all developed country governments do underwrite agriculture the mud flies fast. The USA with our farm supports of course. Others do it in different ways.

That would be more my sense of where the price would fall. Beef used to be more expensive in the US too. But then they found a way to substitute corn for grass to fatten 'em up quicker. Plus, corn is subsidized. Beef is certainly cheaper as a result, enabling Americans to eat more of it. But the consequences of this diet have also added to our ballooning health care costs.

Yeah. My concern is that I CAN find Texas grass-fed beef at local farms and from farms in the panhandle. SO why are we importing this stuff from Ozzie at 3 times the cost of the organic, free range, grass fed Texas grown beef?

I went to Wallmart once and I have never seen so many disgusting people, tacky people, fat stoopit losers lumbering around angling for their next feed. It was so terrifying I felt like I was in the US. I was saddened for weeks,

I can get grass-fed beef cheaply too which left those who raise them sitting pretty during the mad cow disease scare. The scare may have opened the door to imports of grass-fed beef from other countries despite the cost.

One of the main suppliers of beef in California is Harris Ranch which borders the interstate. The first time I drove by, back in 1990, I knew I would never touch the stuff. Picture thousands of cows standing in mud. You couldn't not notice, the smell is enough to cause any driver to potentially pass out.

Because he sure pulls a lot of numbers right out of his ass.

He proved absolutely nothing - but he did it in bold, so that counts for something, right?

Even better, he bolded, italicized, and blocked his favorite unsupported statements.

WE HAD BETTER LISTEN, RIGHT!?!!!

Now, I never mentioned Target, much less defended it or it's labor practices. Maybe someone else did.

Having actually done a lot of price comparisons at both stores, however, I can say this: "johnathanseer, you don't have the faintest idea WTF you are bloviating about."

On many occasions, I have found the equivalent item at higher quality and lower price at Target. That's a fact. As a matter of fact, except for the very cheapest, lowest quality clothes and a few stripped down items on the value aisle (that have no equivalents elsewhere), Target prices are actually lower overall!

For food, my local (unionized) Kroger beats em both - in quality and price, and Fiesta Mart (a local chain) beats Kroger - on price, at least.

The "limousine liberal" strawman you tried to push won't wash - especially since I strongly suspect you're a WM stockholder yourself who wouldn't be caught dead in the place - or you'd know that what I said was true about their bait and switch tactics bolstered by dishonest advertising. Either that, or you are one of the poor suckers to whom I referred in my post.

If WalMart started contracting tomorrow, and kept that up - vanishing completely in a decade, it would be a gigantic economic boon to the poor, most of whom have never had the time to do that comparison shopping and most of whom assume that because that ten pack of shoddy tube socks is ridiculously cheap, everything else is also - and they couldn't be more wrong.

Their labor policies are not only immoral and evil, they are illegal and they keep getting hit with suits and fines for those practices - sex discrimination, wage and hour violations (making workers work "off the clock"), knowing employment of illegals to cheaply clean their stores, and on and on and on.

I understand why you used ad hominum attack and emphasis instead of evidence. You have no evidence.

What you have done is let your alligator mouth overload your grasshopper ass.

Work on that.

Oh look, Salon's village idiot KateTex is gonna try to edjumicate someone. This should be good for laughs!

If this is your frame of reference, little wonder you nominated my post for most idiotic on this thread (while neglecting to mention the many other commenters who seem to agree that IKEA furniture is not built to last).

I ignored the other comments because they all clearly came from idiots, too. Yours was just breathtakingly stupid. Which, obviously, is what we've all come to expect from you.

For starters, those other comments came from lunkheads stupid enough to assume that inexpensive, mass produced furniture is somehow a new phenomena. It has in fact been around at least my entire life - I know, because I grew up in a neighborhood where every single house was packed full of the ugly, disintegrating crap.

Although they weren't packed quite as full of it as you are.

And if you'd bothered to read - or, perhaps I should say, were able to read and comprehend my post - I noted that I'd moved several times since purchasing my IKEA furniture back in '99. So not only has it held up well, but most of it has survived the best efforts of several movers to destroy it - always the most stressful event in the life of a piece of furniture. No "durable" furniture made from "real wood" would have fared any better.

Durable furniture made of real wood lasts far, far longer than 10 years and it can be refinished any number of times, including those times when movers ding it up.

Yes, or - like most furniture in America - it'll just be thrown out or donated to Goodwill when the owners move, die, or plain get sick of it. No doubt wasting a lot of expensive, slow growing and scarce hardwood in the process, hardwood that you can bet wasn't "sustainably harvested". Unlike my IKEA furniture, which IKEA at least makes an attempt to ensure is sustainable harvested, and is comprised almost entirely of inexpensive, fast-growing varieties of wood.

If everybody ran out and bought "quality" hardwood furniture, every last remaining hardwood twig on the planet would be gone in a week.

You really think IKEA goods are going to end up at Cooper-Hewitt or the Met seventy or so years from now, lacking hermetically sealed storage? Not likely, not at all.

There's actually an exhibition on right now at a museum in Stockholm of IKEA furniture from the past 50 years. Looks like there was one earlier in the year in Munich as well. Since IKEA itself never maintained such an archive, the Stockholm exhibition had to be populated largely with pieces donated by their individual owners. So yeah, not only has IKEA's stuff held up for 50 years now, but it's on display in a museum. The older it gets, the more museum attention it's gonna receive. We've seen this happen before with other mass manufactured goods.

I'd also add that IKEA's obsession with making everything flat-packable has dramatically reduced their carbon footprint relative to other furniture manufacturers. They can cram an obscene amount of furniture into a shipping container, and warehouse it in a very compact space. It also reduces the need for fuel-sucking delivery trucks. If all new furniture was IKEA furniture, it would probably reduce the overall ecological impact of furniture manufacturing, not increase it.