For any product, I can find a range of quality trading off with price. For most of my everyday shopping, I like Walmart just fine. But there are times when I will choose to pay more for the special-occasion meal, the premium bath towels, the business-class upgrade, the Apple smartphone. The choice is mine, and I feel no shame whatever in shopping either the big box or the special spot. I'm saving tons of money, and I can always find the quality I really need.

This author would like the whole economy to be run like our US healthcare system: all our buying decisions made for us by people like herself, self-selected to lord over us while picking our pockets. Perhaps she can afford the dreamworld she writes about. I can't.

Why thank you! That's one of the nicest things anyone's said to me in a long time, and it is tremendously appreciated. Suitable for framing, even! Thank you...just...thank you.

And this may be the most important point of all. Thank you and a loud and heartfelt Amen!

with the fact that the majority of Americans are overweight which = extremely lazy, Wal-mart and IKEA make it EASY for us Americans to buy crap.

Going out and taking the time to research and go from store to store to find good quality products, well we're all just too damn lazy to do that

No, you're not. The last word that I could associate with American people is lazy. Try with workoholic, next time.

You don't have time to go from store to store because:

- You slave yourselves to work so there is no time to buy. You work more hours than Japan. Many of you have two jobs. European people have a lot more time so they have the time to buy well. I knew an American man who bought his clothes at Wal-mart at 2 a.m because it was the only time he has left (he worked two jobs to pay child-support).

- Your cities are insanely huge. In Europe, I have everything I need to buy daily so close to my home that I can walk and finish my purchases in one hour or less (by walking). In America, I had to drive 10 miles every time I go to a different store.

This is why you are so overweight. You don't have time to cook or to go to a healthy restaurant during the thirty minutes you have for lunch. In Europe we have one hour and (healthy and affordable) restaurants are far closer. So in America you have to rush to the McDonalds to eat some crap, you have to rushing to Wal-mart to buy some crap and you are rushing and in contact with crap everywhere.

They make what we buy. We have the leaders we elected. We're getting exactly what we want. Don't blame the burgers, chips, and ice cream for making us fat; just stop eating it.

We have the power. We have the responsiblity.

Blaming others for your failures is cowardly and will never result in improvements.

I like Ikea. I like to think that the fake birch surface is the real thing rather than a lid for ground-up Estonian birch. But birch regenerates pretty fast, so what-the-hey? Wish Ikea would hire more than 11 Swedish forestry cops but I also wish they would sell more frozen lingonberries. Bottom line, Ms. Zacharek, I can't afford real wood stuff; just like most people in the Midwest couldn't afford televisons sold by the local TV/electronix store. The local store needed the extra profit to stay in business, so most locals had to pay it to keep up. Result: the ubiquitous small-town class pyramid--only 10% of the families at the top could afford the higher prices charged by the local merchants. Then Walmart came along. . .and now the luxuries once available to a few are now affordable to more. The apex of the small-town economic pyramid has begun to melt away. Is that a good thing? Sure is if your small-town mom wants to enjoy a big flat-screen television---or needs OTC meds in the middle of the night. Is it bad for the overall economy? Maybe, but how do you quantify the better lifestyle afforded small-town America--in return, of course, for their original down-town? It's all about the tradeoff. And there's ALWAYS a tradeoff.

I have grown sick and tired of the anti-globalist nonsense that one only hears from out-of-work hippies who have done nothing in their lives except attend college for six to eight years, and travel from one G-8 summit to the next so that they can violently protest that the eeeevvvvviiiillllllllllll corporations are taking advantage of the poor little people who they are exploiting in under developed nations for their cheap labor. The fact of the matter is that Americans--at least the responsible ones who actually work for a living, unlike most of the dirty unwashed hippies on the left who live off of their welfare or unemployment checks that I, as a tax payer provide to them--want the goods and services we crave for as cheap a price as possible. The fact that the jobs have gone over to other countries is a function of two major factors: the destructive influence of out of control unions, and the fact that corporate taxes are higher in America than in any country n the world. If you want confirmation of this, just take a look at the state of Michigan where, even during the so-called Clinton Boom jobs were pouring out of the state as fast as they could. Why? Because the socialist redistributers of wealth had driven the cost of doing business so high due to out of control state corporate tax levels, not to mention the greedy out of control unions (the UAW comes first to mind) that most manufacturing companies said screw you, Michigan, and moved to India, Malaysia and China. And now you people have the nerve to bitch about it? Well too bad. It's time for you infantile, sophomoric-minded liberal do-nothings to grow up and learn how the world really works.

In the meantime, I'm going to continue to buy my good and services from companies like Walmart and IKEA, and not lose a single moment's sleep over "child labor."