81 Replies to “If Oklahoma Had Walmart Stores”

  2. >Even Steyn got suckered by this one.
    This would imply that it’s not a true story. But I can’t find anything that debunks it…

  6. I’m going to have to give my poor head a rest until somebody explains what I’m missing.

  7. *Sigh* – her point is why did goods need to be donated & shipped like that. Why not just send $$ to purchase goods locally. It would have helped both the suffering victims & their local economy.

  10. Have you ever actually been to Oklahoma City?
    Driven there?
    Do you have any understanding WHATSOEVER of how many thousands of tons of “relief supplies” are available within a 50 mile radius of the stricken area????
    Or that people living in Windsor, ON would have no clue as to what goods are needed – and not needed?
    The story is supposedly that of stupid border officials, when in truth, the organizers are the ones deserving of criticism – for their inefficiency, lack of planning, and refusal to take responsibility.

  11. Back after the Indonesia Tsunami a town in Germany wanted to do something to help. They spent 3 days just making bread. Enough to last a week if sold in the bakery. It was shipped by air to Indonesia and got stopped at airport customs. There was an argument that if the bread was not cleared customs red tape with in a few hours it will be only good enough to give to the birds.

  12. The best way to help is find out those who’s homes where destroyed than give cash.
    Its nice though knowing others care that much to send stuff. When Edmonton had its Tornado, we got tons of stuff. Kept the Food Bank going for 4 years. Warehouses full of furniture.
    That ended up in thrift stores. I like the impulse of the peple that gave. There is a smarter way to help though.

  13. The sooner we accept the fact the old US republic is gone, that it is run by a rogue regime of fascist bureaucrats and that mindless authoritarianism permeates government agencies, the sooner our “heads will stop hurting” when we see this kind of senseless overreach from US officialdom.

  14. me thinks many missed the main “item” here. Heinz spends 20K making soup, but gets to write it off as a 60K tax donation, it’s a win win for many “doners”. Fact is there are big businesses that accept donations of obsolete stuff, which they then sell and donate the proceeds to charities, AFTER ADMIN FEES ARE TAKEN. The doners get a far greater tax write off then the “garbage” was worth new, never mind when obsoleted. If the businesses real wanted to help they would donate cash, which can be electronically transferred!!!

  15. I remember the old days when African disasters always precipitated a tsunami of donated clothing. Wasn’t that just what the Africans needed; new toques and jackets.

  16. Wow, Kate is smarter than Steyn!!!
    She has a point of course but nevertheless a bit too cyncial and, yes, condescending here.
    There is a qualitative difference between cash and gifts in kind.
    See Christmas and wedding anniversary gift giving.
    I cannot agree that the charity deserves more criticism than the border boneheads.
    That is a greviously uncharitable judgment!

  17. You speak as if there is only one Walmart store in that entire area. There are actually 20 Walmarts in the greater Oklahoma City area – I doubt they’ve all been flattened. And that’s just Walmart. How many other stores could have supplied all those goods locally. Kate’s right: The smarter way to help would have been to organize with local relief services to purchase all those goods locally. I’m sure a lot of local stores that were spared destruction would be willing to donate some goods as well.

  18. Somehow, the stupid stumble through life and reach death, same as the ‘highly intelligent’.
    Maybe not as efficiently …suppose it’s important to efficiently reach death.

  19. No doubt cash gifts to a trusted organization are more efficient but I don’t think that was Steyn’s point. The point was his views about the stupidity of bureaucracy.

  20. I admire their attempt, no matter how misguided, to help those they understood to be suffering. The church in the area waiting for the shipment seemed to be welcoming it.
    The sad reality is that under circumstances where these supplies were actually desperately needed, the wheels of bureaucracy at the border would have turned no quicker.
    There MUST be a radical muslim hidden in there somewhere.

  21. “That is a greviously uncharitable judgment!”
    It wasn’t border officials who failed in their duty – it was the organization in charge of collecting and moving the goods. What led them to believe you could just show up at the border citing good intentions, and have 20 tons of unidentified cargo waved through?
    It was as simple as picking up the phone, or sending an email – and nobody bothered to do it.

  22. “The shipment was to be sent to the Gate Church or Oklahoma City, about 20 minutes away from the devastation.
    Bishop Tony Miller called the hang-up “very unfortunate.” He said his church has been waiting to receive the goods all week.”
    If the Bishop on the receiving end wanted the stuff, then there was obviously a need for it. I wouldn’t be so hard on the people trying to do a charitable thing.
    I recently did a spring cleaning and donated clothing to the Sally Ann. By your logic, should I have just mailed them a few bucks, and thrown out the clothes? We have clothing stores in Toronto, why bother?

  23. LC Bennett is right.
    That’s one of the things I admire about Steyn: he’s a genius but always humble, generous,, never condescending while, echoing Churchill, having much to be condescending about.
    The STORY is off the chart yankee border boneheadedness, a fascistic rule-bound loss of any semblance of common sense. NOT the charity’s failure to anticipate this monstrous state behavior.
    Kate, Chris Hitchens is proud of you!

  24. I agree Kate, the phone call should have been made. You can’t just wave that kind of tonnage across a border, regardless of stated intentions. A much better approach would have been to dispatch volunteers with donated funds to Oklahoma to target and manage relief efforts using local resources.

  25. What led them to believe you could just show up at the border citing good intentions, and have 20 tons of unidentified cargo waved through?
    Just didn’t bring it in through the right border. The southern border is a lot more porous. Canadian aid is much more dangerous.

  26. “There are actually 20 Walmarts in the greater Oklahoma City area – I doubt they’ve all been flattened.”

    Why would you want to cloud the issue with facts and rational thought? Why can’t you be perpetually po-faced instead?
    Why, Natasha? Why? Why?
    (Insert angry, gratuitous insult here.)

  27. It’s not an either/or situation. The donor group was remiss in not giving the U.S. border personnel a heads-up on the proposed shipment, and the U.S. Customs was being its usual bureaucratic donkey self.
    But shipping fresh produce hundreds of miles as “disaster relief” makes no sense at all, when fresh produce is available at all the stores that didn’t get flattened. And if your house was blown down, and you are camped in a church basement, how do you propose to cook a meal of fresh food?
    Thing to remember about tornadoes is that they can cause 100% destruction along the track of their passage, but half a mile (or less) to either side of that track there may be zero damage. So the capability exists right in the local area to aid the afflicted. Sending money is the best response.

  28. Using your logic Brick, your next drop off of clothes for Sally Ann should be at the Minneapolis depot.

  29. Um, Kate, could not the border boneheads pick up the phone to verify that this is a bona fide charity project? Yunno, bend the rules a bit here?
    Could not low-end border grunts not phone “upstairs” for some common sense?
    I dunno Kate with your keenness for the War on Drugs and your eagerness to assign more blame to the charity than to the boneheaded border fascists, you got me worried.

  30. But Kate, if a spinner blew through Minneapolis and destroyed people’s homes and their possessions, and somebody organized a drive to get food and clothing to them from Ontario, I wouldn’t knock it.

  31. Steyn was making the point that free people (formerly)can no longer help a neighbour without the government’s oh kee doh kee.
    A Walmart apple pie may be tastier and cheaper than homemade but it’s the homemade in the pie that keeps the community a community.

  32. Anymore, ranchers can’t even get their cows back that strayed across the border without going 20 or 30 miles around through customs.
    Like safety rules, the nanny is ever vigilant. Everyone gets equally treated like a criminal. Well, except the criminals. Root causes, and all that…

  33. NME666 “me thinks many missed the main “item” here. Heinz spends 20K making soup, but gets to write it off as a 60K tax donation”
    Simply untrue. I’m not sure where you took Accounting 101 but ask for your money back.

  34. Do you ever read or proof-read what you write or do you just hire a trained monkey?
    Moving on…
    What I took from this was that American border bureaucracy trumps everything. Even if calls were made, e-mails sent or goods purchased locally, I still believe there would some bureaucratic bungler somewhere waiting to itemise every last bit of charity.
    Just my thoughts.

  35. As others have said, it is not the act of charity that Mark questioned, it is the bureaucracy that could not or would not bend a rule to find a way to help their fellow citizens in need. I might cut them a bit of slack if there was not a pattern here. Remember Katrina. Remember Sandy.

  36. It worked for the folks trying to circumvent the Gaza blockade didn’t it? Those folks are still living off their “good deeds” … Of course the CBC would mention the “red tape” involved with shipping undocumented goods across a border. I think the border authorities could with a phone call or two, make the exception allowing this delivery of goods, but just think of the carbon footprint from these diesels.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008–09_Gaza_Strip_aid
    *note that the Dallas / Fort Worth metro area of almost 7 million people is about 3 hours south of the Oklahoma City area, in Ok itself another 1.3 million live in that metro area.
    There are 104 Walmart stores (including the Supercenters) in the Dallas area.
    Oklahoma Walmart locations:
    http://www.priceviewer.com/walmart_locations/OK.html
    No shortage of Target Stores there either…

  37. Another truck was loaded with bottled water, but nothing over 50 ml was permitted, and then the small bottles needed to be individualy put in clear plastic bags for inspection!

  39. “Mark Cejda, manager of the Norman SuperTarget, noticed a rush of customers Tuesday buying items to donate — including one shopper who loaded his cart full of Band-Aids. Because of the rain Tuesday, the store also sold a lot of rain ponchos, as well as flashlights, batteries and work gloves needed by volunteers and rescue workers. Basic clothing such as socks and underwear, toiletries, water and storage bins also were in high demand.
    The store is receiving special deliveries to replenish its stock of these items, Cejda said.”
    http://newsok.com/oklahoma-tornadoes-major-retailers-target-and-walmart-hustle-to-meet-demand-for-necessities/article/3833302

  40. “She has a point of course but nevertheless a bit too cyncial and, yes, condescending here. ”
    Agreed. I’ll cut her some slack though. One era of judgement does not a character make.

  41. US border agents: “Yo, just calling to confirm that that big semi full of a bunch of unsorted, unlabelled stuff is from a bona fide charity project.”
    Foreign charity worker: “Yup. There’s no contraband or any stuff like that. We double-checked it.”
    US border agent, heard shouting in the background: “Okay, boys, let ‘er through!”

    Seriously, though — and to address Kate’s point — if a twister hit, say, Oaxaca, would it be better to a) load up a semi-trailer full of tortillas in Windsor, Ontario and drive it down there, or b) purchase the tortillas in a town 2.5 miles away from the site of the devastation?
    I think people’s hearts are in the right place – give or take – but in some cases their heads are spelunking in the “fold and smooch” position.

  42. Yeah, the efficiency experts always know better than the people who actually do something…it’s just not efficient to be neighbourly anymore. Even if you pay for it yourself, making it nobody’s business how efficient you are.

  43. scar
    it ain’t gots nuthin to do with accounting, and every thing to do with ripping the system, and yuppers it actually happens. About 12 years a go some one I knew tried roping me into investing in a “company” that facilitated this so of thing, and down in the USA it was big business at that time, so please, if you ain’t informed, just listen and larn me boy!!!!

  44. Sending cash certainly made a lot of people happy in Haiti, but few of the victims benefited. I see Kate’s point, but what ever happened to accepting gifts with a bit of gratitude ? It’s the thought that counts. Stupid rules and regulations could easily have been set aside in a case like this since any chance of terrorist involvement would be zero.

  45. Maybe the intentions were good but the real problem here is the bureaucracy. Merchandise from Canada is no worse than merchandise already in the U.S.A. and, in many cases, to a more rigid (read bureaucratic) standard. An annual aviation flea market in the U.S. has been largely killed off by border agents demanding letters from the organizers that they (the U.S. side) will make a profit on items Canadians take – otherwise no access to Yankeeland. Longest undefended border in the world indeed!

  46. Kate et al – had the disaster been in Timmins do you think this would have happened to reief goods going north from the US??
    We share a border with a now unfriendly government

  47. Heck, some of us who live due south are doing so with a now unfriendly government.
    Peggy Noonan…
    “What does it mean when half the country—literally half the country—understands that the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government is politically corrupt, sees them as targets, and will shoot at them if they try to raise their heads? That is the kind of thing that can kill a country, letting half its citizens believe that they no longer have full political rights.”

  48. “had the disaster been in Timmins do you think this would have happened to reief goods going north from the US??”
    20 ton shipments arriving at the border without a cargo manifest or prior notice? Probably.
    There’s a disaster declared in the US every week or so – floods, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes. Perhaps there should be a special corridor set up for ad hoc aid shipments where cargo is undeclared and customs officials simply wave the trucks through? Because that’s the standard some of you appear to be asking for.

  49. This is nothing new. People with more enthusiasm than knowledge
    get caught up in the “somebody who knows somebody who knows
    somebody down there who used to sing in the choir before they moved”
    and the next thing you wind up with is ten overweight tractor trailers
    full of unknown quantities of useless stuff stuck at some highway weigh
    scales in the middle of nowhere complete with zero qualified school bus
    drivers and no valid insurance.
    Add an international border and the mess just gets more disorganized.

  50. Tulsa area has about a million people and just across the border is the Walmart headquarters, although Sam Walton and Helen Robson got their real start in Claremore next to Tulsa, and many of the families still live here. I think that Walmart knows what is going on and what is needed. In fact, Walmart has a history of trucking in product for free distribution by the emergency responders. In fact, their trucks normally beat those of the gummint and other organizations.

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