good luck to travis and brett at nats today! they drove out earlier this week and hopefully are going to fly in their races today. portland is a good place for cross, i have never been there but i know it's wet and near the ocean. the boys will go well. i was reading an article in this magazine called fast company http://www.fastcompany.com about how wal-mart has ruined some of their vendors by forcing them to sell products for less than they can afford, the example for article was vlasic pickles in a one gallon jar for $2.97. the point was they made a few cents off of each jsr that was sold but that is not really where the profit was for vlasic, the main margins were in spears and hamburger cut. the problem was wal-mart refuse to buy any other products unless vlasic sold them the gallon jar for less and less, who the hell needs a gallon jar of pickles? another problem with the american gluttony, they would buy the jar and then when the jar got nasty they would throw it out, they weren't losing any money on it, they ate half or two-thirds of the jar and now they can go back to wal-mart and buy another for $2.97. america as they said in the article is shopping themselves out of jobs. vlasic filed for bankruptcy in 1999. no more cool little pelican or stork selling you your pickles! wal-mart is evil! strong-arming companies into lower margins is not the way capitalism should be, the problem with this society is they see the value (perceived or otherwise) and not the beast they are feeding. the number one retailer is also the source of damage to our national economy. without smaller outfits able to survive we will soon lack in the area of new non-mainstream products, the adage being if it won't sell at wal-mart it can't be a viable entity. wal-mart has 21,000 vendors, that means that as succesful as they may be they have constant pressure to produce lower priced products year after year, opposite of inflation. forcing overseas production and taking jobs away from america, it gets to the point that even if they worked for free the price would still be prohibitive and wal-mart would drop them as a vendor. the moral of the story-stay away from wal-mart!