Wal-Mart is Bad for America

I Agree with you completely,

Here's another good Documentary call "Wal-Mart, The High Cost of Low Price"

You should also read Charles Fishman's "The Walmart Effect."
And check out www.walmartwatch.com.

Wal Mart also does whatever it can to keep out unions. That is un-American. That's why they provide an overall lower wage and benefit package when compared to union competition.

The US government should force Americans to spend much more of their disposable income for their groceries and clothing and household items at "Mom & Pop" stores because left wing snobs think Wal-Mart is too successful at delivering low prices.

Never mind that it will infringe the freedom of choice of the American consumer, and leave them less money to invest in their children's education, or a new home, or pension contribution, etc. How compassionate.

I find it more and more disturbing that Wal-Mart is becoming less of a mega store and more of an self contained universe. I have read that they are trying to get into banking, and on site housing for employees. I wonder if it will be long before Wal-Mart tries to succeed from the nation in favor of its own democracy of low prices.

Wal Mart is a huge boon for the poor. A family of four can save thousands of dollars a year by shopping at Wal Mart. With this money, they can save for a house, education for their children or whatever.

Wall-Mart selling sushi? Oh my friends the apocalypse is upon us. And, if you want to laugh give the Jib Jab Big Box Mart a try.

Corey said: Wal Mart can also keep the poor, poor

You can't sell cheap stuff and pay high wages. Wal Mart doesn't occupy the same market niche as Bloomingdales. I imagine Bloomingdale employees are well cared for.

The CEO of Walmart flies coach and empties his own trash can.

I wouldn't necessarily say "huge boon." While Wal-Mart does consistently have lower priced goods than other stores, the nature of big box and bulk that they put forward in their stores usually leads people to buy more than they need, so they actually spend about the same amount of money, in total. Sure, they are getting more food or whatever, but food doesn't last forever, and buying perishables in bulk isn't the greatest idea. Additionally, the quality of Wal-Mart goods is usually not up to par with non-Wal-Mart goods (forcing your suppliers to cut their price every single year will eventually cause them to cut costs in their materials and their labor) and so you have people buying pants, shirts, socks, electronics and a higher rate than if they would have had they bought their stuff elsewhere 'cause Wal-Mart stuff isn't as durable.

As for the workers, Wal-Mart does everything it can to keep their man-hours down. While Wal-Mart has all those cash registers, how often are they fully manned? No matter how few people are in the store, how often is there a long line? Wal-Mart can afford to give its workers more hours but it chooses not to. While Wal-Mart pays a little more than a part time job (the last figure I saw was somewhere around 9 dollars an hour) full time work at Wal-Mart is 30 hours a week. So a "full time" worker at this pay rate is actually making less than someone who is full time at another store who is making less money.

Additionally, the Wal-Mart health plan (which I think is currently being revamped because even Wal-Mart in a memo released last year conceded that its health coverage was the greatest complaint among their employees across the country) is too expensive for most Wal-Mart employees. Both the weekly chunk taken out of their check AND the huge deductible they still have to pay when they see the doctor. Luckily, Wal-Mart managers are trained to help their workers fill out the paperwork for Medicare and Medicaid. Yes, Wal-Mart is actively shifting the burden for paying for its own full-time worker health benefits to the taxpayer.

And we won't even get into the practice of clocking their employees out (while they are still working) so they won't go into overtime and locking them inside stores overnight (also without paying them.)

You can't sell cheap stuff and pay high wages. Wal Mart doesn't occupy the same market niche as Bloomingdales. I imagine Bloomingdale employees are well cared for.

The CEO of Walmart flies coach and empties his own trash can.

The CEO of Wal-Mart (along with the entire Walton family) are also multi-millionares. Wal-Mart reports profits in the billions every year. And if their prices are too low to pay a decent wage, give affordable healthcare to their full time workers, and PAY THEIR WORKERS FOR WORKING, then their prices are TOO LOW.

It's admirable that Wal-Mart doesn't waste its money on office furniture for its management, or on expensive flights (unless a Wal-Mart store reports people are talking about unionizing in which case Wal-Mart sends out a team of "union busters" on a private jet from Bentonville within days of the report to advise the store managers how to best contain it) and the way in which they've streamlined their distribution is admittedly amazing. But (and I'll keep harping on this point) health care for full time workers with families, and paying your workers for their labor are not luxuries that Wal-Mart can just decide to forego.

It's not just the poor who reap a huge boon from Wal Mart. We shop at Albertsons, our local supermarket because the nearest Wal Mart is ten minutes away. But if Albertsons gets greedy and raises their prices too high, we will take the time and drive the ten minutes.

Wal Mart keeps the cost of living low for everyone.

And Wal Mart does pay a decent wage. They don't pay unskilled entry level people much, but they pay their core staff a decent wage.

For informational purposes, here's some related articles (& their comments): Activist Under Fire for Wal-Mart Position, and wal-mart tag at Newsvine for the rest (might want to re-tag or add that tag to this article?)

The first link contains a whole lot of argument/debate (with sources cited) regarding how wal-mart stacks up in regards to employment practices, and also a link to a BusinessWeek article that compares it to CostCo.

Unfortunately, this groupthink may be doing just that. Wal-mart imports at least $15 billion of products from China each year. Our current trade deficit with China is over $170 billion. A little quick math would imply that Wal-Mart can personally account for about 10 percent of our trade deficit with China.

No, Wal-Mart's $15 billion in Chinese imports just represents a percentage of our overall Chinese imports. To simply imply that Wal-Mart is somehow 10% responsible for our trade deficit is misleading at best. It is not WM's fault that China has more products to offer us than we to offer them. We can go into discussions about labor practices and such, but in the end China just makes things for less money than Americans do, and for Wal-Mart to choose to buy American instead of Chinese would be bad economic policy for them. If you hold that against Wal-Mart, you have to hold it against every American who buys a Japanese or European car.

The typical response to this is that Chinese products are inferior to US-made products. While this is probably true, that doesn't seem to bother consumers. Wal-Mart's policies, like those of any other business, are primarly a reflection of what the market wants, in this case the want for inexpensive products.

As for Wal-Mart paying poor wages: Nobody is forcing people to work at Wal-Mart. If they can find a better job somewhere else, they'd be working somewhere else.

riptyde,

Where have you been for the last 20 years?

Walmart was one of the companies that has been at the forefront of opening up China and getting free-trade going. Not to sell goods but to get at their work force!!!

They import all those goods because they can get the textiles and hard lines from there are super cheep prices.

For all of those just writing this off as "left wing" or whatever, please read the articles. There have been many, many articles / studies on this subject. I think 20/20 even did a special. Walmart is very bad for America.

They drive local businesses intentionally out of business, then they raise their prices slowly. They buy products from growing vendors, then manipulate them to sell their products so cheap that they have to find ways to make their goods cheaper (make them in China). They won't sell Mature rated video games, but they will sell books on how to snipe people (I'm not kidding). They don't promote competition in the spirit of America- they crush it by driving out their competitors and making their local populace depend on Walmart.

By offering the cheapest / worst made products made overseas, they actually lower our standards of living and increase our dependancies on other countires. When was the last time a minor appliance worked for 20 years like your father's appliances did?

Don't take my word for it. Read up on it. Once I did, I decided I'd never buy anything from Walmart again.

So it seems the author of this article is against working families saving money, against consumers deciding for themselves where they can shop (freedom of choice anyone?) and against free trade in principle.

I wonder if the Wal Mart pharmacy fulfills prescriptions of Economics 101?

seems the last two commenters are anti-middleclass, pro big corp and anti American worker.

No, you are incorrect. The figures do not lie. In fact, this is a conservative estimate, some rank it as high as 15 percent.

I am not saying that the figures are incorrect. What I am saying is that the way in which the figures were presented implies that Wal-Mart is responsible for the trade deficit, when in fact they are just one of a great multitude of American companies who recognize that China produces many products more cheaply than US-based companies do, and choose to take advantage of that economic reality. Perhaps in the end it is bad for America, but Wal-Marts responsiblity is not to be good for America, their responsibility is to be good for Wal-Mart and their shareholders.

I spent two years consulting for many large Wal-Mart suppliers. Wal-Mart does not force their suppliers to lower prices for some arbitrary reason, nor do they force their suppliers to lose money. They simply want solid, verifiable evidence of the need for prices to be at X amount before they agree to it. As with any company, they can do this because they are the ones with the leverage. Having spoken to many suppliers, the consensus is this: Even at lower profit margins, doing business with Wal-Mart is a good thing because it dramatically increases their overall sales, and lowers their sales costs by providing them a single point of focus from which to drive, in many cases, upwards of 50% of their overall sales. And these are American companies. Remember that while Wal-Mart imported $15 billion in Chinese-made goods last year, they spent far more than that right here at home.

Thanks, Corey, for making a point that's often missed: "Wal-Mart has mastered the art of the 'price point,'." I can't look for it right now, but a year or so ago a study found Wal-Mart's prices on home entertainment electronics were, on average, slightly higher than leading retailers Best Buy and Circuit City.

Some folks are good at getting a deal at Wal-Mart, but I think most don't save that much. I won't argue against the point that Wal-Mart keeps overall prices lower through competition and efficiency measures. I just don't think it's worth the costs. Those costs can be summed up this way: falling wage and benefit standards in the face of rising costs of living.

If they can find a better job somewhere else, they'd be working somewhere else.

Too bad in a lot of the small towns Wal-Mart opens in, it shuts down all the other small businesses so people have nowhere else to work.

If Wal-Mart is so good for the country, why are communities across the United States organizing to keep Wal-Mart out of their city limits?

People are finally waking up to the fact that Wal-Mart is increasingly (it seems since Sam Walton died in the mid 90s) bad for the worker, bad for its suppliers, bad for the environment and bad for the United States.

I would also add that, as it pertains to jobs, it is too narrow a view to simply focus on the exportation of jobs. Yes, American companies as a whole are exporting low-tech manufacturing jobs to other nations. But we import a great deal of high-tech manufacturing jobs from other countries. Similarly, we send tax-return-level accounting jobs to India, but many European nations turn to us for their CPA-level accounting work.

In every generation, America has lost jobs in some primary part of our economy to the rest of the world, but we have ended up better of for it. The issues that are raised about jobs today are the same that were raised back when we started exporting steel working jobs decades ago, but yet the standard of living in the United States today is far greater than it was back then, and it is also one of the best in the world. The poor people of most nations would gladly live at what we consider to be poverty levels.

The rest of the world is starting to develop more quickly, and is gaining the capacity to do the things that we have been able to do for a long time. Our best bet for economic security is to stay ahead of the game, and focus on being able to produce the goods and services that other countries don't have the skill to produce, not to try and keep old, low-wage industries protected here in our own borders.

If Wal-Mart is so good for the country, why are communities across the United States organizing to keep Wal-Mart out of their city limits?

Because they are economically illiterate.

riptyde,

You are aware of the tens of thousands of developer jobs that have been sent over to India... right?