WALMART is indeed a paradox-they are a lousy employer, but apparently, people like tobuy from them (I always see their parking lot full).
That said, I have never found their prices to be particularly great…most of the time,you can do just as well at other stores. And most of the stuff they sell isof extremely low quality…like the made-in-China shoes that fall apart after 4-5 months, or that clothing that shrinks after the first wash. I do find their ads pretty smarmy-always ranting about how much they give back to the community, and what a great career the place offers-that is bull bleep. WALMART is just another huge purveyor of cheap, low quality dreck.
Anybody know if they plan to get into selling cars? If the Chinese decide to export cars to the USA, WALMART would be the logical one to market them!
Has anyone mentioned how they are destroying their vendors? Google for WalMart and Vlasic.
I worked for a corporation that had US and Asian divisions. Most of their client companies used the divisions local to the destination of their products. WalMart would only do business with the Asian divisions, even for things being sold in the US.
I think if you look around you, the communities were people bring in decent salaries are the ones that are doing better than the ones where people can buy cheap stuff. Think about which one you’d rather live in.
Anyway, WalMart isn’t creating jobs. WalMart is destroying jobs and replacing them with lower paid jobs. These people once had jobs that payed decently before WalMart’s predatory business practices put the companies the worked for out of business. Grocery employees used to unionized. They made decent wages, had room for promotion, had benefits, and had oppertunities to work full-time steady hours if they wanted to. Then WalMart started stocking groceries and working to put regular grocery stores out of business. Now the people that once had $11.00 an hour jobs with bennies are working part time for minimum wage. Some job is better than no job, but almost any job is better than WalMart.
Oh yeah, I’d like to see you in the pit.
Like fuck it’s not. WalMart is America’s #1 employer. More people work for WalMart than anyone else. By definition, that means WalMart isn’t this mythical “second income” that people don’t really need. WalMart is employing America, and America isn’t a bunch of people who are working just for the heck of it. America is full of people working because they need money to live on. Saying “oh, well I never meant our workforce of ONE AND A HALF MILLION PEOPLE to actually rely on what we pay them” doesn’t absolve you of the fact that you arn’t paying the people that make your company work enough to live on. It doesn’t absolve you of the fact that you are making the government (and the taxpayers) make up for the gap between what they can live on and what you pay them.
I don’t care what the fuck they intended. The truth isn’t made out of a lot of WalMart executives intentions.
And the lady who’s job it was to buy out other stores’ stock was one of my best friend’s mothers. I sat down with her at dinner, heard her stories about how work went that day, helped feed her newborn kittens, housesat- the whole bit. She worked for Sam’s Club, which is owned by WalMart. And Shrek DVDs were definitely on her list of things to buy out of other stores. I think the position is just known as a “shopper”.
It’d be “unfair business practice” for them to sell what they buy from other stores, so they just destroy them and that makes it all right.
I am part of an organization that is fighting to keep Wal-Mart from coming to our community. Read about it here: Helotes Heritage
To make a long story short, even though there are 4 Wal-marts within 10 miles, they want to build a superstore right on the outside border of a town of approx. 4,500. The city council is cooperating with them, even though there has been a great uproar among the citizens. They want to build a 30 acre store/parking lot on a beautiful piece of land at the beginning of the Texas Hill Country (on a two lane road called Scenic Loop, no less) and within a few hundred yards of a creek that feeds into the water supply for the area.
Wal-mart doesn’t care that the citizens of the community don’t want it there (two wal-mart representatives showed up at one of our meetings), they know that a lot of people are going to shop there, even if they were to build it on their grandmother’s grave. This allows walmart to act without needing to care about how they are hurting people and communities, they know people will always show up.
Henry Ford. Except instead of paying employees enough to buy the products they make and sell, Wal-Mart drops wages so low that the only place employees can spend their money is back at Wal-Mart. It’s effectively become a ‘company store’.
The main problem with Wal-Mart, as I see it, is that it takes money out of your local economy. When the former employees were working at a store owned by a local guy, the owner spent his profits in your community. Now money spent at your local Wal-Mart is hoovered to the shareholders who spend it where they live.
WalMart is indeed America’s largest (private) employer. Nonetheless, they account for less than 1% of the U.S. workforce. WalMart is not “employing America.”
I have been stocker at a Walmart for only 3 months now, and just got a $.60 raise, bringing me up to $8.30 an hour. Of course, I work the overnight shift, which pays $1.25 more than the day shift. I am a college student, who goes to a couple classes during the day, while working at night. I live in a low-cost of living area + live within a mile of both Walmart & the college campus, saving on gas money/would bike if it wasn’t so cold; the amount I get from Walmart is enough to cover all my living expenses, throw a little into my savings account, plus I have been buying a $100 worth of Walmart stock a month - since Wallyworld matches 15% of that amount, it seems like a good start for my future retirement plan, though of course I will cash out after a year or so, and throw that money into an index fund or other diversified investment. My parents do pay the tuition, which helps a lot.
Anyways, working at Walmart really hasn’t been that bad. The only other night shift options for someone of my skill would be the food service industry (which sucks & pays less - I flipped burgers in high school, and vowed never again) or there is local manufactering plant that pays better, but from the stories told by some of my co-workers who recently quit that place, the managment there is a complete pain in the ass.
I haven’t had any problems with not getting enough hours to qualify for full time benifits - they are short on overnight people, and I have actually been getting .5-1 hours of overtime almost every day. The store we have is as clean as the day it opened (closed old store & opened a new Supercenter last month. 
) My co-workers have generally been a nice group of people, except for two of the people they hired for the new store that were lazy and disruptive. They both got fired last week though, fortunatly. The night managers are nice guys too, and I have never had any problems with them.
When I was younger, I worked in retail and most of my friends worked in retail. There was no Wal-Mart then, just those little local stores that everyone seems so fond of.
We all made minimum wage or close to it. Nobody made enough to live on. Almost nobody actually worked full-time. None of the retailers even made a pretense of offering benefits. My wife was bookkeeper for a locally-owned retailer, so she saw the pay stubs, and she knew what the other local stores were paying. The best a retail clerk could hope for was the occasional big commission (which generally didn’t kick in until they had already sold X hundred dollars that month) or a year-end bonus from the employer.
Wal-Mart might be big, but I don’t think they’re all that different.
I think the difference would be that if there was a walmart in your town, your wife would not have had the book keeping job, she would have to work the part time position which might be less hours and less skilled.
Even if that’s not a problem, the other element is that a full time job producing something that will be sold locally might sustain you or be enough to raise kids on but if that job is gone, you will be doing a job that wasn’t meant for full time instead because it’s all that’s left to you.
Retail isn’t that great, but I work for a small retailer and I have advanced and have a chance to advance father. If I worked for Walmart the same amount of time I still wouldn’t be making a living. I have an interesting job that I like, and I have relationships with the students who work part time for our stores. I see them develop skills and learn and develop as employees, and as people, and on this scale, there is a relationship that benefits all of us. If we were all working at Walmart, I don’t think it would be the same. We wouldn’t have the same control over our situations. I think these differences are important.
Eminent domain is becoming more and more of a problem, and there’s a case before the SCOTUS right now regarding a case in Connecticut.
Link please. (You knew it was comming)
My first thought was;
“How the hell can they turn a profit when they have to pay for items they stock in their stores and then buy out the stock of competing stores, destroy that stock, and then sell the same item for less than the competing stores sold it to them for? This is a vulgar display of “Does not compute”.”
Unless…
If the widget costs $4 and they buy 50 of them that equals $200.
They buy out the stock of surrounding stores widgets at $6 apiece times 50 = $300. They just paid $500 to be the sole distributor of widgets in the area. Now they have to sell them for $10 apiece to break even. With the advent of the internet this is impossible.
Now try it if they work off of volume;
They buy 500 of them at $3.50 apiece. That equals $1,750 plus the $500 = $2,250. Divide by 500 and you get $4.50 each to break even. I guess it could be done. Somewhere between $4.50 and $6 would fit nicely into their equation.
Now, this doesn’t include the costs of shopping competitors and transporting and destroying the widgets. But I suppose that could be worked into the volume ratio somehow.
And, Uncommon Sense you’re leaving out a HUGE aspect of a place like Wal*Mart, the “loss leader”. They know that 2 million Shreks are going to sell. They want those 2 million people IN THE STORE. They’re not just buying Shrek and walking out.
Someone goes into Wal*Mart, gets a giant cart, and puts things in it. They might be breaking even on Shreak, but they’re getting parents in there, putting the Shrek stuffed animal next the the DVD’s, putting the diapers near the stuffed animal, putting the giant toilet paper near the diapers, etc.
There was a post in MPSIMS last week. Someone said this, “Wal*Mart is advertising bikes for $25. My nieces and nephews already have bikes, but I was wondering if there’s a place I can donate bikes to.”
Now, I’m not going to poop on that nice sentiment, or mention that $25 to the Santa with the bucket is probably better spent, but it’s a weird mentality. I don’t fully get it. . .someone WANTS to spend money even though they know in advance they don’t need the product. That’s worse than an “impulse buy” which Wal*Mart depends on. When you’re a retailer that has made people start to think, “I’m going to buy something that I know in advance I’ll give away”, you’ve won, dude.
And if you can get someone into the store, because they NEED the Shrek DVD, that thinking just takes over.
That’s my take on why it would be good practice to snatch up all the Shreks.
IMHO, I don’t know about WalMart being evil or not. The ONE thing that is bad is that they won’t sell something like Jon Stewart’s book AND they’re putting a stranglehold on the PRODUCTION of goods. And, without stretchign the imagination too far, a publisher might not publish a book if they know WalMart won’t sell it. That’s BAD for America.
As for wages/jobs/cheap goods, those are heavy questions. We’re living in a time that a lot of “poor” people can still eat, still have a TV, still have a job. And I think that a lot of that is tied to places like Wal*Mart driving down prices and wages. Too heavy for a simple guy like me.
Aren’t those people earning $6.00/hour (or whatever) essentially unskilled labour?
It’s always sucks to participate in the economy (i.e. work) if you are doing so as unskilled labour. It’s not Walmart’s fault. It’s always been that way. It would be wonderful if the desire to work and work hard were enough to lead to a good job. It isn’t, never has been, and never will be.
Unionized grocery store employees were able to bypass this suckiness for a while, but it was only temporary. The union can’t protect them forever from the fact that they really don’t have much economic clout as unskilled labour.
I can’t think of any company where unskilled labour equates to a ‘good’ job. (Benefits, a wage you can live on as the sole income.) Even the mom and pops that Walmart is accused of putting out of business never paid much for unskilled labour.
I’ll bet the plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. who built the Walmart made a good wage. Walmart wouldn’t get away with paying them 8 bucks an hour. Those people have marketable skills. The evilness we should be addressing is not Walmart, but how did we get to the point where so many people are so unskilled that they have to put up with Walmart’s crappy work environment?
ABout the only thing that worries me about Wal*Mart is there growing power as a wholesale buyer, as others have mentioned.
That’s a big reason why Walmart doesn’t have handcarts. I’ve never seen a supercenter that has handcarts at the front of the store; some have them in the back, but usually they’re not available at all. You can only fit twenty dollars’ worth of items in a handcart; you can fit two hundred dollars’ worth in a huge buggy.
I wonder if it’s a special talent to be able to walk into a superstore and walk out with only the one thing you need. I’ve done it lots of times, but every time my mom or dad go into Target for one thing they always walk out with like ten bags. Guess I just have the gift.
Not all Walmart workers are unskilled/undereducated. I had a bachelor’s degree when I went to work for them. There’s lots of college graduates who work at Walmart. The company is understandably reluctant to release this kind of information, but I heard from people who work there that something like 10% of Walmart non-management workers are four-year college grads. We can blame that squarely on the recession, though, as well as those graduates who don’t want to leave their Walmart-overtaken hometowns.
But for the ones who are unskilled, I think it’s a combination of factors. Many of the older workers feel they can’t go to college or trade school to get a better job, because they would have to cut back on their hours at Walmart. Many of those older people have kids, and they need every penny of their paycheck to pay for food for them. And regardless of whatever kind of loans or grants we have, college is still damn expensive, and someone who can’t afford to cut their hours at work wouldn’t even be able to expend the money for books or materials. College is still somewhat of a luxury in this country for lower and lower-middle class people. No matter how many success stories you hear about Walmart workers pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, going to college, and moving out of the ghetto and into a six-figure salary, I’ll guarantee you that there’s twenty families who are still stuck in a Walmart-enabled cycle of advantageous poverty.
Wouldn’t that be true almost any retailer? And honestly, the work I do could be done by a well trained chimp (don’t tell Walmart this, I want to keep this job for a couple years, and don’t want them getting any ideas ), so suggesting that it should be enough to support say a family of four just doesn’t make any sense.
I agree it doesn’t make any sense, but sometimes, that’s all there is in a town for an unskilled laborer to do. There’s more people trying to support families on a Walmart salary than you might think.
I worked the midnight shift too. I hope you’re able to handle it better than I was. Walmart destroyed my already messed up sleep cycle and completely emotionally destabilized me. But some people love working nights, so YMMV.
Did anyone here see the TV ad that Wal-Mart ran a few months ago showing some employee saying that his kid was able to get a liver transplant because of their fantastic health benefits?
I didn’t believe that for one second. Somebody ought to investigate.
Evil? You bet.
On top of everything already mentioned, I’ve got lots more. They regularly bribe and/or bully local governments into changing rules for zoning permits, or writing special exemptions that allow them to ignore rules. The result is that traffic and environmental conditions nearby tend to go to hell really quickly. The parking lots are so freaking big that runoff can destroy local waterways. In Lexington, Ky. a few years back runoff from one of the parking lots started flooding a nearby intersection whenever it rained, and God alone knows how much the taxpayers had to cough up to fix that.
Purchasing policy, of course, they’d buy a product from China rather than the USA even if the difference in price is only a fraction of a cent, causing countless factories that survived earlier eras of job movement to shut down with predictably devastating results for the communities involved. One study I heard about claimed that forty percent of all manufacturing job losses in the past few years were WalMart’s fault.
Sam Walton, original owner of the chain was a good man. He had a policy of giving surplus products to local homeless shelters for free, and he also never attempted to butt his way into a city or county where it was clear that he wasn’t welcome. The new head honcho, needless to say, has cancelled both policies.
Let’s not forget the incident in 2001 where an employee was fired for helping the local police battle child abuse.
And of course the neverending attempts to pander to the far right by refusing to sell certain types of birth control and whatever movies and CDs are on Jerry Falwell’s hit list. Also, they supposedly had a policy in the past of having photoshop employees destroy any photograph of a same-sex couple kissing that they found. (Never seen an official cite on this, I should admit.)
Lastly, they just refuse to cooperate with communitty spirit. In Jackson, Wyoming, zoning regulations require all commercial buildings to integrate with the city’s attempts to have an Old West ambience, with wood or faux-wood eaves and columns and so forth. WalMart insists on having the same hideous color scheme as they have anywhere else, and they’re trying to get the city government to change the rules just for them.