I meant, I don’t think PENN AND TELLER addressed the issue, which was a big one from the Documentary.
Also, some of the stores being repurposed NOW does not mean that when the docu was made, that it wasn’t a huge issue with the communities not knowing what to do with them. (I haven’t studied that particular issue, but I believe they had some examples of vacant buildings no one knew what to do with).
Isn’t America great? We can decide to not ever set foot in a Wal-Mart or we can love shopping there because they have such low prices…to each his own. Wal-Mart’s success would tend to support the fact that alot, and I mean $408 billion in sales alot of people shop their because of their low prices.
The 63 cases settled in 2008 for a total of $640 million. The 2009 case leaves Walmart on the hook for between $43 and $86 million. There was one in Massachusetts settled for $40 million. There was a separate Minnesota case settled in 2009 for $54 million after the judge decided that Walmart had violated wage and hour laws, but before the jury trial on damages. Not exactly nuisance value. The cases had been going on for years and were not settled quickly. Walmart has fought other, similar cases, losing a $78 million jury verdict in Pennsylvania in 2006 over rest breaks and unpaid work and and a $178 million dollar jury verdict in California over meal breaks. That's enough for me to surmise that at least some of the words in the lawsuits were true, and that Walmart was afraid of losing even bigger.
It’s also more than enough to explain why Walmart gets more negative attention ( Walmart-watch etc ) regarding this issue than other retailers- and that’s actually where this started.
A good article from an undercover reporter who got a job at Wal-Mart.
Lynn, you don’t have a Joann’s in the area?
I have several JoAnn’s in my area. I find the fabric in JoAnn’s to be absolutely craptacular. If I’m going to spend my leisure time sewing, I want the fabric to hold up for more than a couple of uses. WalMart had better quality fabric than JoAnn’s, for the most part. And Hobby Lobby also has cheap fabric. I know of a few Local Quilt Shops that sell quality fabric, with prices to match. I tend to examine their clearance racks carefully, and ask if I can get a price break if I buy all the fabric left on the bolt (usually I can).
You missed an important question:
I’ve never seen the movie. The website you link to doesn’t show the movie. It merely says what the movie purports to show. But DOES it? None of your questions are even meaningful, unless Wally-World is ACTUALLY as evil as the website claims.
Note: I am not a fan of Wal-Mart. I hate the place. BUT, I’m not convinced that they are the Satan Spawn they are routinely portrayed as. I’ve NEVER seen any Wal-Mart hater actually offer any evidence to back up their claims. This OP is no different.
If their behaviour is “illegal”, why have they not been shut down by the “legal” authorities? Lots of people spout about this or that’s “illegal” behaviour, but scant evidence is ever offered for that contention. If it’s illegal, present the evidence to the legal authorities. If they will do nothing about the behaviour, then perhaps it’s not “illegal”, but rather, just “something I don’t like”, which is an entirely different kettle of fish.
Yes, because it would be at all possible for local authorities to go in and close down one of the biggest corporations in the wotld because a minimum wage wotker is getting illegally taken advantage of…they hav money and power to stay open, it must be legal! I can’t roll my eyes hard enough.
And you either havent actually LOOKED at anti walmart claims, or youre just being ungenuine. There are factual claims in this very thread.
My mother works at wal-mart currently. Last year (after the lawsuits) I remember her mentioning the manager getting angry with an employee for assisting a customer before clocking in. After the law suits, corporate had made it clear to the manager no one was to be working off the clock. Even now, they are pretty strict about it because everyone is always watching, and they do not want another law suit. This may not be a corporate-wide policy, but at least at the store my mom works it is enforced.
As for the working conditions at wal-mart, my mother worked at another grocery store for years, when my grandmother was nearing the end of her life the store was reluctant to give her family medical leave. Since getting essentially the same job at wal-mart, she has needed to take it on one other occasion and they were very supportive. It is also worth noting she is much happier with the working conditions, and the pay increase which accompanied the change. Some of that may be due to the poor management of the previous store.
So as far as treating their workers, wal-mart is at least on par with the other local groceries around here.
*edit
I forgot to mention, they are very strict about offering overtime and will not allow you to work it unless it is unavoidable. They do however pay for it (in my town).
This is one of the things that puzzles me greatly. Why would a town subsidize a chain store that’s going to suck money out of the community instead of putting that same money into grants for the existing businesses that already support the community.
It’s the rural people that are hurt most by WalMart. Let’s say they come into town and “create” 100 jobs. According to several of the books I’ve read, they average 1 employee per $150,000 in annual sales. So those 100 people would support a WalMart with $15 million in annual revenue. The average American business hires 1 employee per $100,000 in annual sales. So, unless the community suddenly gets an extra $15m, other stores will go belly-up and 150 people will lose their jobs. If the WalMart apologists are to be believed, it will be worse than that because WalMart’s prices are lower. Wal*Mart (at least around here) pays less, and fewer of their employees receive benefits.
So, net effect to the community? The 100 jobs they “created” leave 50 people out of work and the majority of the rest making less money.
The insidious thing is that they’ll base initial prices on competition. If, for example, there’s a shoe store in town, they’ll make their shoes cheap until the shoe store goes out of business, and then raise shoe prices. They also locate their stores outside of traditional downtown business areas, luring shoppers away from downtown. As smaller competitors fold, it leaves the downtown littered with empty abandoned buildings. Newspapers and local radio stations lose the advertising revenue from the dead businesses. Since money spent at a locally-owned business recirculates through town and most of the money spent at WalMart goes straight to Bentonville, the WalMart becomes a drain on the town.
If I lived in some faceless big city, I really wouldn’t care. But it irks me no end to watch Wal*Mart come into small towns and destroy their historic downtowns and damage their economies.
Their business philosophy is based on the average consumer’s willingness to (a) believe the “always” lower prices line, and (b) ignore the effect that shopping at Wal*Mart will have on their friends, neighbors, and the community they live in.
Wal*Mart goes to the city council and says, “We’ll create 100 jobs.” City council says, “oh, goody” and waives their property taxes and development fees. A hundred people get new jobs. THEN the other businesses go belly-up.
Yeah, and tons of folks saw the ‘Twilight’ films because they are superb cinema.
mmm
Because WalMart can tell the town council in Springfield that they can build their new store in Shelbyville instead. And either way the local businesses in both towns will suffer.
I hate to throw any facts into this discussion - nobody else has - but I did find an article that has studied the issue statistically.
Has Wal-Mart Buried Mom and Pop? BY ANDREA M. DEAN AND RUSSELL S. SOBEL. It’s a .pdf from Regulation magazine. Regulation is a publication of the libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, whose pro-business bias is slightly to the right of Andrew Carnegie’s. You may take the results with as much salt as you like.
Whether the numbers are cooked or not - I’m not expert enough to judge - they do raise a good point in that Wal-Mart opponents only look at the stores that close and not at any new businesses that arise because Wal-Mart comes in. You always have to look at both sides of an economic equation.
Note that in that article, they count things like a Starbucks inside of a WalMart as a “small business.” They don’t refute that WalMart kills off existing small businesses, they just point out that new small businesses crop up to replace them. And their definition of small business is based on the number of employees at that location – not on local ownership, not on total size of the business.
As opposed to other business doing the exact same thing?
My wife and I have both worked for various retail outlets (including WalMart) and in every store, we were encouraged to keep an eye on competitors prices, in an attempt to undercut, or at least meet, their best price. That is what competition is all about.
I don’t understand this animosity- as has been pointed out, this same thing happens to EVERY business model that proves to be successful. Starbucks becomes the most popular coffee shop in the world, then we hear how they are driving all of the “independent, mom-and-pop coffee shops out of business”. Barnes and Noble, destroying the local book shop owners. I only hope that someday I can start a business that becomes wildly successful, just so I can be labeled as the next Great Satan and get a target painted on my back.
This is one issue - Walmart like every other business will play one jurisdiction against the other to get the best tax breaks. “We’re putting a store in the area - do you want the tax revenue or should we go to your neighbour?” No surprise - every large manufacturer does it when they want to build a plant. It’s a time-honoured North American tradition.
The issue I have with the Walmarts, Targets, Barnes and Noble, etc. is this - in the days of mom and pop stores, they were stocked (badly) from a plethora (love that word) of different sources. The choice was large, you just had to travel a circuit of the area or go on a journey to hopefully find exactly what you wanted. Today, there is one superstore with a large selection - but only that selection. If some buyer in one big city decides they will not carry that item in the big box store then odds are you will never find it.
This is the “monoculture” aspect of large retailers. Instead of 100 stores in the area who each carry some 3 to 5 brands of a range of 20 different brands of kitchen appliances for example, we will likely find only 2 or 5 brands in your choice of 2 or 3 box stores. How much of this is the stores and buyers fault, how much is competition, and how much is just a sign of the how the world works today, I don’t know.
Walmart also does a trick learned from the Japanese car makers; they sign a deal with a manufacturer, become a major source of that company’s revenue. Once they are hooked, Walmart then approaches them with various demands to cut prices. They have a choice, lose half their sales or more, or cut costs to the bone. The complaint is that often they gouge other customers to make up for the lost revenue, thus exacerbating the price differential between Walmart and the real world.
PS. There’s a truly fascinating, in the “watch a train wreck” sense, web site of “People of Walmart”.
I guess I’ll drop a fact on the conversation too. Walmart has a nifty site where they post their supplier jobs supported, tax revenue generated, and charitable giving for each of the fifty US states.
This isn’t to support one or the other value judgment on Walmart, but it is some actual numbers in a national discussion which suffers a dearth of them.
[bolding mine]
Does this really happen? Any evidence? Because I’ve never really seen anything at WalMart that I would class as expensive or price-gouging.
Not to mention that predatory pricing, if proven, is an anti-trust violation IIRC. They just are cheaper. One small hardware store I recall from an interview complained that his wholesale prices (for a small store) were higher than WalMart’s retail prices.
Walmart does what they are allowed to do. IIRC it was Delaware that passed the Walmart law, requiring employers of over X employees to provide health care. Only Walmart in the state had more than X employees and did not already provie healthcare. Walmart would simply let their employees go on Medicare, since based on their low wages, they were eligible. Thus they transferred what would normally be an employer expense for a big business, to the taxpayers. After all, it was legal.
I suspect their overtime problems were a side effect of the same mentality as sexual harrassment used to be. Until it suddenly became big news and a negative publicity item. Just like the old “boys will be boys - you expect me to fire him for doing that?!” it was probably a big joke; “we can make them work extra off the clock and keep our costs down… if they like their jobs they won’t complain.”
Keep in mind all the laws about employer standards - overtime, breaks, minimum wages, harrassment - are based on the abuses employers tried to pull until it became illegal.