I don’t know if this topic has been aslked already, but this is another one of many things that puzzle the mind…(at least my mind anyway). I’ve notived in the News lately that there are a lot of people that are protesting Walmart for reasons I can’t seem to understand. It looks like no one anywhere wants them in their neighborhoods. I’ve shopped at Walmart several times and I’ve had no problems with them at all. Whats so bad about Walmart that no one in the media seems to want them around?
Anyone have an answer to this question that makes logical sense?
Several reasons:
Traffic
As close to a sweatshop as a retail store can get (compair working conditions and salearys to Costco, which is the only real fear that Sam Walmart has).
and my personal reason, they owe me either $50 plus interest since last year or a BBQ grill that their employes monkeyed around w/ the price.
Part of the increasingly bad PR has come from the employees. For many years the stock went up, up, up, so employees who bought stock balanced their opinion of the company. High returns make up for other missatisfactions. Walmart stock returns have been more like other companies the last 5-10 years, unlike the 1970s and 1980s.
Employees who started in the last ten years have not experienced the postive of very high investment returns and those who have been there longer are disappointed compared to the earlier time.
Ya know, I understand why other business owners don’t like walmart. The low prices can put them out of business. But this quote I will never understand. It’s one of the things I’ve always heard about Wal Mart. No one’s FORCING you to work there. If your unhappy with pay or conditions, don’t work there.
Walmart is very anti union and anti-labor. the author of ‘confessions of a union buster’ said it was the most anti union company he ever met
from organizing – sometimes in violation of federal labor law. In 10 separate cases, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Wal-Mart repeatedly broke the law by interrogating workers, confiscating union literature, and firing union supporters. At the first sign of organizing in a store, Wal-Mart dispatches a team of union busters from its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, sometimes setting up surveillance cameras to monitor workers. “In my 35 years in labor relations, I’ve never seen a company that will go to the lengths that Wal-Mart goes to, to avoid a union,” says Martin Levitt, a management consultant who helped the company develop its anti-union tactics before writing a book called Confessions of a Union Buster. “They have zero tolerance.”
Walmart strongarms its suppliers to get lower prices which may indirectly cause them to go bankrupt, cut their workforce and/or have to transport jobs overseas
I think a few years ago walmart pretended to get many of its products from america when many of them really came from asia. I remember alot of news stories about it.
A Walmart job is the most common low paying service job you can get, so i guess it is representative of that class of job.
But your two points have everything to do with each other. WalMart, by having driven so many mom and pop stores out of business, has also removed those shops as employment options. I lived in a town once which actually floated bonds to attract WalMart there, and then watched their downtown retail businesses slowly die off. Dumbest thing I’ve ever seen a city do.
This may be one of the most insensitive things I have ever seen. Joey, you do realize that being a checkout girl at Wal-Mart is not exactly anyone’s idea of a dream job, right? People work these jobs because they feel they have no other choice but to work it or to be unemployed. This is especially true after Wal-Mart has come into a town and run any local business into the ground.
I don’t know anything about you, but I’m willing to bet you’re in a professional career if you’re in the job market at all. Look out your window sometime: it’s not exactly a bright, sunshiney economic day.
Wal Mart has been repeatedly dragged into court for violating labor laws. A couple of the charges:
Making workers work cleanup at the end of shift, unpaid and off the clock.
Discriminatiing against women and blacks in promotion decisions.
On the PBS show NOW with Bill Moyers, a former Wal Mart manager showed his Rolodex. Managers, he said are expected to have a full list of local welfare offices and charities. Employees are paid at welfare-eligible levels, so the boss shows them how to get welfare, food stamps, housing subsidies, and help from charities. The effect is that WM employees are paid in part by taxes. The show went on to tell the story of a Wal Mart that was built and abandoned after a few years. The city has given them a sweet deal; no property taxes for the first 3 years. The city figured to make it up after the 3 years. However, after 3 years, the store was closed. A new one was built in the next town. They ripped off the first town for millions of dollars.
I could go on and on, but there’s such a stack of stories like these that it doesn’t take long to see the pattern. Wal Mart is bad news. I don’t shop there. Just keep in mind that every time you go there, you’re helping them screw somebody.
Is that a fact? It seems to me that its too much hassle to set up a new store just for 3 years, even if it’s tax-free. You are not going to make any profit.
Read this book for some insight into Wal-Mart practices and on working minimum wage in this country.
Wal-Mart has been successfully sued for locking its doors and refusing to let workers out until they finished the chores assigned by the store manager off the clock. Wal-Mart has denied that this represents their policies; however, the pressure on local managers to run things efficiently (on the cheap) is tremendous, so the practice is implicit, if not explicit.
The chain does little to present a storefront that is anything but butt-ugly. They allow RV tourists to camp in their parking lots, creating additional eyesore, noise and air pollution. They care almost nothing for local laws, regulations and sensibilities.
Their business practices are cutthroat, but that’s capitalism. They provide genuinely low prices for bargain hunters, and jobs for people who need work. I don’t shop there because I can afford not to, and because I am retired military with PX privileges. The place gives me “mall sickness”.
It’s interesting here in the Northeast. Walmart didn’t have anything to do with driving the mom-and-pop stores out of business. Those stores have been gone for 15-20 years due to the KMarts and Ames and other general discount stores. Good old Walmart is a recent arrival, only in the last 5 years or so, and all it’s putting out of business is KMart. Which is really nobody’s loss.
I think the main problem people here have with Walmart is just classism. They don’t really dislike Walmart, they dislike the people who shop there.
I know of at least one small town that managed to keep Walmart from building a store there, in a effort to save their downtown retail businesses, only to have them die anyways because people would rather drive 35 miles to a the nearest Walmart than pay the inflated prices at the local shops.
I’m not a classist – I’m one of the last people in the world that should be a classist. But you’ve got it right – I detest the other people that shop there. I always feel like I’m walking onto the set of Montel Williams or one of those types of shows.
I guess second, though, is that the quality of most of their stuff is subpar. Yeah, I do buy subpar stuff now and again – but at least I can buy it in a comfortable atmospehere in Miejer.
It’s not really about WalMart in particular, it’s that WalMart is symbolic of cultural decline. The WalMart phenomenon makes it all undeniably clear that the public at large is hopelessly addicted to buying stuff, and buying it as cheaply as possible, with no social conscience whatsoever. Also it makes it clear that the process is unavoidable and that our entire society is full of mindless consuming clones. Another issue is that WalMart has been in the vanguard of sanitizing (censoring) CDs and videos so they’re acceptable to the Bible belt mindset. And WalMart is the latest targetable symbol of all of that. Well maybe it’s not nice, but that’s how it is.
Remember when people were protesting against building McDonald’s, then Starbucks? Now it’s WalMart. It has nothing uniquely to do with WalMart itself. Some people are pissed off by the concept of mindless homogenization.
We’re doomed, there’s nothing to be done about it unless people become better educated and more tolerant.
I don’t shop at Wal-Mart. It has nothing to do with “class” - I am hardly rich and I don’t shun K-Mart, Cost-co and other discount stores.
For one thing, the parking is a nightmare. For some reason, all Wal-Marts that I have seen have all of their parking in front of the store - not all around as many other stores do. The parking situation is a magnet for car burglars as well.
I am generally not impressed with their grocery department, especially their produce. There’s nothing there that can’t be bought at a more human sized store.
Of course, people in smaller towns don’t have this option. I too have seen the fine downtowns of small towns die away after Wal Mart set up shop.
As far as other shoppers are concerned, my biggest gripe at Wal-Mart is that everyone has to take all of their kids along. I am of the opinion that children should not be taken shopping unless they are infants that can ride along with mom or dad, or older kids who know better than to bawl their eyes out over everything. This seems to be less of an issue at K-Mart (where everyone seems to be over 60) or the supermarket.
I generally liked Wal-Mart up until ten years ago. It had a better reputation as an employer in the past as well. My mother worked for one years ago and considered it to be a perfectly fine place to work - for someone who was just out of high school. We once got in an arguement when I refused to apply there (I have friends who have worked there who told me to avoid it), even though I made just as much money doing something else then. She still thinks highly of the company.
As a poster of anti Mall-Wart threads, I hate them for their policies. Screw the suppliers, screw the employees, screw the town, screw the other merchants who were there. Crush competition, unions, and labor laws at all cost. If an employee gets injured on the job, lie about it. Their collective policies are 180 degrees opposed to the warm and fuzzy red, white, and blue all-American image they seek to portray. I’ll do without before buying from Mall-Wart. Feh.
