It seems like everywhere walmart goes, there is always protest, but they always build it anyway..and tons of people shop at that walmart in the end.

did ya'll ever see that episode of SouthPark making fun of Walmart? It was a really funny one :)

WTF?

I refuse to even step foot in a wal-mart. Nasty employee's, shitty products. If I need to go to one of those types of places I'll go to Target.

I think Wal-Mart is more dangerous for American Society than Communism and Al-Qeada combined. Although, I don't think communism is that big of a threat anymore. I think global warming, and the SOLS are way worse.

I hope you don't vote.

I found this really interesting article. It's scary how powerful Wal-Mart is. This article is from 2003, and I'm sure Wal-Mart has only grown even more since then. I don't know what the solution is. Even if we could make everyone more globally aware (aware of the type of pressure Wal-Mart puts on its suppliers, aware that Wal-Mart is driving factory jobs overseas, aware that Wal-Mart has the power to very negatively affect other businesses, etc.), I still don't think it would make a difference. People are still going to shop at Wal-Mart because it's the cheapest. I think as long as there is no direct negative effect on our lives and lifestyles, most of us (Americans in general) aren't going to concern ourselves too much with global issues.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html

"Wal-Mart is not just the world's largest retailer. It's the world's largest company--bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what

number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined. "Clearly," says Edward Fox, head of Southern Methodist University's J.C. Penney Center for Retailing Excellence, "Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has ever been." It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being.

Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas."

Every single wal-mart in existence should be completley destroyed, and their execs should be tried for treason.

yes, quite.

Tom

Make up your mind. Are the unions killing the country or is non union companies like Wal Mart?

Why?

All I read was that Wal-mart is bad. It charges less than anyone else, and....it's bad. :rolleyes:

Walmart has developed inventory control and supplier systems that the US military (and other militarys around the world) have copied because it is so revolutionary.

Once again, people want cheap prices...but they aren't willing to accept the other side of the deal. Foreign outsourcing.

Wal-mart in my town was attempting to build a new super center. However it was supposedly on top of graves (like there is any place in the world without a grave there from some point or another). Well, people bitched and protested, so no store was built.

Now, a few years later, a developer has put up a town house development.... Yeah, so where were those idiot protestors for that?

Chicago's losses, according to USA Today:

sales and property taxes - $1 mil

school taxes - $400,000

Yeah, I kinda think Wal-Mart is bad. In order to give you those cheap prices, it forces companies to outsource and go oversees. Companies have to make their products cheaply in order to meet the price that Wal-Mart agrees to buy the product at. So, you get a crappy product for less. Great, that's what I want.

It (Wal-Mart) doesn't pay their workers a 'liveable' wage forcing two things. One, the only place they can afford to shop is Wal-Mart. Two, they ENCOURAGE their workers to file for welfare and other forms of goverment aid. So while your saving the big bucks by shopping there, in the long run, you're paying for it because you're supporting the workers that work there because they're on government aid.

Half the people that work there would be on gov't aid regardless.

Outsourcing is also going to happen. It's not like Wal-mart created the desire to manufacture more for less money. Any business man would rather pay someone in China a dollar a day to make a product as opposed to $40 an hour to lazy union workers in the US.

If you think the products are cheap, don't buy them. If something is that bad, a rival's product will take over that sector of the market. Bad products just don't make it.

Isn't Wal-Mart notorious for treating their employees like shit? Not paying their over-time and not giving them breaks? I've been in Wal-Mart before and I have seen Salvation Army thrift stores that are being better maintained. One big thing here (Michigan) is that Wal-Mart is a newer chain in the market. We just got our first one in the area about 10 or 12 years ago.

Price fixing is a big thing that wal-mart likes to do. Their prices are lower than all of the competitors, driving them to go out of business. Once the competition is gone, wal-mart raises their prices sometimes to the point where they are more expensive than what the non-existant competitor was.

I would never shop there nor would I invest in their stock (although the shares have done very well).

There are cleaner discount stores that don't exploit their workers.

Did anyone read that book regarding working for minimum wage jobs around the country? I forgot the title and author. The author took various low-paying jobs in different areas of the US from waitressing to Shoney's in the South to working for Merry Maids in Maine. From what I recall, she worked at Wal-Mart in MN(?)