Next time you see those vapid-seeming Wal-Mart commercials, remember...

[BurtWorm]

This article is a year and a half old. Think the situation has improved?


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.

Of course, U.S. companies have been moving jobs offshore for decades, long before Wal-Mart was a retailing power. But there is no question that the chain is helping accelerate the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries such as China. Wal-Mart, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s trumpeted its claim to "Buy American," has doubled its imports from China in the past five years alone, buying some $12 billion in merchandise in 2002. That's nearly 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States.

[getmeouttahere]

1. Wait for sales at other stores, go to Costco....

just don't go to Walmart!!!

and check out justiceclothing.com

union-made, sweatshop-free, made in the USA and Canada

[OrlandoGator]

6. Costco gets scolded by Wall Street for treating its employees TOO WELL.

That's not a "problem" that concerns me, however.

[navvet]

2. I despice wal-mart!!

[Blue_In_AK]

3. Did anybody see "Without a Trace" last night

where the poor underpaid "Everymart" employee had to resort to drug running to earn money for her child's needed hearing aid? Hmmmmm...what "Everymart" could they have been referring to, I wonder.

[Rex]

4. Reagan is to thank for this corporate godizlla.

Anti-trust laws don't apply to companies like Microsoft and Walmart. They have more assets then some countries.

[warrens]

5. There's more

Wal-Mart will demand that a company engineer its products down to reach a lower price point. Rubbermaid products, for instance, are now made with less and lower-grade plastic, meaning their laundry baskets etc. will crack and break much quicker. But they look roughly the same so the consumer can't tell.

The fact is, though, you are getting less for your money at Wal-Mart. Their towels are smaller and made with lighter material. They will wear out more quickly than competing products. It goes on and on.

Another thing that happens is that WM basically tells a brand that it will not support R&D or advertising or marketing. It wants the net-net cost, the cost of raw goods, labor and plant costs. Period. Then it sets its own profit margin on the goods, and tells the company it will be back next year, and the price better be lower or sayonora sucker.

The upside is that like a shark, WM has to keep swimming or it will sink. And its organic growth is just about over. It has saturated the U.S. except in the Blue states, but we don't want them here and they have to pay enormous amounts of money to bulldoze their way in, at which point sales are often disappointing. Now, Costco and Trader Joe and Target we welcome with open arms, even though none of them are unionized (Wal-Mart's bogus argument about why we hate them).

If you got money in WM stock, you might be thinking about finding a new place for your money.

[BurtWorm]

8. A lightbulb goes on: That's what the vapid commercials are about.

They're designed to make us bluestaters conjure up blandness--instead of seething rage--when we think of Wal-Mart. Because we have a 9-year-old daughter, we watch Nickelodeon in the evening and every freakin' break there's a Wal-Mart commercial. I don't know if other networks are as saturated as Nick, but I would be surprised if they weren't.

[Broadslidin]

10. Costco is Open To Unions.........

According to the July17th New York Times,

"How Costco Became The Anti-wal-mart"

Costco is open to unions and does have
employees who are represented by unions.

Like wal-mart, target is also rigidly against
collective bargaining and safeguards for workers.

[sinkingfeeling]

7. Hey, WM has the power to squeeze concessions from state

licensing boards as well. They were turned down by the Arkansas ABC for a liquor license for a new Sam's Warehouse in Fayetteville. They were back yesterday and it was approved.

So here's the plan: they're closing the Sam's in Springdale and building one here. Only RETAIL business to have a liquor license! All other license holders in state can only sale liquor!!

[BurtWorm]

9. That's fucked up.

Why aren't the Prohibitionists up in arms about that? It's okay if you're Wal-Mart?