[honeygrl]

So why don't some of these suppliers get together and do a publicized boycott of Walmart and tell the press exactly why. With the current job problems, I would bet it would take walmart down a peg and get a consumer boycott moving against walmart.

[only1percent]

To band together and refuse to do business with a particular retailer is anti-trust, and the executives who arranged it would go to prison.

However, for individuals simply to decide what it's worth to sell a product and not to sell for less than that -- that's something that plenty of higher-end consumer-goods manufacturers do all the time. (This is why there is so much crap and relatively few high end brands at Wal-Mart -- it's not that Wal-Mart doesn't want high-end brands in their product mix, it's just that they won't mark down their wholesale prices to a level Wal-Mart is willing to pay.)

I actually think Wal-Mart has less power than most non-high-end consumer goods companies think it has. If it was willing to weather a hard year or two, Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola (to name two) could probably break Wal-Mart. They simply won't be able to keep their customers if they can only offer Huggies and not Pampers, or Pepsi but not Coke.