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Steal Christmas, Hell! it will destroy this country!
[source: December issue {Fast Company} magazine]

Wal-Mart leverages its enormous sales power,
and its access to products produced by slave-labor,
to make suppliers follow its pricing decisions.

If the supplier company doesn't sell its goods at the price Wal-Mart sets,
Wal-Mart denies them shelf space at its stores, which destroys that company.

However, even when a supplier meets Wal-Mart's prices,
the prices are so low, and the supplier losses so much money,
that the supplier is forced into bankruptcy.

Wal-Mart's 2002 sales of $244.5 billion
were larger than the sales of Sears, Target, J.C. Penney,
K-Mart, Safeway, and Kroger combined.

* Textiles and Apparel: Carolina Mills is a 75-year old
Carolina company that supplies thread, yarn, and textile
finishing to apparel-makers -- half of which supply Wal-Mart.

But since 2000,
Carolina Mills' customers have begun to face imported
clothing sold so cheaply to Wal-Mart that they could not compete
even if they paid their workers nothing.

Since 2000, Carolina Mills has shrunk
from 17 factories to 7, and from 2,600 employees
to 1,200. Steve Dobbins, the CEO of Carolina Mills told the
December issue of {Fast-Company} magazine that,

"People ask, `How
can it be bad for things to come into the U.S. cheaply? How can
it be bad to have a bargain at Wal-Mart?'

{But you can't buy anything if you're not employed.
We are shopping ourselves out of jobs}." (emphasis added)

* Lovable Garments, which was founded in 1926, had, by the
1990s, become the sixth largest producer of women's bras and
lingerie in the United States, employing 700 workers.

Wal-Mart became the biggest purchaser of Lovable's goods;
in 1995,
Wal-Mart demanded Lovable slash its prices to compete with cheap imports.

When Lovable indicated it could not do that, Wal-Mart
illegally reneged on its contract with Lovable, and outsourced
the lingerie production to Ibero-America, Asia, and China.

Without the Wal-Mart market, in 1998 Lovable had to close its
American manufacturing facilities and fire the workers. Stated
Frank Garson, who was then Lovable's president, "Their actions to
pulverize people are unnecessary. Wal-Mart chewed us up and spit us out."

* Food: Vlasic Pickles. Although it may at first glance seem humorous,
there is a serious lesson.
Wal-Mart roped Vlasic into a contract in which
Wal-Mart sold a 3 gallon jar of Vlasic whole pickles for $2.97.
Wal-Mart sold 240,000 gallons of pickles per week.

But the price
of the 3 gallon jar was so low, that it vastly undercut Vlasic's
sales of 8 ounce and 16 ounce jars of cut pickles; further,
Vlasic only made a few pennies per 3 gallon jar.

Its profits were
tumbling. Vlasic asked Wal-Mart for the right to raise the price
per 3 gallon jar to $3.49, and according to a Vlasic executive,
Wal-Mart threatened that if Vlasic tried to back out of this
feature of the contract, Wal-Mart would cease carrying any Vlasic
product. Eventually, a Wal-Mart executive said, "Well, we've done
to pickles what we did to orange juice. We've killed it," meaning
it had wiped out competitor products. Finally, it allowed Vlasic
to raise prices. But in January 2001, Vlasic filed for bankruptcy.

Wal-Mart forced the price of Huffy Bicycles, which is the
third largest bicycle maker in the U.S., so low, that today 98%
of Huffy's bicycles are imported from overseas.

[Source: Nov 20 {Observer} article, "Buffalo Moves Closer to Extinction"]

Today's London {Observer} carries an
article that focusses on the destruction of the City of Buffalo,
New York, mentioning the role of Wal-Mart.

Buffalo had been a premier U.S. city:
it was the first city to have widespread
residential lighting, and was a center of heavy industry.

But Buffalo's Bethlehem Steel plant, which once employed 22,000
workers, is virtually empty; its unemployment rate is officially
10.2% (and in reality closer to 17%-18%); its population has
shrunk in size by 40% since 1970; and the city is bankrupt and
under the direction of a control board.

The article tells the story of Buffalo Color, a
manufacturing plant where indigo dye for denim was produced. Once
employing 3,000 workers on its 63-acre site, Buffalo Color lost
business to plants established in China, which produce the indigo
dye at half the cost that Buffalo Color does.

Although the
article's author David Teather does not draw it out, the indigo
dye dyes denim, most of which is used in clothing, and Wal-Mart
has driven down the price it will pay for clothing, and thus all
its constituent ingredients must be cheaper.

Buffalo Color now
employs 12 people, and functions strictly as a resale operation.

The article concludes by reporting on the Made in the USA
group, which consists of many small- and medium-sized
manufacturers, whose chairman states that its primary enemy,
which causes destruction, is Wal-Mart.