Posted on 01/29/2005 9:23:51 PM PST by Former Military Chick
Here’s a shocker. I love Wal-Mart. I know it’s almost always on the receiving end of bad press. It ruins neighborhoods. It puts small businesses out of business. It wrecks the balance of trade. It pays its workers poorly and treats them mean. It makes overseas workers into slaves. That's what the news says. The truth is that Wal-Mart is a major blessing for most Americans who live close enough to one to shop there and for the people who work at them. My smart friend C.L. Werner in Omaha made the point really clearly. When a Wal-Mart opens in a town, he said, it's as if everyone in the town got a raise. That's because the stuff at Wal-Mart is so much cheaper than that same merchandise was anywhere else. This is not a trivial thing. Now, don't get me wrong. Target and Sears and K-Mart and J.C. Penney and Brooks Brothers also sell good stuff usually at bargain prices, but they do not have the same reach of stores, the same astounding prices that Wal-Mart offers every day. This makes the people who shop there richer. Price matters a lot to most people. I am sure Wal-Mart is stiff competition for the stores and supermarkets across America. I feel bad for the people who lose their stores because of Wal-Mart. But not everyone is a store owner. Everyone is a consumer, and Wal-Mart is about as good a friend as the consumer ever had.Is Wal-Mart ruining the balance of trade? Well, let me put it like this: I buy American whenever I can find it.
But there are a lot of things that are just not usually made in the USA any longer. Toasters. Hot pots. Color televisions. Underwear. Since the goods are almost always made overseas, why not buy them at the best possible price? By the way, if someone knows of a good American made toaster, please stand up and shout.
Is Wal-Mart wrecking small towns? Not the ones I see, which are mostly in North Idaho. Those towns are booming. And the closest you get to a town square is the Wal-Mart, where neighbors visit with neighbors in the aisles all day and all night, in air conditioning, out of the rain.
Is Wal-Mart impoverishing third world workers in sweat shops? Heck, no. Conditions in those places are far from ideal. But they are far better than working on the farm or begging in the streets or selling themselves into prostitution or whatever they were doing before they came to work for foreign suppliers of US stores. The gains in prosperity in the developing countries because their people can sell to America through Wal-Mart are astounding. As to the people who work at Wal-Mart, they seem to me to be bright, alert men and women who work there because it's the best they can do in their town or at their age. Plus, they seem happy. The usual clerk at Wal-Mart gives a lot better service than the clerk at Tiffany. I would like it if they were paid more, but they are in a competitive labor market. And what about those greedy stockholders? A lot of them are those same Wal-Mart clerks, many of whom got rich from their stock.
In the real world, Wal-Mart is as much of a boon to the American shopper as the Sears catalogue was long ago.
Jeer at it all you want, all you cool people, but, it's progress, big time.
You make the charge, you support it.
It is all out there for you to look at. Wally-Mart, by its own admission, has over 5,000 lawsuits against it. I don't think this site would appreciate all the citations on this thread.
Simply put: Since you claim to know nothing about Wal-Mart abuses, you are either lying or the most ignorant and clueless person on the planet. I prefer to think you are lying for your own personal reasons. Wal-Mart manager, perhaps?
"The fact of the matter is that there is no truth to your lie that Walmart uses child or slave labor and that is why you are unable to support your lie."
It all out there. Pull your head from the sand and do your own search.
"W-M is all about price, quality comes last, virtually everything they sell is Chinese junk.
Maybe the author likes having to replace everything he buys after one or two uses, I prefer goods that last."
If your premise is that WM only sells poor-quality Chinese junk, and that you (and presumably many others) prefer well-made American products, than you have nothing to worry about. There is nothing stopping American companies from producing these items. If there is a profitable market for them, they WILL be produced and they WILL be sold- and you can bet that WM will be in on it! There is no "conspiracy" to kill American companies. The fact is that the majority of consumers pick price over quality. That reality may be unpleasant to you, but it is reality none-the-less. Nothing short of severe trade restrictions or tarrifs will change the situation. Go ahead and call for such regulations, but remember that trade restrictions and tarrifs are a two-way street.
As I said they say one thing and do another. They try to keep just ahead of the lawsuits.
People working off the clock get wage increases. Don't and you risk losing your job. Though they will find another reason even if they have to invent another rule.
Ben Stein get's it.
I favor raising the minimum wage to a level that would keep a single mom with one child off Welfare. I really don't see how that is too much to ask for. It is simply caring for those you employ.
I would make the new minimum wage only for those over 20, married or with a child.
I only shop there as a last resort. I can usually find the items I'm looking for cheaper somewhere else, so I don't find their boast of low prices that credible.
The WebSite makes out Wal-Mart out as the worst of the worst as well.
" Child Labor In January 2004 the Associated Press reported that a Wal-Mart internal audit had warned top executives three years prior that employee records at 128 stores showed extensive violations of child-labor laws and state regulations. A spokesperson for the company told the paper the audit was meaningless, since what looked like violations could simply reflect employees' failure to punch in and out for breaks and meals they took. The audit shows one week's time-clock records for about 25,000 employees. The audit found 1,371 instances in which minors worked too late at night, worked during school hours or worked too many hours in a day, 60,767 apparent instances of workers not taking breaks, and 15,705 apparent instances of employees working through meal times. Source: Associated Press, Jan. 13, 2004"
"# As of June 2002, Wal-Mart employees and former employees in 28 states had filed a series of class-action and individual lawsuits against the company for forcing or pressuring them to work unpaid overtime. The employees say that they are forced or pressuring into working off-the clock despite the fact that the company's own policy prohibits such actions. In the suits the workers claim that overtime practices helped Wal-Mart undersell its competition and push up profits. The company paid $50 million to settle a class-action suit filed by 69,000 current and former Wal-Mart employees in Colorado in 2000 that alleged Wal-Mart pressured them to work off the clock. However, the company denies that the problem is more than a few isolated incidences. According to a Wal-Mart spokesperson, "Off-the-clock work is an infrequent and isolated problem, which we correct whenever we become aware of it."
So much more about this evil store.
The problem with alot of these big stores is that they get huge tax abatements when they move into a town. And usually it's the ordinary taxpayer who gets stuck with that particular bill. We had trouble with a big box store when all the sludgey mud created by the construction of the building ran right into our sewers, into our local lakes, and eventually into the ocean (we live near the beach). A mess.
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