Why I Won't Shop at Wal-Mart Anymore
Mar. 14th, 2005 03:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moderate_excessI used to only half-jokingly claim I refused to shop at Wal-mart. But when the urge struck me to buy lingerie at 2am, off I would go, slinking guiltily into the nearest megastore. I even bought a Sam's Club membership, not really processing the fact that the "Sam" in the name was Sam Walton, one of the richest and least moral business men in the world.
I protested the opening of the new Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas St. on the edge of New Orleans' Garden District, but didn't really think it would affect businesses on nearby Magazine St. much--reasoning that most of them were specialty shops or galleries or antique shops not likely to face much competition from the retail giant. But what about the hardware stores? Or grocery stores? Or sporting goods, or clothing... The more I find out about Wal-Mart's business practices, the more I realize what a dangerous beast we have allowed to move in to the heart of our city.
Wal-Mart makes a good many claims, but the facts tell the real story. I found the following on a site called, appropriately enough, "The Evil That Is WalMart" (Lest you think that because this site is adamantly anti-WalMart it must necessarily distort the information, all facts cited have references from mainstream media and academic studies. ) Ready? Here goes:
* This company runs ads featuring the United States flag and proclaims "We Buy American". In 2001 they moved their worldwide purchasing headquarters to China and are the largest importer of Chinese goods in the US, purchasing over $10 BILLION of Chinese-made products annually. Products made mostly by women and children working in the labor hell-holes China is famous for.
* Their average employee working in the US makes $15,000 a year, $7.22 per hour!
* These employees gross under $11,000 a year.
* The company brags that 70% of their employees are full time, but fails to disclose that they count anyone working 28 hours a week or more as full time.
* There are no health care benefits unless you have worked for the company for two years.
* With a turnover rate averaging above 50% per year, only 38% of their 1.3 million employees have health care coverage. -In California alone it's estimated that the taxpayers pay over $20 million annually to subsidize health care benefits for these employees who get none from this behemoth corporation.
* According to a report by PBS's "Now" with Bill Moyer, their managers are trained in what government social programs are available for these "employees" to take advantage of so that the company can pass on those costs to you and me. It allows them to not only keep their $7 BILLION in annual profits, but to do so by substituting benefits they refuse to provide with benefits paid for with taxpayer dollars.
* This company holds the record for the most suits filed against it by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A lawyer from "Business Week" (not exactly the bastion for supporting Labor) said, "I have never seen this kind of blatant disregard for the law." They had to pay $750,000.00 in Arizona for blatant discrimination against the disabled! The judge was so incensed that he also order them to run commercials admitting their guilt.
* The National Labor Relations Board has issued over 40 formal complaints against the corporation in 25 different states in just the past five years. The NLRB's top lawyer believed that their labor violations, such as Illegal spying on employees, fraudulent record keeping, falsifying time cards to avoid paying overtime, threats, illegal firings for union organizing etc., were so widespread that he was looking into filing a very rare national complaint against the company. (The company contributed $2,159,330.00 to GW Bush and the GOP in 2000 and 2002. The NLRB attorney was replaced when President Bush took office.).
* Nearly 1 MILLION women are involved in the largest class-action suit every filed against a corporation. Although women make up over 65% of this corporations work force only 10% of them are managers. The women who have become store managers make $16,400 a year LESS then the men.
* The corporation took out nearly 350,000 life insurance policies on their employees. They did not tell the employees and then named the corporation as the beneficiary. They are now being sued by numerous employees, and although the corporation has stopped this practice of purchasing what is known as "Dead Peasant Policy's", a company spokesperson stated, "The company feels it acted properly and legally in doing this."
* They force employees to work after ordering them to punch out. In Texas alone this practice of "wage theft" is estimated to have cost employees $30 million per year. Wage theft or "off-the-clock" lawsuits are pending in 25 states. In New Mexico they paid $400,000.00 in one suit and in Colorado they had to pay $50 MILLION to settle one class-action case brought against them. In Oregon a jury found them guilty of locking employees in the building and of forcing unpaid overtime.
* With 4,400 stores they practice "predatory pricing." They come into a community and sell their goods at below cost until they drive local businesses under. Once they have captured the market the prices go up.
* Locally owned and operated businesses put virtually all of their money back into the community which helps keep the local economies vibrant. This corporation sucks the money out of the local community, decreases wages and benefits and ships the profits out of state.
* This company doesn't buy locally or bank locally. They replace three decent paying jobs in a community with two poorly paid "part-timers".
* In Kirksville, Missouri when this company came to town, four clothing stores, four grocery stores, a stationary store, a fabric store and a lawn-and-garden store all went under. Eleven businesses are now gone.
Following the links on the site gets you to such minority opinions as the New York Times:
NY Times Book Review Full Article
"Wal-Mart's ability to keep prices low depends not just on its productivity but also on its ability to contain, or even reduce, costs, above all labor costs. As Sam Walton wrote in his memoirs:
'You see: no matter how you slice it in the retail business, payroll is one of the most important parts of overhead, and overhead is one of the most crucial things you have to fight to maintain your profit margin.'
One of the ways to win this particular fight is to make sure that the growth of labor's productivity well exceeds the growth of its wages and benefits, which has in fact been the dominant pattern for US corporations during the past decade.
From a corporate perspective, this is a rosy outcome. When the productivity of labor rises and its compensation stagnates, then, other things being equal, the cost of labor per unit of output will fall and profit margins will rise. Wal-Mart has carried this strategy to extremes. While its workforce has one of the best productivity records of any US corporation, it has kept the compensation of its rank-and-file workers at or barely above the poverty line. As of last spring, the average pay of a sales clerk at Wal-Mart was $8.50 an hour, or about $14,000 a year, $1,000 below the government's definition of the poverty level for a family of three.[4] Despite the implied claims of Wal-Mart's current TV advertising campaign, fewer than half— between 41 and 46 percent—of Wal-Mart employees can afford even the least-expensive health care benefits offered by the company. To keep the growth of productivity and real wages far apart, Wal-Mart has reached back beyond the New Deal to the harsh, abrasive capitalism of the 1920s."
_______________________________________________________________________
Slightly less objectively written, but stuffed with real information, is a book I have seen referenced in any number of articles. Here is an excerpt from "Thieves In High Places" by Jim Hightower, www.jimhightower.com
WAL-MART: HOW TO PLAY 'BEAT THE DEVIL'
I hail from a small business family – my daddy and momma ran both a wholesale magazine operation and the Main Street News in Denison, Texas. And to paraphrase George W, I also know about small business people, because "I are one" – my Saddle- Burr Productions is a small (bordering on tiny) enterprise that develops my books, radio work, newsletter, columns, speaking, and whatever other trouble I can stir up with pen and mouth.
So, in the spirit of full consumer disclosure, I’m biased for local, independent, unique, smallish business. But there are a host of unbiased reasons for saying that we ought not let the giant chains remake our local economies. One is price. I don’t mean the pricetag on the products, but the exorbitant price we pay for Wal-Mart’s "low price" model. Such companies are predators, hitting neighborhoods and towns like a neutron bomb, leaving buildings standing, but sucking out all of the economic and democratic vitality.
Wal-Mart concedes that when it comes to town, it’s out to eliminate competitors. Any store it opens can crush our local groceries, pharmacies, hardware stores, clothiers, and other retailers, not by being more efficient (and damned sure not with super service), but by slashing its prices below what it pays for the products – a tactic known as [WARNING: TECHNICAL TERM APPROACHING] "predatory pricing."
I hear your mind whirring. With my supersensory perception, I can hear you thinking, What’re you talking about, Hightower? Even Wal-Mart can’t sell below cost and stay in business. No trick to it. Wal-Mart has 4,400 stores. It can lose money at the one in your area ‘til the cows come home and not hurt its company-wide bottom line one bit. But your local stores don’t have a global network of stores to subsidize them, so Wal-Mart can just sit on top of them with a losing hand… and still win. This isn’t competition – it’s mugging. And when it’s over, when the local competitors are bled to death, this Wal-Mart store’s prices rise. Then, the dollars you spend there are used to subsidize another mugging down the road.
I’m hearing you again. You’re saying, Give me a for-instance on this predatory pricing thing, or I won’t believe that those nice friendly country people from Arkansas would do such a thing. Right you are. Check out Wal-Mart’s gas pumps, now in the parking lots of 700 of its stores and soon to spring up like dandelions all across Wal-Martland… assuming its lobbyists can change the laws.
The company is selling gasoline at prices below what it pays to get it into the pumps. Eddie, or Felipe, or Maybelle, or Khanh, or Royce, or whoever’s selling the gas down the road can’t do that – they don’t have the deep pockets to match a losing price.
How do I know Wal-Mart is doing this? Because several states have laws against it and, rather than comply, Wal-Mart is openly trying to repeal the laws, essentially claiming a right to kill its competitors by predatory pricing. Caught selling below cost in Florida, where it’s illegal, Wal-Mart has launched a lobbying and petition drive to make it legal. Likewise in Oklahoma, Wal-Mart was caught and has run to federal court, claiming a constitutional right to kill competition.
Well, I hear you saying, at least Wal-Mart is a job creator for our communities. Sorry, no. By crushing local businesses, this giant eliminates three decent jobs for every two poorly-paid, part-time, high-turnover Wal-Mart jobettes that it creates. It’s an extractor of community wealth, not a creator. It doesn’t buy locally. It doesn’t bank locally. It doesn’t advertise locally.
In Kirksville, Missouri, a Wal-Mart SuperCenter opened a few years ago. In short order, four clothing stores, four grocery stores, a stationary store, a fabric store, and a lawn-and-garden center were gone. And with their demise, the Kirksville Daily Express has lost major ad revenue and is struggling. Townspeople now go to Wal-Mart, or have to leave town to shop.
The SuperCenter sits there on the edge of Kirksville like a demonic tombstone sucking up local money and channeling it to Bentonville, where a portion of it can be used as capital for Wal-Mart’s assault on the next Kirksville.
By dictating a new economy for low-wage workers, Wal-Mart and its corporate disciples are not merely cutting their wholesale prices, they’re doing something far more radical and dangerous to America’s social equilibrium: They are cutting themselves loose from America’s two-century old quest for an egalitarian society. Let me put it in real-life terms: They are abandoning the notion that the middle class is essential to America.
And since Wal-Mart is by far the biggest employer and is capable of compelling so many other major corporations to take the low-wage road, the upshot of their actions is that America itself is abandoning its middle-class pretensions and possibilities. Thanks to this shift, the fastest growing class in America is the working poor. For decades, our country’s social cohesion has been grounded in a broad agreement that full-time work will afford you a middle-class slice. The Wal-Mart model breaks that agreement – its own "associates" can’t afford to buy a Ford on Wal-Mart pay.
How long do they think they can hold down so many hard-working people? Already, the rebellion is simmering within the belly of the beast. The company tries to hide it, and the media rarely probes (whatever happened to the idea of the "inquiring reporter," anyway?) but those happy little "associates" have been hauling Wal-Mart’s corpulent hulk into court constantly. It’s the most sued corporation in the country, facing more than 5,000 actions per year (almost 14 a day - for everything ranging from disability discrimination to sex discrimination to "off-the-clock" payroll fraud!), for it is an unrepentant, recidivist criminal, routinely violating practically all employee rights and all of America’s labor laws.
All of this from a corporation banking $250 billion a year and sending a steady torrent of cash into the coffers of "Simple Sam" Walton’s five heirs, who already are billionaires.
_______________________________________________________________________
[Edit] [note: this is thethird fourth attempt to make this edit... damned browser keeps crashing on certain sites. &*#(^$&*%&*@#]
Three other points I find worth mentioning: In order to protect its unethical employment practices, Wal-Mart is rabidly anti-union. Canadian employees attempting to organize have been harassed and fired. (Granted, union organizers have also used less than polite tactics.) When a store in Canada voted for the union, Wal-Mart decided to close the entire store. When you read about standard practices such as chronic understaffing and demanding workers do more than they are able, it's no wonder Wal-Mart viewed the unions demands to hire more workers as threatening to their corporate model. (Info about employment practices can be found in the complete NY Times Book Review article referenced above.) Canadian Wal-Mart Closing
If you want to join a union, you can... in China. Wal-Mart has agreed to let the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) set up shop in its China stores. The catch? This is the only union allowed in China, is run by the Communist Party and is a tool to suppress dissent and conflict. Independent unions and collective bargaining are illegal. Wal-Mart to Allow Chinese Union
And lastly, Wal-Mart is currently faced with the largest class-action suit ever filed, regarding its discrimination against women. So what are they trying to do? They are appealing to the courts that the nature of class-action suits deprives the company of facing its accuser in each individual case. It is trying to undermine the entire concept of the class-action suit by asking that plaintiffs be required to bring suit locally against each individual store involved. You can read what Business Week says about it here: Wal-Mart Vs Class-Action
I have decided that the only moral and ethical thing I can do is simply put my money where my mouth is. I will willingly pay more to shop at local businesses. I will continue to patronize Harry's Ace Hardware, which is small enough to navigate easily but contains a larger selection of things I need. I will buy my groceries at a grocery store, my clothes at a clothing store, my shoes at a shoe store. I will do business with small stores as often as possible, knowing that the money they put into the register will go to paying a decent wage to its workers, be deposited in a local bank and spent in the local economy.
Yes, you can get a t-shirt for $4 instead of $15, but somehow that savings doesn't seem so big when you take into account the hidden costs.
I protested the opening of the new Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas St. on the edge of New Orleans' Garden District, but didn't really think it would affect businesses on nearby Magazine St. much--reasoning that most of them were specialty shops or galleries or antique shops not likely to face much competition from the retail giant. But what about the hardware stores? Or grocery stores? Or sporting goods, or clothing... The more I find out about Wal-Mart's business practices, the more I realize what a dangerous beast we have allowed to move in to the heart of our city.
Wal-Mart makes a good many claims, but the facts tell the real story. I found the following on a site called, appropriately enough, "The Evil That Is WalMart" (Lest you think that because this site is adamantly anti-WalMart it must necessarily distort the information, all facts cited have references from mainstream media and academic studies. ) Ready? Here goes:
* This company runs ads featuring the United States flag and proclaims "We Buy American". In 2001 they moved their worldwide purchasing headquarters to China and are the largest importer of Chinese goods in the US, purchasing over $10 BILLION of Chinese-made products annually. Products made mostly by women and children working in the labor hell-holes China is famous for.
* Their average employee working in the US makes $15,000 a year, $7.22 per hour!
* These employees gross under $11,000 a year.
* The company brags that 70% of their employees are full time, but fails to disclose that they count anyone working 28 hours a week or more as full time.
* There are no health care benefits unless you have worked for the company for two years.
* With a turnover rate averaging above 50% per year, only 38% of their 1.3 million employees have health care coverage. -In California alone it's estimated that the taxpayers pay over $20 million annually to subsidize health care benefits for these employees who get none from this behemoth corporation.
* According to a report by PBS's "Now" with Bill Moyer, their managers are trained in what government social programs are available for these "employees" to take advantage of so that the company can pass on those costs to you and me. It allows them to not only keep their $7 BILLION in annual profits, but to do so by substituting benefits they refuse to provide with benefits paid for with taxpayer dollars.
* This company holds the record for the most suits filed against it by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A lawyer from "Business Week" (not exactly the bastion for supporting Labor) said, "I have never seen this kind of blatant disregard for the law." They had to pay $750,000.00 in Arizona for blatant discrimination against the disabled! The judge was so incensed that he also order them to run commercials admitting their guilt.
* The National Labor Relations Board has issued over 40 formal complaints against the corporation in 25 different states in just the past five years. The NLRB's top lawyer believed that their labor violations, such as Illegal spying on employees, fraudulent record keeping, falsifying time cards to avoid paying overtime, threats, illegal firings for union organizing etc., were so widespread that he was looking into filing a very rare national complaint against the company. (The company contributed $2,159,330.00 to GW Bush and the GOP in 2000 and 2002. The NLRB attorney was replaced when President Bush took office.).
* Nearly 1 MILLION women are involved in the largest class-action suit every filed against a corporation. Although women make up over 65% of this corporations work force only 10% of them are managers. The women who have become store managers make $16,400 a year LESS then the men.
* The corporation took out nearly 350,000 life insurance policies on their employees. They did not tell the employees and then named the corporation as the beneficiary. They are now being sued by numerous employees, and although the corporation has stopped this practice of purchasing what is known as "Dead Peasant Policy's", a company spokesperson stated, "The company feels it acted properly and legally in doing this."
* They force employees to work after ordering them to punch out. In Texas alone this practice of "wage theft" is estimated to have cost employees $30 million per year. Wage theft or "off-the-clock" lawsuits are pending in 25 states. In New Mexico they paid $400,000.00 in one suit and in Colorado they had to pay $50 MILLION to settle one class-action case brought against them. In Oregon a jury found them guilty of locking employees in the building and of forcing unpaid overtime.
* With 4,400 stores they practice "predatory pricing." They come into a community and sell their goods at below cost until they drive local businesses under. Once they have captured the market the prices go up.
* Locally owned and operated businesses put virtually all of their money back into the community which helps keep the local economies vibrant. This corporation sucks the money out of the local community, decreases wages and benefits and ships the profits out of state.
* This company doesn't buy locally or bank locally. They replace three decent paying jobs in a community with two poorly paid "part-timers".
* In Kirksville, Missouri when this company came to town, four clothing stores, four grocery stores, a stationary store, a fabric store and a lawn-and-garden store all went under. Eleven businesses are now gone.
Following the links on the site gets you to such minority opinions as the New York Times:
NY Times Book Review Full Article
"Wal-Mart's ability to keep prices low depends not just on its productivity but also on its ability to contain, or even reduce, costs, above all labor costs. As Sam Walton wrote in his memoirs:
'You see: no matter how you slice it in the retail business, payroll is one of the most important parts of overhead, and overhead is one of the most crucial things you have to fight to maintain your profit margin.'
One of the ways to win this particular fight is to make sure that the growth of labor's productivity well exceeds the growth of its wages and benefits, which has in fact been the dominant pattern for US corporations during the past decade.
From a corporate perspective, this is a rosy outcome. When the productivity of labor rises and its compensation stagnates, then, other things being equal, the cost of labor per unit of output will fall and profit margins will rise. Wal-Mart has carried this strategy to extremes. While its workforce has one of the best productivity records of any US corporation, it has kept the compensation of its rank-and-file workers at or barely above the poverty line. As of last spring, the average pay of a sales clerk at Wal-Mart was $8.50 an hour, or about $14,000 a year, $1,000 below the government's definition of the poverty level for a family of three.[4] Despite the implied claims of Wal-Mart's current TV advertising campaign, fewer than half— between 41 and 46 percent—of Wal-Mart employees can afford even the least-expensive health care benefits offered by the company. To keep the growth of productivity and real wages far apart, Wal-Mart has reached back beyond the New Deal to the harsh, abrasive capitalism of the 1920s."
_______________________________________________________________________
Slightly less objectively written, but stuffed with real information, is a book I have seen referenced in any number of articles. Here is an excerpt from "Thieves In High Places" by Jim Hightower, www.jimhightower.com
WAL-MART: HOW TO PLAY 'BEAT THE DEVIL'
I hail from a small business family – my daddy and momma ran both a wholesale magazine operation and the Main Street News in Denison, Texas. And to paraphrase George W, I also know about small business people, because "I are one" – my Saddle- Burr Productions is a small (bordering on tiny) enterprise that develops my books, radio work, newsletter, columns, speaking, and whatever other trouble I can stir up with pen and mouth.
So, in the spirit of full consumer disclosure, I’m biased for local, independent, unique, smallish business. But there are a host of unbiased reasons for saying that we ought not let the giant chains remake our local economies. One is price. I don’t mean the pricetag on the products, but the exorbitant price we pay for Wal-Mart’s "low price" model. Such companies are predators, hitting neighborhoods and towns like a neutron bomb, leaving buildings standing, but sucking out all of the economic and democratic vitality.
Wal-Mart concedes that when it comes to town, it’s out to eliminate competitors. Any store it opens can crush our local groceries, pharmacies, hardware stores, clothiers, and other retailers, not by being more efficient (and damned sure not with super service), but by slashing its prices below what it pays for the products – a tactic known as [WARNING: TECHNICAL TERM APPROACHING] "predatory pricing."
I hear your mind whirring. With my supersensory perception, I can hear you thinking, What’re you talking about, Hightower? Even Wal-Mart can’t sell below cost and stay in business. No trick to it. Wal-Mart has 4,400 stores. It can lose money at the one in your area ‘til the cows come home and not hurt its company-wide bottom line one bit. But your local stores don’t have a global network of stores to subsidize them, so Wal-Mart can just sit on top of them with a losing hand… and still win. This isn’t competition – it’s mugging. And when it’s over, when the local competitors are bled to death, this Wal-Mart store’s prices rise. Then, the dollars you spend there are used to subsidize another mugging down the road.
I’m hearing you again. You’re saying, Give me a for-instance on this predatory pricing thing, or I won’t believe that those nice friendly country people from Arkansas would do such a thing. Right you are. Check out Wal-Mart’s gas pumps, now in the parking lots of 700 of its stores and soon to spring up like dandelions all across Wal-Martland… assuming its lobbyists can change the laws.
The company is selling gasoline at prices below what it pays to get it into the pumps. Eddie, or Felipe, or Maybelle, or Khanh, or Royce, or whoever’s selling the gas down the road can’t do that – they don’t have the deep pockets to match a losing price.
How do I know Wal-Mart is doing this? Because several states have laws against it and, rather than comply, Wal-Mart is openly trying to repeal the laws, essentially claiming a right to kill its competitors by predatory pricing. Caught selling below cost in Florida, where it’s illegal, Wal-Mart has launched a lobbying and petition drive to make it legal. Likewise in Oklahoma, Wal-Mart was caught and has run to federal court, claiming a constitutional right to kill competition.
Well, I hear you saying, at least Wal-Mart is a job creator for our communities. Sorry, no. By crushing local businesses, this giant eliminates three decent jobs for every two poorly-paid, part-time, high-turnover Wal-Mart jobettes that it creates. It’s an extractor of community wealth, not a creator. It doesn’t buy locally. It doesn’t bank locally. It doesn’t advertise locally.
In Kirksville, Missouri, a Wal-Mart SuperCenter opened a few years ago. In short order, four clothing stores, four grocery stores, a stationary store, a fabric store, and a lawn-and-garden center were gone. And with their demise, the Kirksville Daily Express has lost major ad revenue and is struggling. Townspeople now go to Wal-Mart, or have to leave town to shop.
The SuperCenter sits there on the edge of Kirksville like a demonic tombstone sucking up local money and channeling it to Bentonville, where a portion of it can be used as capital for Wal-Mart’s assault on the next Kirksville.
By dictating a new economy for low-wage workers, Wal-Mart and its corporate disciples are not merely cutting their wholesale prices, they’re doing something far more radical and dangerous to America’s social equilibrium: They are cutting themselves loose from America’s two-century old quest for an egalitarian society. Let me put it in real-life terms: They are abandoning the notion that the middle class is essential to America.
And since Wal-Mart is by far the biggest employer and is capable of compelling so many other major corporations to take the low-wage road, the upshot of their actions is that America itself is abandoning its middle-class pretensions and possibilities. Thanks to this shift, the fastest growing class in America is the working poor. For decades, our country’s social cohesion has been grounded in a broad agreement that full-time work will afford you a middle-class slice. The Wal-Mart model breaks that agreement – its own "associates" can’t afford to buy a Ford on Wal-Mart pay.
How long do they think they can hold down so many hard-working people? Already, the rebellion is simmering within the belly of the beast. The company tries to hide it, and the media rarely probes (whatever happened to the idea of the "inquiring reporter," anyway?) but those happy little "associates" have been hauling Wal-Mart’s corpulent hulk into court constantly. It’s the most sued corporation in the country, facing more than 5,000 actions per year (almost 14 a day - for everything ranging from disability discrimination to sex discrimination to "off-the-clock" payroll fraud!), for it is an unrepentant, recidivist criminal, routinely violating practically all employee rights and all of America’s labor laws.
All of this from a corporation banking $250 billion a year and sending a steady torrent of cash into the coffers of "Simple Sam" Walton’s five heirs, who already are billionaires.
_______________________________________________________________________
[Edit] [note: this is the
Three other points I find worth mentioning: In order to protect its unethical employment practices, Wal-Mart is rabidly anti-union. Canadian employees attempting to organize have been harassed and fired. (Granted, union organizers have also used less than polite tactics.) When a store in Canada voted for the union, Wal-Mart decided to close the entire store. When you read about standard practices such as chronic understaffing and demanding workers do more than they are able, it's no wonder Wal-Mart viewed the unions demands to hire more workers as threatening to their corporate model. (Info about employment practices can be found in the complete NY Times Book Review article referenced above.) Canadian Wal-Mart Closing
If you want to join a union, you can... in China. Wal-Mart has agreed to let the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) set up shop in its China stores. The catch? This is the only union allowed in China, is run by the Communist Party and is a tool to suppress dissent and conflict. Independent unions and collective bargaining are illegal. Wal-Mart to Allow Chinese Union
And lastly, Wal-Mart is currently faced with the largest class-action suit ever filed, regarding its discrimination against women. So what are they trying to do? They are appealing to the courts that the nature of class-action suits deprives the company of facing its accuser in each individual case. It is trying to undermine the entire concept of the class-action suit by asking that plaintiffs be required to bring suit locally against each individual store involved. You can read what Business Week says about it here: Wal-Mart Vs Class-Action
I have decided that the only moral and ethical thing I can do is simply put my money where my mouth is. I will willingly pay more to shop at local businesses. I will continue to patronize Harry's Ace Hardware, which is small enough to navigate easily but contains a larger selection of things I need. I will buy my groceries at a grocery store, my clothes at a clothing store, my shoes at a shoe store. I will do business with small stores as often as possible, knowing that the money they put into the register will go to paying a decent wage to its workers, be deposited in a local bank and spent in the local economy.
Yes, you can get a t-shirt for $4 instead of $15, but somehow that savings doesn't seem so big when you take into account the hidden costs.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-03-14 01:31 pm (UTC)You go!
Good for you. I hate Wal-Mart and try to convince everyone I can not to shop there.
I hate the new ads they are running now with smiling automaton people telling how Wal-Mart has invigorated their community. Riiiiight. Sure it has.
I wonder if anybody sells anti-Wal-Mart bumper stickers...
PS
Date: 2005-03-14 03:11 pm (UTC)Crazy(and suffering from icon-envy)Soph
no subject
Date: 2005-03-15 10:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-14 03:10 pm (UTC)Thanks for the light in the darkness.
Crazy(and so glad she doesn't have to make the hard choices - small shop, default preference!)Soph
no subject
Date: 2005-03-15 10:46 am (UTC)I am awaiting the arrival in the mail of a membership packet in an organization dedicated to socially responsible buying and investing. We are starting to set aside a little money to invest and I want to make sure it goes to support good companies. It's so hard these days with all the mergers and buyouts to know who is owned by whom and where your money goes. In Madison that sort of thinking is the norm, but down here it's a pretty alien thing.
Sprawlmart
Date: 2005-03-21 06:51 pm (UTC)